Favorites: The Frye Founding Collection

Favorites: The Frye Founding Collection showcases selected works that our visitors most frequently request to be on view. Continuing to honor the legacy of Charles and Emma Frye, and the artists they collected, the exhibition will present key works by Munich Secession artists Franz von Stuck, Ludwig Dill, and Gabriel von Max, alongside beloved canvases by Alexander Koester, Mihály de Munkácsy, and Daniel Somogyi, among others.

Charles and Emma Frye developed their passion for art in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an experience that would influence the painterly subjects and artists the young couple would collect over the next four decades. Three German paintings shown in the Exposition were reputedly in Charles Frye’s possession in 1930, including Dutch Woman and Child by Albert Neuhuys, which is among the works in Favorites. Paintings the couple later purchased bear close similarities to paintings by artists of the Munich Künstlergenossenschaft (Artists’ Association) that were included in the Exposition, but that interest soon gave way to a penchant for the more experimental artists associated with the Munich Secession. The Secessionists were distinguished by their insistence on extreme individualism and stylistic diversity.

Favorites will be incorporated into the large-scale, multidisciplinary exhibition Genius, on view from September 26, 2015, through January 10, 2016. For  Genius, select works from Favorites will be presented together with poetic responses in both Arabic and English by Maged Zaher, a Seattle-based writer as part of his participation in Genius. These interventions will offer a global perspective on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century European paintings of the Frye Founding Collection. Together they create a link between past and present, across the disciplines of poetry and painting.