Frye History
Charles Frye (1858–1940) was the son of German immigrants who moved to America in 1846 to farm in Iowa. In 1888 Frye moved from Iowa to Seattle, where he purchased land and established a successful business. Frye and his wife Emma (1860–1934) became avid collectors and patrons of the arts. A 1930 newspaper article reports that Charles viewed his first oil painting in 1893 at age thirty-five. In 1909 the couple lent a French painting to Seattle’s Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (a World’s Fair celebrating the development of the Pacific Northwest), which indicates that they were probably well-known as collectors by this time. The Fryes displayed their paintings in their private quarters and in a purpose-built exhibition space attached to their home. Major philanthropic supporters of music in Seattle, the couple hosted concerts as well as charitable events in their art gallery.
Gifted in perpetuity to the people of Seattle, Charles and Emma Frye’s collection became the Founding Collection of the Frye Art Museum, which opened on February 8, 1952. After Charles Frye’s death in 1940, the executor of Frye’s will, Walser Sly Greathouse, administered the establishment of the Museum and became its first director. After Greathouse died in 1966, his widow Ida Kay directed the Museum until her retirement in 1993.
In 1994 the Board appointed Richard West, scholar and former director of Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Maine; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; the Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. West oversaw the Frye Art Museum’s expansion and renovation, which was designed by Rick Sundberg of Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects, Seattle.
After West’s retirement in 2003, Midge Bowman, a Yale-trained historian and educator, directed the Museum, establishing the museum’s archive and initiating important collection research projects. Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, former director of the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich and the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, became the Museum’s director in 2009 following Bowman’s retirement.
Collections
Frye Founding Collection
Comprising 232 paintings, the Frye Founding Collection was established by two of Seattle’s earliest patrons of the arts, Charles and Emma Frye. The collection, which celebrates primarily late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German art, was formed in the first part of the twentieth century, when a number of influential American collectors and museum curators sought to establish close cultural ties between Germany and America.
Among the many highlights of the Founding Collection is one of the icons of European Symbolism, Sin by Franz von Stuck, a founding member of the influential artists’ association, the Munich Secession. Indeed, with the exception of a number of fine French paintings, the collection maintains a careful balance between important works by the generation of artists belonging to the Künstlergenossenschaft (Franz von Defregger, Friedrich August von Kaulbach, Wilhelm Leibl, and Franz von Lenbach) and exemplary works by the generation of young painters who founded the Munich Secession (Ludwig Dill, Hugo von Habermann, Otto Hierl-Deronco, Stuck, Fritz von Uhde, and Heinrich von Zügel). Members of the Munich Secession, corresponding members such as Max Slevogt and Hans Thoma, as well as artists such as Gabriel von Max who bridged both generations, are also represented in the collection.
In its content and structure, the Founding Collection bears similarities to other collections of German art established around the same time, most notably those belonging to American art collector and merchant Hugo Reisinger and New York Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Josef Stránský. Several important works in the Frye Collection were originally owned by either Reisinger or Stránský, or by both. In addition, the Frye Collection includes many of those artists whose paintings appeared in important German art exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, and the Art Institute of Chicago between 1906 and 1909.
Frye Art Museum Collection
In addition to the Frye Founding Collection, the Museum owns an extensive collection of artworks purchased or gifted to the Museum since its opening in 1952. The first director of the Museum, Walser Sly Greathouse, purchased nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American artworks that complemented the Founding Collection. Some of the American artists represented in the collection, including Albert Bierstadt, William Merritt Chase, Frank Duveneck, Geri Melchers, and John H. Twachtman, had close artistic and intellectual ties to Europe, particularly to Germany.
