Art Review: Napoleon joins forces with video artists at the Frye

The galleries of Frye Art Museum have been transformed again, with two shows that swing from 19th-century genre paintings and historical prints to contemporary video art. Here's the lineup: the traveling show "Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt" from the Dahesh Museum in New York; and "Empire," curated in-house by Robin Held. Displays from the permanent collection are limited this time to two galleries sparsely installed under the title "Gaze" — the Frye's old jampacked salon-style installations are out.

Does the whole package make sense? Not really. But it's kind of an adventure navigating the reconfigured space.

The connection Held tries to establish between the imagery in "Napoleon" and "Empire" is a big leap — and that's assuming you have the stamina to watch the video installations after perusing the nearly 200 objects in "Napoleon." The fresh take on the Frye's permanent collection in "Gaze," chosen by scholar Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and the museum's collection curator Donna Kovalenko, does its own thing. One gallery features a few hard-hitting acquisitions from the 1990s that show the taste of former Frye director Richard West, including Odd Nerdrum's angst-ridden "Man Bitten by Snake." Turns out, the tendency to melodrama in the paintings West acquired perfectly suits the tenor of the collection.

Traces of an empire

"Napoleon on the Nile" is a mixed bag of intriguing material for anyone interested in Orientalism and the art of discovery and conquest. The exquisite engravings that document the expedition accompanying Napoleon's ill-fated army through Egypt are the high point of the show. They remind us that in the days before photography, the easiest way for the public to be exposed to the landscapes, flora and fauna of exotic places was for artists to painstakingly reproduce them.

This work is spectacular, in a quiet way. I was happiest contemplating engravings of Egyptian landmarks, hieroglyphs, a detail of the Rosetta stone and natural history studies of mummies, spiders, fishes, reptiles, petrified wood and other oddities of the place. Here you get the full sense of how awesome these things were when first seen by European eyes — like scenes from Mars. Even now, as familiar as much of the imagery is, the vast scale, mystery and antiquity of Egyptian culture still thrills.

The gallery devoted to Napoleon and his army includes late-18th-century letters signed with a confident scrawl by the French general as he boldly advanced into Egypt — then quietly and ignominiously withdrew. Don't miss a couple of gorgeously nuanced little photogravures of Napoleon from images by the French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. One depicts the general on horseback, a conqueror poised solid and dark on a hilltop, surveying the dreamlike city of Cairo below. And there are the wickedly funny British satires of the French debacle, drawn by James Gillray — the Jon Stewart of his era. Gillray skewers Napoleon and his army in one print titled "French Generals Retiring, on Account of Their Health" showing a mummy of Bonaparte standing behind a group of hacking, vomiting old wrecks.

With a few exceptions, the small selection of decorative genre paintings are what they are — and for me stand as the least interesting part of "Napoleon." The prime exception is Lawrence Alma-Tadema's radiant little 1874 jewel, "Joseph, Overseer of Pharaoh's Granaries." Here you get a sense of why Orientalism was so captivating, like the strange tales of Scheherazade. In Alma-Tadema's vision, Joseph, supposedly a mundane public official, looks like a god. He's enthroned in an ornately decorated room; his whisper-thin gauze robe, ropes of choral necklaces and cascade of dark hair barely veil the svelte contours of his body. His sandals are kicked aside and his slim feet rest on a dais. Alma-Tadema paints the details of this enchanted granary with godlike precision, the piles of beans and legumes glowing like precious stones.

A new notion of "empire"

After all that, the video selection of "Empire" was something of a slog, featuring works by Halil Altindere, Dias & Reidweg, Runa Islam, Paul Pfeiffer and collaborators Janos Reverz and Norbert Szirmai. One piece documented the basically imperceptible progress of a wasp nest being built, another a group of men telling stories in Kurdish. The most visually crafted was Islam's "Be the First to See What You See As You See It," looking in on a lovely young woman with the subversive urge to break pretty porcelain. That was fun.

Does "Empire" answer the curatorial question it poses: "How does one create art today without reinscribing (colonial) patterns of domination?"

Not for me.

Sheila Farr:

sfarr@seattletimes.com