The Greathouse touch: Several exhibits at the Frye reveal the canny curatorial eye of former director Ida Kay Greathouse

The summer lineup of exhibits at the Frye Art Museum testifies to the savvy curatorial eye of Ida Kay Greathouse, the museum's director from 1966 to 1993 — the longest tenure of any of the Frye's directors.

Greathouse, still alive at 104, succeeded the museum's first director, her husband, Walser Greathouse, following his death. For 27 years, she put her stamp on the institution, and "Ida Kay Greathouse: A Tribute" highlights what she accomplished in that time.

There are choice items by William Merritt Chase, Berthe Morisot, Pierre- August Renoir and Andrew Wyeth. There are also surprises, including a Venetian landscape by Thomas Moran, better known for his epic portrayals of the American wilderness.

John Singer Sargent's "Mrs. Frederick William Roller" (1905) greets you at the entrance. This is Sargent in subdued mode: no riots of silken fabric here. Instead, everything about the lady — the way she averts her gaze, the way her hands clutch the fabric of her long black dress — speaks of shyness, even discomfort, at being the painter's subject. Sargent frames her in architectural scrolls — the plasterwork on the wall behind her — that play off the sober colors of her dress, adding to the formality of her pose.

Chase's "Portrait of a Lady against Pink Ground" (circa 1886) couldn't be in greater contrast. This painting of Chase's sister-in-law depicts a character in motion: head cocked impatiently as she holds a folded parasol, seemingly eager to be off somewhere. She's seen in soft focus, as if through veils of color at play: a palette of pinks that verge on dusky brown at one end and pale gray at the other. It's a brilliant piece.

The two items by Morisot, "Jean a la Poupée" and "Toilette de Nuit," both from the 1880s, use brush strokes almost jazzy in their energy. Wyeth's "Nightwind" (1976) and "Dogwood" (1981), both watercolors on paper, serve as a reminder that, once you get away from this artist's overly familiar iconic works, he impresses you all over again with his unusual composition and fine technique.

Not everything in "Tribute" will be to everyone's taste. The work by Russian-trained artists Nicolai Ivanovich Fechin and Sergei Bongart seems a little vulgar to my eye. But the Renoir ("Head of a Young Girl" from 1875), the atypical Moran and Willard L. Metcalf's Monet-influenced "Bank of the Seine, Giverny" (1888) are all small treasures.

The Frye also is showing a trio of shows related to Alaska, including the paintings in "Northern Latitudes: The Frye and Alaska," many of them acquired by Great-

house. Mount McKinley, inevitably, is a frequent subject, and noted Alaskan artists Sydney Laurence and Eustace Paul Ziegler return to it repeatedly. Yet it's with less innately dramatic subjects that their painterly eye comes into more dynamic play.

Laurence's undated oil on canvas, "Northern Lights," may be the masterpiece here. It rises in dim layers, from the snow-gleam of a meadow at nightfall, to the dark band of woods at its edge, to a bank of shadowy mist above, and then, on high, the brighter night sky where scrimlike traces of the aurora borealis shimmy and play.

Ziegler's "Alaska Sentinels" (1923) concentrates on a trio of monument-sized tree trunks in the foreground, while only partially disclosing the mountain landscape behind them. The handling of color — pinks that verge on golden and brown-green in the tree trunks' sunlit bark — is unusually bold for Ziegler.

Jonathan Van Zyle's "Into the Flats" (1982) makes a virtue of a landscape's chilling featurelessness as a dogsled team traverses it. There are some distinct hills on the upper right. But off to the left, the horizon disappears in a whiteout of cloud and snow fields. That's where the team leader, in parka and hood, is staring, as though at something that might suck him in and never spit him out again.

Fred Machetanz's "Out Where the Ice Gets Thin" (1976) achieves a similar effect in the vertical. Three- quarters of the painting is sky: sunlit, mist-suffused, protean. Below it, a figure ventures out onto an ice shelf that looks fragile indeed. At the lower right, with a rising ice slab and a stain of blue, there's even a hint that the ice may be breaking up behind him. The painting has energy, fluidity, peril.

It's strange, then, that in "On Arctic Ice: Fred Machetanz," a collection of lithographs also acquired by Greathouse, the general impression is of rigidity. The detail — of Alaskan characters, landscapes and wildlife — is meticulous. But there's a looseness of line missing that would let Machetanz's subjects come more fully to life.

The Alaskan offerings are rounded out with "Frye-Bruhn and Alaska" — archival photographs of the small grocery chain that Charles Frye, founder of the museum, operated with Charles Bruhn in Skagway, Juneau and other Alaskan locations — and "A Day in Skaguay," a film by Burton Holmes that gives a six-minute glimpse of the town on a summer's day in 1918.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com