It’s a regional thing here in the US but Colorado and Texas have a lot of animosity towards each other. Denver recently received a $100m gift of 22 landscapes, including works by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Eugène Boudin and Edouard Manet. That might stir things up a little but as the Dallas News’s art critic explains, it turns out they have somewhat similar histories when it comes to establishing art museums:
Dallas and Denver aren’t known primarily for their cultural tourism. Tourists to Denver generally head to the mountains. Visitors to Dallas tend to be conventioneers, sports fans or shoppers.
Both cities were founded at roughly the same time, in the mid-19th century, but Denver was wealthier in the 19th century, while Dallas surpassed it in both wealth and population in the second half of the 20th century. The cities founded their downtown art museums 10 years apart — in 1893 for Denver and 1903 for Dallas — but Denver’s grew more quickly and now has a collection of about 70,000 artworks, compared to the DMA’s roughly 25,000.
The Denver Art Museum has harnessed attention-getting architecture. The campus boasts two buildings by major figures: the only building in the U.S. from midcentury-modern Italian master Gio Ponti, which opened in 1971, and a boastful geometric explosion of metal-clad forms by New York-based Daniel Libeskind, which opened in 2006.
By contrast, the DMA’s discreet limestone boxes by Edward Larrabee Barnes seem almost unassuming.
How does Denver’s art scene compare to Dallas’? (Dallas Morning News)
Denver Art Museum to acquire its first van Gogh, Cézanne, four by Monet (The Denver Post)
