Damn The DAM - Show Us The Modigliani!

I went to the Denver Art Museum (the DAM) yesterday afternoon to see the Modern and Contemporary Art Galleries, which were recently installed on two floors in the museum's Hamilton Building. I was excited to see this exhibit since I was told by a museum employee, back when the North Building reopened in 2021 after a renovation, that my favorite painting at the museum, Modigliani's Portrait de Femme, would be located in these galleries when they were reinstalled. But when I went there yesterday, the Modigliani was not there. And only one Picasso, two Georgia O'Keeffes, and a single Braque, all very small, were exhibited together among other paintings on a wall at the entrance. The rest of the artwork consisted of very modern, very weird contemporary paintings such as the one I am posing in front of in the photograph on the left. This from galleries that were supposed to represent a wide selection of paintings from 1900 to the present.

I know the museum, in addition to the Modigliani, has a number of paintings from this period by Picasso and many other famous artists, but instead they show "cutting edge" works. Fine and good, but would it hurt to show some more traditional - and famous - works of art? The DAM has a comment card at the entrance that says they value everyone's opinion, and so here is mine: Devote one corner of these two floors of artwork to Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse, and others from this period. I suggest they use the corner devoted to a video of a naked man crawling on all fours across a salt encrusted landscape, as seen in the photograph on the right. I know the public would be deprived of this truly important work of art, but perhaps the museum might attract a wider audience if it did.

In any case, the DAM still admits to owning that Modigliani. I looked it up on the museum's website and took a photo of it, as seen on the left, but evidently it is unsuitable to show in a gallery. It is certainly no naked man crawling on all fours, but still kind of nice in an old fashioned way. And for the record, I stopped watching the video of the naked man crawling over salt flats before the elks appeared and licked the salt off his body. Very artistic I'm sure, but I just couldn't bring myself to watch. Does that make me sound like an old curmudgeon? Good.