Until I saw the Anschutz Collection on tour a decade or more ago, I didn’t much appreciate Western art. My mistake, because the best of it is very good. And Philip Anschutz has some of the best of it. Now, we’ll all be able to see it again, because in May Anschutz will open the American Museum of Western Art in downtown Denver.
It’s housed in the Navarre Building, built in 1880 and directly across from the Brown Palace. The Victorian building once was a school for girls, then a coed school, then a bordello, then a dining club, then a restaurant. Anschutz bought it in 1997 and restored it. It has been open to the public a couple of hours a week, by appointment, in recent months. In May, it will be open regular hours for walk-ins, though tours by curators will require advanced sign-ups.
Anschutz owns about 650 paintings, made from the early 19th Century to the present, as described on the website:
the museum’s holdings include examples of early American expeditionary painting, Hudson River School and Rocky Mountain School landscapes, 19th century American narrative painting, early American modernism, Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction, American Regionalism, “New Deal Artâ€, and even Abstract Expressionism. Â
According to the Denver Post,  about 400 of them will be on view, hung in three floors of galleries. The paper also named some of the artists, including Frederic Remington, George Catlin, Charles Marion Russell, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Georgia O’Keeffe and Ernest Blumenschein. It added:
The paintings themselves are cohesive in their collective take on the old West — the work is as journalistic as it is artistic. Crossing from realism to abstraction, the paintings depict lush, hilly landscapes, Indian families, frontier settlers, cavalrymen in battle. They can take a wide view of high desert pueblos or offer a closeup of the patterns on native pottery. They are, at times, earthy, colorful, intimate, violent and serene.
The website has a slideshow preview of some works in the collection, including Thomas Eakins’s Cowboys in the Badlands, above, and there’s also the catalogue for Painters and the American West: the Anschutz Collection, which was shown at the Denver Art Museum in 2000.
 Need I say it? This is great news for Denver and for American art, which is having a moment in the sun — the new wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the renovated wing at the Met, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.