Hotels Are Taking Care to Choose Good Artworks

At least hotel artwork has tradition.

Most hotel art traditionally has been a consistent display of bad--if not boring--taste, a collection of things bought simply to fill wall space, artwork where the frame is usually worth more than what’s in it.

Finally, however, things seem to be changing . . . and mostly for the better.

The Seattle Sheraton has become a showcase for artists of the Pacific Northwest. The Inter-Continental Hotel in New Orleans features works by 17 local artists. And the Century Plaza hotel in Los Angeles, as well as all the Ritz-Carlton hotels, publish special art books and offer private art tours of each hotel.

The Seattle Sheraton looks like any other high-rise hotel. But now that establishment can claim the largest permanent public installation of contemporary art in the Pacific Northwest.

The hotel’s art collection is valued at more than $1 million, and includes works by Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and George Tsutakawa.

The Sheraton also boasts its own curator. “We want this hotel to be different for the guests,” says Margery Aronson, an independent art adviser who supervises the Sheraton collection. “As a result, each guest room at the Sheraton features at least two original works of art.”

“It’s been refreshing to me,” Aronson says, “that many new hotels are giving as much thought to their art collections as they are to more traditional hotel considerations.”

The Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Florida boasts a $1.5-million art collection. The Fairmont in San Francisco has more than 500 original 20th-Century art pieces, each handpicked by Roselyne Swig. Swig is not just the wife of the hotel owner, she is also the founder and president of a San Francisco-based company called Art Source.

“The art at most hotels doesn’t respect the clients,” Swig says. “We want our art to be both a learning experience as well as an aesthetic one for our guests.

“The art that we buy should reflect a style that is not overbearing, but is original. The strength of our collection is that our artists are considered initiators.”

Swig also supervises the hanging of each piece in guest rooms, and insists on one non-negotiable rule: Nothing can be hung over guest beds. “That’s the last place people will see it,” she says.

Hotels are no longer just buying art, they’re commissioning it. The outside of Le Mondrian hotel in Los Angeles has a monumental painting by Israeli artist Yaacov Agam. Inside the hotel are more than 2,000 pieces of original art by Agam and other contemporary artists.

Each of the 197 rooms and suites at the Mandarin Hotel in Vancouver has an original watercolor by Vancouver artist Jamie Evrard. And watercolorist Dong Kingman has just become an artist in residence at the Hyatt Regency Waikiki.

At the new Park Hyatt in Washington, D.C., 13th-Century Buddhist sculptures flank a David Hockney piece. And at the newer Hyatt in Scottsdale, Ariz., original art is everywhere.

“I started working on this project as the hotel was being built,” says Bernice Greenberg, who found and bought the art. “We made a specific effort to find art that was contemplative and could be discovered as one roamed through the hotel.”

“Many hotels now find themselves on the cutting edge of art patronage,” says Lynne Kortenhaus, the fine arts adviser to the Ritz-Carlton hotel company. “We’re displaying museum-quality art in a non-museum environment.”

In a program just announced, Ritz-Carlton is offering private tours of its $7.5-million art and antique collection to American Express card holders who stay at their hotels in Boston, Atlanta, Naples (Fla.) or Laguna Niguel.

But you don’t need an American Express card to tour the extensive collection at the Regent Hotel in Hong Kong or the Mauna Kea Hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii.

The Regent in Hong Kong is home to a magnificent assemblage of Oriental art dating to the 17th Century. “We have carefully acquired the art,” says general manager Rudolf Greiner, “not only for its aesthetic beauty but also for the Oriental symbolism represented.”

The Regent has published a beautiful coffee-table art book of its collection, and will gladly arrange tours for guests.

At the Mauna Kea, it’s not only the types of art but how the pieces are displayed that sets the hotel apart.

Japanese ceremonial horses, an 18th-Century Siamese Garuda, an Arabian chest from Zanzibar, ceramic animals from Ceylon and rare Kimono tapestries are part of the more than 1,000 pieces of art throughout the hotel.

The open-air halls and walkways display 10-by-10-foot antique Hawaiian quilts, each featuring a different symmetrical design. Each has up to 2 million stitches.

Buddhas from Thailand and Burma, silver temple toys from India, and large brass hope chests are everywhere. Temple drums from Thailand stand guard in front of some guest rooms. And in one corner of the hotel, remarkably preserved, is a tall wooden scholars’ table.

“The concept is to present the art as if you were in someone’s home,” says Don Aanavi, Mauna Kea’s consultative curator. Aanavi, a former curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is a professor of Asian and Pacific art history at the University of Hawaii.

“I came to Hawaii to teach art,” he says, “and then I discovered that the Mauna Kea offered the most thorough representation of Asian and Pacific cultures.”

Aanavi began taking his students to the hotel, and now takes hotel guests on twice-weekly tours of the Mauna Kea art. (The hotel also publishes a guidebook.)

The Mauna Kea is not adding to its 1,600-piece collection. The hotel’s art is already large enough to rotate many items for exhibition. The rotation also gives the hotel an opportunity to restore artwork affected by the open-air elements of the Mauna Kea, or to regild the gold statues and sculptures.

Of course, there are some hotels where one has always expected to find great art. At the Gritti Palace in Venice, a portrait of Andrea Gritti, the 77th doge of Venice, looks down on guests from the same place in the hotel where it was hung 400 years ago.

Many rooms at the Hotel Crillon in Paris display original 18th- and 19th-Century mahogany furniture and artwork. And the George V Hotel is nothing less than a museum. It’s hard to go anywhere in that Paris hotel without discovering Louis XIV clocks, tapestries and paintings.

Sometimes an older hotel displays its art collection only after going through a major restoration.

In 1981, when the St. Anthony Inter-Continental was restored in San Antonio, Tex., the design team assigned to the project discovered 586 art objects in storerooms, basements and even guest-room closets. The same thing happened when the Willard Hotel was restored in Washington, D.C. (It’s now the Willard Inter-Continental Hotel.)

Presumably, about the last place one would expect to find decent hotel art is in Las Vegas. But at least two casinos might surprise you.

Caesars Palace has embarked on an art acquisition program for guest rooms. One of its most recent purchases is the Brahma Shrine, a bronze and gold statue that greets guests entering the hotel and casino.

It is a reproduction of one of Thailand’s most famous recent shrines. (The original was erected 30 years ago at the Erawan Hotel in Bangkok to thwart a succession of random disasters while the hotel was under construction. Ever since, thousands have flocked to the shrine to plead for help in solving personal and professional problems.)

The Golden Nugget casino boasts its own vice president of design. Roger Thomas, an art historian who holds the title, travels the world hunting up original art and artifacts for the hotel’s 20 super suites. Thomas has also commissioned 20 murals for the hotel, and had another 1,500 pieces commissioned for guest rooms.

“We’re trying to upscale the art here,” he says. “It helps set the hotel apart from other hotels in the city.”

The boom in guest-room art isn’t limited to hotels. Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines has commissioned renowned Norwegian, English, Swedish and Danish artists (including Otto Neilsen) to create an estimated $1.7 million in original artwork for the company’s new ship Sovereign of the Seas, which makes its maiden voyage next January.

And Holland America has already committed more than $1.5 million worth of art to each of its ships.