Culture on rock’s coattails

MICROSOFT co-founder Paul Allen opened Seattle’s Experience Music Project six years ago to put pop music artifacts in a sort of museum setting. Now the philanthropist is bringing old-fashioned art to the place -- 28 works from his own large and mysterious collection, including celebrated canvases by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Jan Bruegel the Younger that haven’t been seen in public for more than 50 years.

The show is known as “DoubleTake: From Monet to Lichtenstein” and is scheduled to run from Saturday through at least Sept. 24. It’s getting attention, of course, for putting some of Monet’s water lilies and Jimi Hendrix’s guitar under the same roof. But it’s not really aimed at merging Allen’s musical and visual interests.

Instead, Allen’s curator, Paul Hayes Tucker, came up with a scheme to match artworks from different eras, including several pairings of paintings by Impressionists with others by such 20th and 21st century artists as Gerhard Richter and Roy Lichtenstein. Admission to the show (which includes an introductory video) will be $8 for adults, or $33 to visit the Experience Music Project and the adjacent Science Fiction Museum as well.

Allen has been coy about the size of his personal art collection, but nobody doubts his ability to buy what he likes. Forbes magazine has estimated the worth of the 53-year-old bachelor at $22 billion.

Christopher Reynolds