The new Four Seasons Resort in Whistler, B.C., had barely swung open its doors this summer when general manager Scott Taber came rushing into the dining room in a panic.
Taber had just walked past Rodney Graham's topsy-turvy Napoleon Tree, a limited-edition print by the renowned Vancouver photo-conceptual artist hanging in the lower level lobby. The playful photograph, taken with Graham's famous room-sized pinhole camera, depicts a tree -- inverted, with its branches swaying down into the sky -- the way the image would be reproduced after light passed through the camera obscura's lens.
"Is that upside down or is it art?" Taber asked Laurie Cooper, the resort's public-relations director.
"It was so funny," recalls Cooper, who assured Taber the print was meant to hang that way.
When the story was related to Susan Almrud, the Vancouver art consultant commissioned to curate the resort's impressive half-million-dollar contemporary B.C. art collection (it contains roughly 750 works, including original art, limited-edition prints and reproductions), she felt immensely rewarded.
"It does create that sort of dialogue," says Almrud, owner of Vancouver's State Gallery. "And having work like that in the hotel was very important to me. It offers opportunities for people to learn about contemporary art and it offers the hotel the opportunity to have that dialogue with their guests. If people aren't talking about the work or asking questions, I don't believe it's serving its purpose."
Hotel art, once the mainstay of washed-out reproduced masterpieces and the butt of bad jokes, has recently acquired a bold new lease on life. Forget the Frette linens, celebrity chefs and Aveda bath products. To stay on top of the game, luxury high-end chains and boutique hotels must now provide their guests with cultural stimulation too, which is why a growing number of hoteliers in Canada and around the world are investing in serious modern-art collections to spice up their designer lobbies.
"The international traveller is a very sophisticated individual. They are people who are interested in seeing original art in hotels."
Almrud credits Ian Shraeger, who hired Philippe Starck to design his chain of cutting-edge-cool W hotels, for revolutionizing architectural aesthetics. The hotel as art gallery, as she sees it, is simply the next logical step.
In some parts of the world, the hotelier as art patron is a long-established tradition. In the 1930s, soon after founding La Colombe d'or in St. Paul de Vence, France, the late Paul Roux began bartering with his creative, but impoverished clientele. Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and George Braque are just a few of the artists who exchanged their paintings for a place to lay their heads -- eventually making this small 16-room inn, located in the hills behind Nice, one of the greatest galleries of early 20th-century art.
In other places, the renovated Sagamore Hotel in Miami's revitalized South Beach art-deco district, for example, the spotlight shines on contemporary abstracts and sculptures by Udo Noger, Sterz Imrie, David Stolz and Christine Borland, prominently displayed in the chic galleries, lounges and bars behind the hotel's carefully restored postmodern Bauhaus-style façade.
The concept seems to be spreading with art-conscious chains like the German-owned Art'otel, which showcases the work of one significant contemporary artist in each of its locations - Andy Warhol in Berlin City Centre West, A.R. Penck in Dresden and Donald Sultan in Budapest.
And some hotels are creating a niche by narrowing in on local artists. The Hotel Arts in Barcelona, for instance, showcases more than 1,000 paintings, collages, sculptures and ceramics by contemporary Catalan and Spanish artists, many of which were specially commissioned.
"We have a very powerful artistic identity here on the West Coast of Canada," says Almrud, who won the contract for the Four Seasons Whistler with a proposal that recommended a diverse collection representing recognized and museum-level local artists who enjoy regional, national and international acclaim.
"I feel it's very important to introduce that identity to the world so that when people from around the world visit Whistler they can experience some of the most significant artists in B.C. today."
The collection she assembled, which ranges from painting to ceramics and photography-based work, are displayed in public nooks and spaces all around the hotel -- from the safety-deposit-box room to the spa.
In the lobby lounge, guests will immediately notice a collection of clay ceramics on the console table by West Vancouver artist Tam Irving, and two sumptuous oil panels by Vancouver's Greg Murdoch behind the reception desk.
The ballroom level includes colour photographic prints by Jim Breukelman in the washroom, abstract acrylics on canvas by Philippe Raphanel, and a large acrylic-on-linen landscape by Landon Mackenzie, which has toured with several major exhibitions of Canadian contemporary work.
The high-end suites include works by such recognized artists as Ann Kipling, Takao Tanabi, Greg Murdoch, Gordon Smith and Graham.
And although the budget for the standard rooms allowed only for reproductions, Almrud made a special effort to support the local community by purchasing prints not just from galleries but also from grassroots groups such as Malaspina Printmakers on Granville Island and Artists for Kids.
Almrud -- who also provided the hotel with maintenance manuals, a library stocked with every available book on B.C. artists she could find and a comprehensive brochure for guests -- was impressed by the developer's attention to detail. They didn't just randomly stick her selections to the walls. They also hired a professional architectural lighting designer, Bouyea and Associates of Connecticut, to work with her.
"It really shows the level of commitment and it makes such a huge difference when you're working with original art." The collection includes several original commissions. Particularly noteworthy -- and eye-catching -- is the two 8-by-15-foot screens made of cast-bronze twigs by David Robinson. The lattice-like panels of fabricated forest separate the main upper and lower lobbies from the grand stairwell, above which Spring Thaw, a huge 10-by-18-foot acrylic-on-canvas mural by Gordon Smith takes pride of place.
"Gordon's piece is the anchor of the collection," Almrud says. "He's well into his 80s and one of Canada's most prominent living artists. His piece is the perfect balance with some of the younger artists."
Not everyone agrees with that assessment, but contemporary art is bound to inspire diverse reactions.
"I think Gordon Smith is the most boring artist in the world," says Globe and Mail art critic Gary Michael Dault. "But good for them for doing this," he adds enthusiastically.
Dault is no stranger to modern experiments in hotel art. Last year, he and Toronto artist James Lahey collaborated with designer Bruce Mau on two abstract elevators for the city's new Hotel Le Germain. When you walk into the elevator, you are surrounded by one of Lahey's floor-to-ceiling photographic prints of black-and-white clouds in the sky. Superimposed on the image is the text of a poem by Dault (the second elevator works with a French poem by Quebec writer Hélène Dorion).
"Hotels are like a fantasy," says Lahey, whose intensely erotic painted photographs of tulips are also displayed in Le Germain's guest rooms.
"The elevator should be as engaged a space as the rest," says Lahey, who was delighted to discover that some guests have continued riding up and down the elevator until they finished reading the entire three walls of text.
Lahey hopes the tulips on the bedroom walls inspire different sorts of fantastical heights. "If you're in these rooms and you don't want to [have sex] there's something wrong with you."
Over on Toronto's Queen Street West, the newly reopened Drake Hotel is another example of an art-conscious hotel that is engaging its guests in all sorts of ways. With its art-magazine launches, literary salons, photography exhibits, video installations and very own artist-in-residence, the Drake is actually more of a living cultural experiment unto itself.
According to Almrud, the constantly evolving nature of the Drake -- or places like Manhattan's Hotel Gansevoort, which hosted this year's Scope New York art fair -- is an aspect she hopes more hotels will consider when investing in art.
"It's important that art collections continue to grow and evolve. I've certainly heard many corporations say their collection has reached their maximum, but art is constantly changing and a collection should reflect that."
Of course, whenever you're dealing with private collections, there are compromises that must be made.
"It was important to have a balance between beautiful works and works that have critical integrity," Almrud says.
Scott McFarland's Segal Garden, for instance, certainly grabs your attention, but it's not exactly what you'd call beautiful to behold. It's actually very strange looking. The photographic C Print, part of McFarland's Night Garden Series, is of a giant mutant green shrub that bizarrely resembles a woolly mammoth.
Almrud had to work hard to convince Intrawest and the Four Seasons to include it in the collection. Then she had to work even harder when she decided to move it from a secluded corner near the restaurant to a much more prominent place at the bottom of the stairwell.
Cooper says everyone involved is glad Almrud stuck to her guns now that the woolly mammoth has become one of the most talked-about pieces in the collection.
"If everyone's talking about it, that's good," Almrud says. "Conceptual photography is such an important part of the artistic community here. And although it does have a lot of respect from people who understand contemporary art, that's such a small percentage.
"That's one of the most exciting things about working with hotels. What people see in public spaces is what they come to think of as important art. And hotels have a great opportunity to change the way people think about art."
Alexandra Gill