The docent-led groups of schoolchildren, Japanese tourists and other first-time visitors may not notice anything different when they visit the Honolulu Academy of Arts this month, but curator Theresa Papanikolas has been playing a game of art shuffleboard.

The curator of European and American art, who joined the museum over a year ago, has been digging through the academy vaults since she arrived. The fruit of her labor is on view in two new installations of European and American modern art, one of which opened last month, and the other of which opened Thursday.

"I thought, why not bring together all our major works from the mid-to late 19th century and early 20th century together in one gallery," explained Papanikolas of the newly installed Gallery 10, which opened on Oct. 20.

The room serves as a sort of pop-up textbook of early modern art: the major movements are all covered, from romanticism and realism with Eugene Delacroix and Gustave Courbet, through post-impressionism with Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gaugin.

Down the outdoor hallway and across the courtyard, the academy's European and American modern permanent collection continues in the newly installed Clare Boothe Luce Gallery, which re-opened on Thursday. The space has been used for temporary traveling exhibitions in the past, and most recently for a tightly focused installation of abstract expressionism from the academy's collection.

"What I'm trying to do is give a broader sense of the 20th century," says Papanikolas of the reinstalled gallery.

The interior walls of the Luce Gallery have been restructured for the installation.

"We thought it would open up the space, and set apart the early-20th-century work, but also create a dialogue," says Papanikolas of her collaboration with Larry Maruya on the installation design.

Altogether, Papanikolas removed five or six artworks from the previous Luce Gallery setup, in addition to all the rotating work on paper, and added a jam-packed 20-some artworks for the new installation, mostly pulled from storage or moved from other galleries in the museum.

EXPECT SURPRISES

The new installation contains the expected heavy hitters, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg and Alexander Calder, and also some less-well-known artists.

One unexpected delight comes from the French painter Amedée Ozenfant, whose "Accords" (1922) is an example of purism, a late cubist style developed in collaboration with Le Corbusier. In "Accords," Ozenfant pares down objects into their pure geometric essence, and paints them in muted tones of blue and gray.

Another surprise is John Baldessari's "Six Colorful Gags (Male)," a print in photogravure, aquatint and etching from 1991. The work illustrates the artist's pop art-influenced habit of appropriating mass media-related photography and film stills. In "Six Colorful Gags (Male)," Baldessari juxtaposes six male faces, cropped tight, each with a hand over his face. The title is a play on words: in one or two of the images, the man's hand could be covering his face as if he is laughing from a joke (a gag), in other images, the hand appears at the face as part of an act of aggression in blocking the mouth (gagging).

Works like Baldessari's print are being pulled up from the vaults for the first time in years in the new installations in both Gallery 10 and the Luce Gallery. The reinstallations come on the wings of a nationwide trend in museums to re-evaluate permanent collections and bring previously uncelebrated artworks into viewing spaces.

In previous years, museums may have triumphed from the rise of the big, expensive blockbuster traveling exhibition to bring in large attendance numbers. But now, in light of the economic recession, museums are more often looking to their own collections for works to fill their galleries.

Although museums might lose a small segment of their attendance by forgoing these big traveling exhibits, what they gain is the opportunity for carefully considered, intimate looks at collection works that might not otherwise see the light of day.

In the case of the academy, the reinstallation of the European and American modern art galleries provides an impressive demonstration of the breadth of the institution's 19th- and 20th- century holdings in Western art. Art history neophytes and connoisseurs alike will appreciate that the academy is bringing out some of its crowd-pleasing big names in addition to unsung gems. Papanikolas reflects, " ... If you can show them something that is familiar, even it it's not by an artist they have heard of, it's good. It can be very valuable."