Places I'm Visiting: Dallas Museum of Art

After visiting the former Texas Book Depository Building and the museum it houses on my recent trip to Dallas, I went to The Dallas Museum of Art. I had always wanted to visit. I’ve noticed many choice paintings on loan from the museum in large traveling shows at other institutions over the years, suggesting a strong collection. 

Having now seen the museum, I can confirm my impression. There are some gems. In addition to the permanent collection (which is quite broad, including some fine textiles aside from the paintings), there was an exhibition of Surrealist art on show featuring works on loan from the Tate Gallery. 

Here are some favorites, including a Jackson Pollack splatter painting. In general, I really don't care much for the these paintings, which are so highly praised. Often they just look messy to me and, while I understand the idea that they may be intended or at least interpreted after the fact as records of an action, they often strike me as simply uninteresting to look at. This one, however, I rather enjoy. I think it's the blank areas of canvas that make it more appealing. 

 

Art I'm Looking At: Color prints at the Legion of Honor

After seeing the Manet & Morrison show at the Legion of honor earlier this week, I looked into the side gallery on the first floor always used for small shows of prints and book arts from the collection of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, this one called 'Printing Color: Chiaroscuro to Screen print'. 

As the title suggests, it's a survey of color printmaking. Here are a couple of pieces I particularly liked. These shows are easy to miss but almost always worthwhile.

From top to bottom: Erich Heckel. 'Portrait of a Man,' 1919. Color woodcut with monotype printing on paper; Jasper Johns. 'Bushbaby,' 2004. Color spit-bite aquatint and soft ground etching on paper; Loretta Bennett. 'Forever (for Old Lady Sally), 2006. Color soft ground etching and spit-bite aquatint on paper; Wayne Thiebaud. 'Paint Cans,' 1990. Color lithograph with lithographic crayon and colored pencil; Alex Katz. 'The Green Cap,' 1985. Color woodcut printed on handmade Tosa Kozo paper

Art I'm Looking At: Manet & Morisot at The Legion of Honor

I recently saw ‘Manet & Morisot’ now on at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. I thought it well worth a visit for two main reasons. First, it offers an unusual opportunity to see a large number of paintings by Berthe Morisot all together and, second, it offers an equally unusual opportunity to see three of Manet’s most famous paintings (‘The Balcony,’ ‘Boating,’ and ‘The Railway’), which are usually widely dispersed. In addition, the show highlights the relationship between Manet and Morisot both on a personal level and as painters, which, of course, is the central theme of the exhibition. ‘Manet & Morisot’ runs through March 1 next year in San Francisco before moving to the Cleveland Museum of Art  for a run from March 29 through July 5.

I had not seen a lot of work by Morisot before, although I am well aware of her and knew that Manet and Morisot were close friends. Manet painted her several times (there are two or three of his portraits of her in the show) and eventually they became family when Morisot married Édouard’s brother Eugène. In 2010 I had the privilege of spending a week in Paris staying in the apartment of friends. It was a short stroll away from the Cimetière de Passy (the Passy Cemetery) where I saw the side-by-side graves of Édouard, Eugène, and Morisot, among other celebrity graves, including those of the composers Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy.

I was impressed by Morisot’s bold, loose brushstrokes. Unlike Manet, Berthe Morisot belonged to the Impressionist group, having been invited to exhibit in the first Impressionist show by Edgar Degas. She exhibited in all but one of the subsequent Impressionist shows. Her brushwork brought several painters to mind, including Munch, Joan Mitchell, and Sargent, although I don’t mean to make any sort of direct comparison; Mitchell, was, of course, a mostly abstract painter and it has to be said that nobody has ever matched Sargent’s ability to evoke a texture or capture a highlight in a single, perfectly placed abstract smear of paint from a loaded brush, but these painters are all notable for their very obvious brushwork. I’ve included here a couple of details of Morisot up close. The show suggests that it was the influence of Morisot that led to Manet adopting a looser style over time, becoming more willing to let the brushwork show. 

I have seen both ‘The Balcony’ and ‘Boating’ in person in their normal homes (respectively the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) but neither recently. It was particularly interesting to see ‘Boating’ again and in this context. The wall label notes that it was started in 1874 but that Manet worked on it repeatedly for at least a couple of years after that. What I thought striking was the background (essentially, the water), which appears to have been heavily reworked in the top third of the painting. I was left wondering whether he had started with obvious brushstrokes in all of the areas corresponding to water and then softened the brushwork in the top third of the image or if he had later added more painterly strokes in the lower two-thirds. Whichever is the case, the two sections appear rather starkly different and there isn’t much of a transition between them – something I’d never noticed before. It would be natural to blur the upper part of the background gradually to suggest distance, but the contrast between the two areas is quite noticeable once you notice it. It may be that he toned down the brushwork in the upper portion because it distracted from the face of the male figure. Who knows? In any case, there was much of interest to see in this show. Recommended.

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 312 (Santa Rosa)

Here's a collage from earlier this summer, Untitled Collage No. 312 (Santa Rosa). Completed June 9, 2025. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monotype, collage. Image size: 13.2cm x 16.3cm (5.2in x 6.4in). Matted to 11in x 14in. Signed on the mat. Signed and dated on the reverse. 

For more of my abstract monotype collage work, visit my website at http://ctalcroft.wix.com/collage-site/ or you can purchase my recently published book commemorating ten years of working in the collage medium – Colin Talcroft: Abstract Monotype Collage: 2103–2023 (ISBN 979-8-218-37717-5). Available on the website.

In person, my work can be seen at Calabi Gallery in Santa Rosa, Hammerfriar Gallery in Healdsburg, and at the Ren Brown Collection in Bodega Bay or in my studio by appointment. Sadly, however, Calabi Gallery is closing (although it will maintain an online presence)– a great loss for Santa Rosa and Sonoma County. 

Art I'm Looking At: Quilts at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Over the past weekend, I stopped in at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive to see the main show on now – a show of quilts by black Americans called "Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California." The show, which runs through November 30, looks at quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration of black Americans out of the South (1940-1970) in search of work and better treatment than they were accustomed to in the South. It comprises about one hundred quilts either made in the South and transported to California through migration or made in California by migrants to the state from the South. It is the first show that draws on a large collection of quilts donated to the museum in 2019 by a life-long collector. 

The earliest pieces in the show were made by women born into slavery. The most recent pieces were made by artists still living. The range of styles is diverse. Some exhibit the careful piecing, geometric formality, and intricate stitching that characterize the quilting traditions with which I'm more familiar but others display a much freer approach to materials and composition, notably a willingness (or often a need) to draw on materials at hand; there are quilts that incorporate old denim, old T-shirts, entire pieces of used clothing (one artist in the show appears to have been known for making "britches quilts" using overalls and other articles of clothing intact), neckties, and scrap fabric of all kinds. The inventiveness and beauty of some of the pieces is impressive. Well worth a look. I've attached photos here of some of my favorite pieces in the show.

Art I'm Looking at: Ruth Asawa, Paul McCartney, Kunié Sugiura, and Richard Diebenkorn

In the past six weeks or so, I've seen some of the major shows currently on view in San Francisco, mainly the Ruth Asawa show and work by Kunié Sugiura at SF MOMA, the Paul McCartney photographs at the De Young, and a small show of prints by Richard Diebenkorn at Crown Point Press. 

The Ruth Asawa show, which runs through September 2, brings together more than 300 pieces from all phases of Asawa's career. Like many people, I have been most familiar with her hanging wire sculptures. I was largely ignorant about the details of her career, however. The show, which is roughly chronological, offers an excellent opportunity to put the wire sculptures into context and to get a sense of the range of her activity. From the earliest work in the show, mainly from her time at Black Mountain College, to the last work she did, in San Francisco, where she eventually settled and raised a family of six children with her husband, architect Albert Lanier, it is evident that she had a deep interest in and understanding of natural forms, which appear to have been a constant inspiration. 

I particularly enjoyed seeing folded paper creations, early printed works, and some exquisite botanical contour drawings in the show, as well as drawings done using Screentone on matboard. Well worth a visit.  (Photos: Top – SF MOMA, installation view. Above, Mounted Paper Fold with Horizontal Stripes, ink on paper, 1952. Below, Photocopy of Ruth Asawa's Hand, not dated, photoelectric print.)

Also on at SF MOMA is a show of work by Kunié Sugiura, an artist I had never heard of, who appears to have been active mostly as a photographer. In the show are everything from small photomontages to very large photograms, but the show features what she refersto as "photopaintings." Sugiura's photopaintings are assemblages that combine photographic images with sculptural elements. Some of these put me in mind of Robert Rauschenberg's "combines." Others suggested Rothko with their simple pairings of diffuse, flat surfaces. I thought the photopaintings rather effective. The photographic elements function simultaneously as independent images and as abstract compositional elements within the whole of each piece. 

The show will be up through September 2025. If you're heading to SF MOMA to see the Ruth Asawa show, I recommend taking in the Sugiura show as well. (Photos: Above, SF MOMA installation view; below top, Introse BP3, toned silver gelatin print, 2002; below bottom Deadend Street, photographic emulsion and acrylic paint on canvas with wood, 1978.)

The Paul McCartney photographs now on view at the De Young I found interesting for their historical value; they present an intimate look at life behind the scenes with the Beatles just as Beatlemania was taking off, but I found the show a bit disappointing. With a few exceptions, the photos are not especially fine as photographs. Those on view are almost all digital prints from the negatives rather than silver gelatin prints (and where negatives have been lost, digital prints from scans of contemporary contact sheets), which would have been more authentic, and many of the shots were poorly focused (which is not to say that all photographs must be in sharp focus to be worthwhile). They mostly read as incidental snapshots – which, I suppose, is what they are; McCartney makes no claims to art here. Finally, not all of the photos on display are by McCartney. A fair number include McCartney's image, taken not by him but with his camera handed to someone else, and a couple of the best shots in the show are by other photographers entirely. Color photos in Miami reveal McCartney responding as a tourist. That said, any Beatles fan will enjoy seeing the collection presented here. I thought the photo of John Lennon in Paris and a shot of Ringo and George, both shown below, among the better images.

When Yale University Press in association with The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, published the Richard Diebenkorn Catalog Raisonné in 2016, I acquired the set, as Diebenkorn is among my favorite artists, but I was disappointed to find that none of his many prints were included. I learned that a definitive catalog of the prints was to appear in a separate edition, and that has just appeared, almost ten years later. In honor of the publication, Crown Point Press in San Francisco (on Hawthorne St., a short walk from SF MOMA) is now doing a small show of some of the prints that Diebenkorn made at Crown Point Press. The show is small, with only about 25 pieces on the walls, but each is choice and one of the finished prints is shown alongside several proof versions, which allows a glimpse into the process of its creation. Worth a visit, but, checking the Crown Point Press website, it looks like this show may have just closed. I'd recommend calling in advance, but Crown Point Press is almost always worth a visit. 

Very close to Crown Point Press, walking along the sidewalk on Howard St., I noticed some pavement markings that looked very much like a Diebenkorn to me.  

Art I'm Looking At: Shows featuring SFAI artists (March 2025)

The Museum of Sonoma County (425 7th St., Santa Rosa, CA 95401 (707) 579-1500) is now in the middle of a show called "UNRULY: North Bay Artists from the San Francisco Art Institute" featuring art by students and faculty at the now-defunct San Francisco Art Institute, which for 150 years fostered artistic experimentation in the San Francisco Bay Area, influencing generations (closed in 2022). The show of about 30 pieces by 18 artists occupies most of the museum's large central space. The show runs through July 8, 2025.

Local gallery owner Dennis Calabi, inspired by the Unruly show, has opened a show of his own at The Calabi Gallery (456 10th St., Santa Rosa, CA, (707) 781-7070) also featuring work by artists and students of the SFAI but mostly of an earlier generation. Dennis's holdings are rich in work by SFAI artists from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, nicely complementing the Unruly show, which mainly presents more recent work by living artists that were associated with SFAI. Both shows are worth seeing, but The Calabi Gallery show is perhaps the more rewarding as it is broader in scope, presenting more than 100 high-caliber works. 

Art I'm Looking At: SF MOMA (March 2025)

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I stopped in at SF MOMA. I had visited only about six weeks earlier, so didn't find much new, but I enjoyed seeing a show of photography on right now called "Around Group ƒ.64: Legacies and Counterhistories in Bay Area Photography." 

The short-lived but influential Group ƒ.64 was founded in 1932 by California photographers interested in photography that was sharply focused and true to the medium – photography not pretending to be something it wasn't (Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams were three of the eleven members). 

The impetus was a reaction to the pictorialists in vogue at the time whose aim was essentially to use photography to make images that mimicked painting, using soft focus and choosing mainly romantic subjects. The pictorialists and many early photographers were attempting to establish photography as a respectable art, a status it did not at first enjoy, by associating it with high art. The ƒ.64 Group photographers had as one of their goals a firmer footing for serious photography as well, but they chose an entirely different approach. 

The name of the group comes from ƒ.64, which is the smallest-diameter aperture setting available with most camera lenses, important in this context because the smaller the aperture used, the greater the depth of field there is – that is, the broader the range of view in an image that's in sharp focus. 

The show was a bit unfocused (no pun intended). It takes the actual Group ƒ.64 photographers as its starting point, showing work by all eleven original members, and then goes from there quite far afield. There is a section looking at the relationship between the Group's photographers and the poet Langston Hughes (a connection I was entirely unaware of). 

There is a section featuring the work of Tarrah Krajnak who does self-portraits referencing work by the Group ƒ.64 photographers. Some of her photographs are shown alongside the Group ƒ.64 photographs they were inspired by. These sections were followed by contemporary photographs with a rather tenuous connection to the rest of the show – the "counterhistories" of the show's title. I thought the earlier sections more interesting. I especially enjoyed seeing original prints by the less familiar Group ƒ.64 photographers. Posted here are a few favorites from the show, which runs through July 2025, along with one or two from the Amy Sherald show that has just closed at SF MOMA. 

 

(Above: Willard Van Dyke, Boxer's Hands, silver gelatin print, 1932; Willard Van Dyke, Funnels, silver gelatin print, 1932; Sonya Noskowiak, Spanish Bottle, silver gelatin print, 1927; Sonya Noskowiak, Industrial Section, San Francisco, silver gelatin print, 1937; Tarrah Krajnak, Self-portrait as West/as Bertha Wardell (Knees), silver gelatin print, 1927/2020; Edward Weston, Knees, silver gelatin print, 1927; Amy Sherald, Miss Everything (Unsupressed Deliverance), oil on canvas, 2014; Amy Sherald, The Rabbit in the Hat, oil on canvas, 2009)

Art I'm Looking at: The Lost Art Salon, San Francisco

Somewhere on line (where, I have no idea anymore) I recently saw a reference to The Lost Art Salon in San Francisco, which sounded interesting. As I had business in the city last Friday, I decided to stop by. The place is in an industrial building on South Van Ness Ave. (245 S. Van Ness), virtually under a freeway overpass. You'd never suspect there was a gallery there if you didn't know. The door is locked. You have to ring a buzzer to gain access, which was quickly granted once I finally figured out which button to push. 

Up three flights of stairs and down a hallway is Suite 303, a large room filled with art. Art on the walls. Art stacked against the walls, art in racks, and art in file folders arranged alphabetically by the artist's last name. The floor is completely covered by oriental carpets.

I was greeted immediately by a friendly gentleman (he turned out to be Rob Delamater, one of the co-founders of the place) who gave me a brief orientation. He explained that The Lost Art Salon mainly buys accumulations and collections, in many cases from estates or directly from artists doing estate planning. It seems a lot of art left behind by artists that doesn't find a home elsewhere comes here, and that seems a better fate than ending up at a garage sale or at Goodwill. The Salon also hosts regular art talks (free of change). The next of these appears to be scheduled for Thursday, April 17th from 6:00PM followed by a "festive show and reception" (RSVPing on the website guarantees a seat). The topic is "The Story of Bay Area Figurative Art."

There was a lot to see. I put only an hour in the parking meter, so I had to leave before I had seen all that was there. I'll visit again when I have a chance and more time to devote to looking through the offerings. It's the sort of place you could browse for hours. Open 10:30AM to 5:30PM every day except Sunday. (415) 861-1530.

Art I'm Looking at: Dress Rehearsal: The Art of Theatrical Design at the Legion of Honor

The courtyard at The Legion of Honor

Yesterday, I attended a San Francisco symphony concert but arrived in the city much earlier than required, so I set off to The Legion of Honor to look at a little art and Amoeba Music to check to the used records before heading to Davies Symphony Hall for the concert. I arrived at the end of the day. There was no admission charge (although I am a member); I had forgotten that the last 45 minutes (4:30 to 5:15) is always free. 

There wasn't much going on at The Legion, but I had a stroll through the permanent collection and there was an attractive little show in the gallery on the ground floor that is always devoted to work from the collection of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, this one called "Dress Rehearsal: The Art of Theatrical Design" featuring costume and set designs. There's always something interesting in that space. Here are some favorites. The show runs through May 11, 2025. 

On my way out, the sun was low and golden on the horizon, the upper sections of the white stone of the building were dyed a warmer hue by the light, and the lawn was a vibrant, rain-nourished green. In the distance, a container ship was passing under the Golden Gate Bridge, and on the lawn a photographer was posing a beautiful young Indian woman with raven-colored hair in a strapless gown the color of rubies for a photograph. One level down, a young man and his two children played in the sun on a chartreuse putting green striped with shadows from the surrounding trees, and, as I turned to leave, I saw the photographer helping his model into a sleek car as red as her gown. 

[Top to bottom: Léon Bakst, costume design for Potiphar's Wife in La légend de Joseph, 1914; Abraham Walkowitz, Study of Isadora Duncan, 1915. This one reminded me very much of Rodin's watercolors; Eugene Berman, Costume design for a young girl in Le bourgeois gentilhomme, New York, 1944.]