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: 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)

A Visit to SF MOMA

I recently purchased a collage made by artist Sara Post out of a show in Danville called "Paper Trails." The show closed last weekend. This weekend offered the first opportunity I had to go pick up the art.

 

On my way home, I decided to stop in at SF MOMA. I enjoyed seeing some old favorites in the permanent collection as well as a few new things, including some small pieces by Paul Klee, among others.  

The last photo here is a detail of Diego Rivera's mural "Pan American Unity," temporarily on display at SF MOMA.

Art I'm Looking At: Joan Mitchell at SF MOMA

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting an art museum for the first time in many months. I went to see the Joan Mitchell show now on view at SF MOMA. Masks were required, but showing vaccination status was not. I had my card ready to go, just in case. Much of the space is shut down, especially on the second floor near the photography galleries where the little coffee shop always has been a cozy spot to take a break in. The only photogrphy on view was a set of four panoramic photos of San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake. No matter. I had come to see Joan Mitchell, whose work I have noted before here and there but I really knew little about the trajectory of her career. She seems to have spent most of her life bouncing back and forth between New York and France, sometimes in Paris, sometimes on a large estate in the south. She is often considered an Abstract Expressionist, but doesn't seem to have cared much about the label. Apparently she spent much more time with like-minded painters in France (including Sam Francis and Pierre Soulages) than with the painters in New York most closely associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement.  

I enjoyed the show. I'm glad I went, but I had mixed feelings about the work (as I always have had). Some of the paintings I liked very much, others left me rather cold. A great deal of her work has an unfinished, messy feel to it. For me at least, the thick, discrete strokes of paint don't always come together into a whole greater than the parts. Rarely are there open planes of color that give the eye a quiet place to dwell.  

The wall notes kept referring to views of the spaces that she lived in (particularly her gardens and the local landscape) and memories of experience as the wellsprings of her compositions but also to Monet, Cezanne, and Van Gogh as sources of inspiration. That was a bit puzzling to me. Monet, yes—in the brush strokes and the garden-inspired abstractions. Van Gogh, maybe—perhaps in one image that put me in mind of his crows over a wheat field, but Cezanne was nowhere to be seen. I was frequently reminded of Pierre Bonnard, actually. Both Mitchell and Bonnard seem to have been fond of cadmium yellows and oranges. 

The garden-inspired pieces seemed most successful to me, but I particularly liked the very large "Salut Tom" of 1979, on loan from the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington D.C. (bottom photo). It is monumental in scale, like Monet's largest water lily paintings, and similarly requires time and space to stand back in to appreciate. Some of her drawings I enjoyed as well and it was interesting to see a case full of  paints, brushes, palette knives, and other tools from her Studio. Worth a visit. The show runs through January 17, 2022 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Art I'm Looking At: Edvard Munch in San Francisco

Edvard Munch, Puberty, 1894.
Munch museum, Oslo. Photo by the author.

It's been weeks now since I saw the recently closed Edvard Munch show at SF MOMA (which ran from June 24 to October 9, 2017). I had intended to visit a second time and to write something, but time slipped away and then the fires hit (on the day the show closed). I did want to record a few impressions, however, even if belatedly. Mainly, I was struck by two things: the extraordinarily loose brushwork in many of the later canvases and a boldness of color that I have never associated with Munch. The latter, in particular, was a surprise. Munch is best known for two or three distinctive images: primarily The Scream and Madonna (in their various forms), and perhaps Vampire and Puberty (both of which exist in a number of versions as well). These are all angst-ridden, psychologically dark works rendered mostly in somber colors. This is the Munch I suspect most people know. The SF MOMA show brought together a large number of less familiar works, an extraordinary number from the Munch Museum in Oslo, that, seen together, fundamentally changed my view of the artist.

Edvard Munch, The Death of Marat, 1907.
Munch museum, Oslo. Photo by the author.

His brushwork often was bold—daring even. Many of the canvases look barely finished. They give the impression of roughed-in sketches to be completed later. Faces are mask-like, skull-like, or cartoonish. The Death of Marat (1907), for example, is a loose lattice of lines in thinned paint that allows the canvas to show through.

Edvard Munch, Self-portrait with Bottles, 1938.
Munch museum, Oslo. Photo by the author.

There is no denying that Munch was fairly obsessed with the death of his older sister Sophie, obsessed with sickness and death in general. His was a morbid mind, apparently, and many of the paintings are of morbid subjects. Yet, what was most striking about stepping into the galleries at the SF MOMA show was the color. If Munch was psychologically dark, he was by no means always dark in a literal sense. Munch was a strikingly distinctive colorist, as some of the examples here show, even if he often used slightly garish, starkly contrasting color combinations mainly to heighten a sense of unease.

Edvard Munch, Model by the Wicker Chair, 1919-21.
Munch museum, Oslo. Photo by the author.

Edvard Munch, The Artist and His Model, 1919-21.
Munch museum, Oslo. Photo by the author.

Art I'm Looking At: The New SF MOMA--First impressions (July 9, 2016)

Visiting the newly re-opened, newly expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is daunting. I spent a tiring four hours there last week and didn't even see any of the new, upper floors. I found the place a little disorienting, a little cold, a little unwelcoming.  I was disappointed, but maybe subsequent, longer visits will change my opinion. The thing is, at $25 a visit, the place is now quite expensive. Parking at the nearby Moscone Center Parking Garage cost $20.50. Lunch at the new café wasn't especially cheap (and seating was cramped--entirely inadequate given the number of people, and this was on a Wednesday). Sadly, it's not a set-up that will allow me easily to make the many visits seeing the place will require*.

The new Howard St. entrance seemed little used, not very welcoming from the outside, and cramped inside, as it's nearly entirely filled by Richard Serra's 2006 sculpture Sequence. I like the sculpture itself. Its surfaces sustain long attention. Walking through the spaces between its curving walls is evocative of walking through a cave or a narrow, high-walled canyon. The latter effect is enhanced by the rust-brown color of the walls, suggestive of the iron-red rocks in the Southwest that form slot canyons. Still, its position here seems a little forced: feeling a bit claustrophobic inside the piece seems right, feeling claustrophobic in the space around it just feels uncomfortable. Perhaps that was intended? A wall of bleacher-like wood seating gives a view of the sculpture from a less overwhelming perspective, but, standing next to it you can't see the room you're in.

The main lobby is sort of a gutted version of the old lobby. The striped, black stone staircase is gone (sadly) and so are the ticket desks with people who used to greet you as you came in (ditto). Entry is now through a bank of ticket sales desks on the second floor in a very large room that seems half empty and therefore much too big for its purpose--and, if I had to sum up the new SFMOMA experience in a few words, that would do nicely: the place seems much too big for its purpose.

One of the first rooms I wandered into shows a selection of modern British sculpture (above). A large, mostly empty room, it's a case in point. One wall was entirely blank save for a couple of labels for sculptures so far away from the pieces they describe that they seemed to have been placed deliberately to annoy. The wall might have made a good backdrop, but it goes virtually unused. Other pieces are placed in front of windows that create a great deal of "noise." Shown here with a noisy backdrop is Henry Moore's Oval with Points (Bronze, 1967-68); the black upright bar in the photo is part of the window frame, not the sculpture. The wood floors in this and other galleries, while attractive, were distracting as well. It's fashionable to criticize "the white cube," but all-neutral backdrops do at least focus attention on the art.

The wall labels were oddly placed in most of the galleries I visited. Some are 10-12 feet away from the artworks they accompany. Often it's difficult to know what refers to what. The result is a lot of unnecessary and repetitive walking. I was reminded of the ludicrous distances between venues in Las Vegas (although labels were more conventionally placed in the photography galleries, alongside the images they describe).

No one likes a gallery that feels overcrowded, but many of the spaces I walked through felt underused. Perhaps museum planners have left a lot of space anticipating new arrivals? Oddly, an otherwise engaging display of chairs made from novel materials was given barely enough room to breathe (photo). On the whole, the gallery layout didn't make a lot of sense to me. There seems to be no logical path through the spaces. Hence the feeling of disorientation and fatigue I felt. Signs for cafés and restrooms are so small and infrequent that they are virtually useless. Signs throughout the spaces mark work as part of the "Campaign for Art," but, unless you already know the details of the campaign, these signs are simply puzzling. Nowhere is the campaign explained (apparently, it was a 2009-2015 drive to solicit donations of modern and contemporary art that added more than 3,000 pieces to the collection from more than 200 donors; pieces labeled "Campaign for Art" came into the collection this way). I had to ask and then do a Google search after I got home.

It may sound petty to point it out, but I found the guards distracting too. Guards wear plain dark trousers, white shirts, and dark jackets with no tie. They don't wear conspicuous badges. There are no identifying marks on the jackets. Without ties and because the clothes were often (though not always) ill-fitting, the guards sometimes looked a bit slovenly. At times it was hard to be sure who the guards were. The "uniforms" they wear fail in the single most important thing a uniform is supposed to do: clearly identify a member of the team. Young people in red T-shirts stationed here and there as guides seemed more alert and better informed.

Having said all this, there is a lot worth seeing. The museum has a very deep collection of works by Ellsworth Kelly now (shown here above is his Cité; oil on wood, 1951). There are five or six pieces by Martin Puryear, one of my favorite modern sculptors (although it's a shame there's nothing by Eduardo Chillida, another favorite--at least that I saw). There's an entire room of Calder mobiles, with several of his large stabiles placed in adjacent outdoor spaces. There are multiple strong pieces by Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, and Canadian painter Agnes Martin. There is a large collection of drawings byJoseph Beuys. A large show of graphic design from the museum's permanent collection is now on display.

Photography is much better represented than it used to be; particularly interesting were selections from Jim Goldberg's Rich and Poor series (1977-1985, pictured here is Carol Green Wilson, from among these); a large group of late Diane Arbus works; a nearly complete set of Nicholas Nixon's well known The Brown Sisters series (the 1975 to 2014 images) interestingly paired with Idris Kahn's 2004 every ...Nicholas Nixon's Brown Series (below), which is a layered montage of each of the series images; and historical photographs including examples of many different early processes. Among these, I particularly enjoyed seeing examples of Wilson Alwyn Bentley's Snowflake prints done on collodion printing-out paper** (bottom of page).


And, as I've said, I didn't even make it into the newly added spaces above the 5th floor or go through sections that appear to feature the core of the collection on display before the expansion. So, yes, I will be going back, but it seems to me there's some room for improvement here.

*Since writing this, I decided to become a member. For $100, an individual membership will ultimately be cheaper than paying for admission multiple times, at least in the first year, as it will allow many visits for two people.

**Bentley's snowflake photographs were taken with a microscope-mounted camera. Bentley is often credited with making the first snowflake micrographs, although German researcher Dr. Johann Heinrich Flögel (1834-1918) is known to have photographed a snowflake on February 1, 1879, about six years earlier than Bentley's first such photograph, on January 15, 1885. Still, Bentley went on to take thousands of snowflake photos over many years and he is most closely associated with snowflake photography and with popularizing the idea that every snowflake is unique. The collodion printing-out paper process is one of a number that use a printing-out paper—a sensitized paper that forms an image when exposed to ultraviolet light. No darkroom is required because the image is not developed in the sense we think of today—in a chemical bath of some kind. These processes involve contact printing in sunlight (or today commonly with an artificial UV light source). "Printing out" processes are so called because the image gradually appears on the paper with exposure, the image printing out as you watch. Other examples of printing-out processes include the salted paper, albumen, gelatino-chloride, and collodio-chloride processes.

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