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.

Miscellaneous: Reflections at SFMOMA

Last time I was at SF MOMA, I noticed these reflections in the top of a display case positioned near a window looking out over the city.

Art I'm Looking At: Matisse/Diebenkorn at SF MoMA

Yesterday (March 24) I went to see SF MoMA’s Matisse/Diebenkorn show (March 11 through May 29, 2017). The show has been open here for a couple of weeks. I was hoping crowds would be thin with an initial rush of interest already past, but the galleries were crowded, even on a weekday. Perhaps rain was to blame, as a ticket-taker suggested when I enquired. I sometimes had trouble getting an unobstructed view of the mostly large canvases, and I see that elsewhere in the museum they’ve made no effort to improve the signage since my last visit—wall lettering so small as to be mostly useless (and signs are much needed given the illogical, disconnected layout of the stairways). These complaints aside, I very much enjoyed seeing this close look at the influence of Matisse on the work of Richard Diebenkorn.

The exhibition begins with a timeline showing where and when the American artist had significant contact with Matisse’s work, both through visits to collections with important Matisse holdings and through reproductions (several display cases hold books about Matisse that Diebenkorn owned). The exhibition follows Diebenkorn’s career in broadly chronological fashion and thematically, starting with large abstractions from his Urbana period. A side room focuses on black and white drawings by the two artists. Many works by Diebenkorn are mounted beside works by Matisse that organizers and catalog editors Janet Bishop (SF MoMA Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture) and Katherine Rothkopf (Senior Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, The Baltimore Museum of Art) believe were particularly important to Diebenkorn or that they believe show obvious influence. Matisse/Diebenkorn presents more than 100 works by the two painters from private collections, the estate of Richard Diebenkorn, museum collections all over the US, from museums in Paris and London, and other sources, including SF MoMA’s own holdings—in total, about 40 by Matisse, 60 by Diebenkorn. San Francisco is the second of only two locations that will host the show. Matisse/Diebenkorn was at The Baltimore Museum of Art from October 23, 2016 to January 29, 2017.

Matisse: Studio, Quai St. Michel, 1916
The Phillips Collection

Richard Diebenkorn moved to Urbana, Illinois, in 1952 to take up a year-long teaching position there. He doesn’t appear to have liked the landscape much, but during his stay he produced some important large abstractions (these and the Berkeley-period pieces are among my personal favorites). The show includes Urbana No. 2, Urbana No. 4, Urbana No. 5, and Urbana No. 6 (all from 1953), pairing Urbana No. 4 with Matisse’s 1916 Studio, Quai St. Michel (shown above) and Urbana No. 6 with the French painter’s Goldfish and Palette (below). The show would be of interest just for the opportunity to see this group of Urbana paintings, but the pairings highlight similar color choices, a willingness to leave behind traces of process, and an approach to composition marked by an ever-present tension between opposing forces—tension between the abstract and the representational; between complex gestural areas suggesting motion on the one hand and static expanses of subtly modulated color on the other; between the linear and the un-delineated; between the patterned and the plain; between three-dimensionally rendered form and flatness.

This dialectical approach to composition (along with a distinctive use of color) is perhaps what most clearly makes Matisse recognizable, particularly in his highly experimental work of 1914–1916, and walking through the galleries I began to feel it may also have been the most fundamental lesson Diebenkorn learned from Matisse. Both painters were adept at creating a slightly disturbing ambiguity that generates the same feeling you get when looking at an optical illusion presenting two contradictory perspectives the brain struggles to reconcile. The real magic Matisse and Diebenkorn achieve, however, is in at the same time providing just enough solid ground to stand on that we aren’t compelled to turn away.

Matisse: Goldfish and Palette, 1916
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Goldfish and Palette is a good example of the ambiguity. It’s not at all clear what kind of space we're looking into here. The junction of the base of the blue trapezoid in the top half of the painting and the white in the bottom half suggests the meeting of a floor and a wall at the back of a room, two planes presumably meeting at a 90-degree angle, but the more-or-less centrally placed vertical black strip flattens the space—although not completely: the fine white lines on top of the black (both the two vertical lines above and apparently beyond the fishbowl and the less-assertive horizontal lines under the table-like surface that appears to support the fishbowl) argue again for a three-dimensional space (is that a door beyond the fishbowl?). The flat, supporting surface of the "table" grounds the fishbowl, but an interpretation of that surface as a table top is undermined by the incursion of blue at the left and by the black edge of the table-like plane doubling as part of what looks like a pattern on the blue wall beyond (which again flattens the space—if it is a wall; perhaps it is blue sky seen through a decorative balcony railing?). Thus, the “table top” apparently supports the fishbowl yet it threatens to fold down against the blue space at the same time, while, logically, it can’t do that because there appears to be a pair of legs under the table (or is it three?). The cross-like black lines in the upper right corner of the painting perhaps represent bars on a window, but, if there is a window there, the blue area must be a wall…and on and on.

Diebenkorn: Urbana No. 6, 1953
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth 

Diebenkorn’s Urbana No. 6 may not be as directly indebted to Goldfish and Palette as the curators suggest, but Diebenkorn has used similar techniques to create ambiguity, even if the image is much more abstract than Matisse’s. In Urbana No. 6, we see a similar central black band, although here horizontal rather than vertical. In Diebenkorn’s painting it's this band of darkness that seems to create a flat, supporting surface; Diebenkorn’s black band functions like Matisse’s table top, supporting pale forms and red accents that suggest Matisse’s fish. The pale blue area in the upper right suggests a window, reinforcing the notion that the black area is in an interior space. The blue could also give the impression of looking through an open door at the far side of a room. In that case, the black band would seem more like a large carpet. But this is abstraction. I don’t mean to suggest one should struggle to interpret a work like Urbana No. 6 as representational. Yet the human brain inevitably interprets and Diebenkorn gives our brains just enough to keep us groping—following the example of Matisse.

Left: Matisse: Yellow Pottery from Provence, 1905, Baltimore Museum of Art
Right: Diebenkorn: Berkeley No. 47, 1955, SF MoMA

In pairing Diebenkorn's Berkeley No. 47 (1955) with Matisse's Yellow Pottery from Provence (1905), the curators look at how Diebenkorn experimented with unusual color combinations apparently inspired by Matisse. If Diebenkorn had Matisse's Yellow Pottery in mind when he painted Berkeley No. 47, he turned things on their side again, translating Matisse's representational color into horizontal bands of abstract color.

Throughout the exhibition, the color echoes are striking. Diebenkorn's Untitled, 1964, for example, showing a spray of flowers in a small blue bottle on a chestnut-colored table with a window beyond rendered in contrasting light and dark blues (not shown here) echoes the brown table and grey wallpaper (patterned in similar light and dark blues) in Matisse's Pansies (c. 1903, not shown). More generally, there's a range of blues in Diebenkorn that strongly echoes the blues Matisse favored. Following his autumn 1964 visit to the Soviet Union (now Russia) as part of a cultural exchange (where he toured the State Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg, and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, in Moscow, both with large Matisse holdings), Diebenkorn made the paintings in his oeuvre most obviously indebted to Matisse. Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad from 1965 and Large Still Life from 1966 (below) use the characteristic Matisse blues, overtly decorative flourishes filling spaces that read as walls, and, again, spatial ambiguity. It's appropriate that Recollections adorns the catalog cover (top of this page).

The Matisse paintings Diebenkorn saw in the Soviet Union include some of the French painter's largest canvases. I was set to wondering if the monumental quality of Diebenkorn's large Ocean Park paintings was also inspired by Matisse. Diebenkorn started painting the Ocean Park series in 1967, returning to abstraction on a large scale and in earnest following a period of mostly figurative work not long after his return from the Soviet tour.

Diebenkorn: Large Still Life, 1966, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Drawings on display in a side room are instructive. Devoid of color, they make it easy to see Diebenkorn using some of Matisse's compositional tricks—in particular, the use of decorative patterns and the juxtaposition of flat and three-dimensional treatments. Matisse loved interlocking areas filled with patterns, sometimes suggestive of tiling. (It's tempting to think Matisse's 1912 and 1913 visits to Morocco inspired the habit, but he was already using this device before his trips to Africa.) The most striking example of influence among Diebenkorn's drawings is perhaps an untitled 1964 drawing in graphite and ink on paper showing a coffee cup, a plate, and silverware on a richly patterned tablecloth (below).

Diebenkorn: Untitled, 1964, Collection of Leslie A. Freely, New York

To illustrate the juxtaposition of two- and three-dimensional treatments, the curators pair Matisse's Reclining Model with a Flowered Robe (c. 1923-1924, not shown here) with Diebenkorn's Untitled (Woman Seated in a Chair) of 1963 (not shown here), pointing out that Matisse depicted his figure with volume against a flat (again heavily patterned) background, while Diebenkorn used a patterned drape to flatten his figure against background elements handled three dimensionally. I thought Diebenkorn's 1962 Girl with Flowered Background among the paintings an even better example (below).

Diebenkorn: Girl with Flowered Background, 1962
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

The figure is simplified, but it is clearly three-dimensional. The knees protrude, the waist recedes. One hand is behind an elbow, the other is in front of the girl's face. There is shadow below her skirt and under her chin, and her forearm throws a shadow across her chest. She casts a blue shadow on the wall behind her. The background is completely flat, and Diebenkorn muddies the relationship between the girl and the background—and here he shows how completely he's absorbed Matisse's example. The red-tipped floral curve at the girl's left shoulder (on the right side of the painting) connects with the line of trim on her collar,  undermining her three-dimensionality. The way the "horizon" line behind her is broken by the blue shadow has a similar effect, as do the connections between the shadow and the blue line of her collar (this time at her right shoulder, on the left side of the painting) and the connection between that blue line and the darker linear element on the wall behind her, just above her shoulder. The effect is to make the red and blue trim of her collar appear part of the decoration on the wall behind her.

Left: Matisse: Seated Nude, Head on Arms, 1936, private collection
Right: Diebenkorn: Untitled (Seated Nude), 1966, SF MoMA

Also of interest were drawings by Diebenkorn that show substantial reworking (pentimenti), with heavy lines overlaid at the end to mark the artist's final decision about what ought to go where—a technique Matisse used in a number of his drawings. Shown above are the French artist's Seated Nude, Head on Arms from 1936 and Diebenkorn's Untitled (Seated Nude) of 1966.

I also thought it notable that one of the Matisse drawings had been augmented (made larger) with an additional strip of paper added at its top edge. A thumbtack hole is visible in each of the four corners of the original sheet. The artist appears to have run out of space and added the paper at the top, adapting his working space to the demands of a composition in progress. I mention this drawing in particular (Model Resting on Her Arm, 1936) because I have seen film of Diebenkorn working in this way, pasting strips of paper onto a piece in progress as the composition seemed to require. Again the influence of Matisse? (I saw the film at The Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in 2015 in conjunction with a show of Diebenkorn's works on paper. The film shows Diebenkorn at work at Crown Point Press, in Oakland, collaborating with master printers Marcia Bartholme and Hidekatsu Takada, in 1986, photographed by Kathan Brown, the founding director of Crown Point Press. A review of that show is here.)

Matisse: French Window at Colliure, 1914
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

The Matisse/Diebenkorn show is a pleasure to walk through because it is a lucid explication by example of the way Diebenkorn learned from Matisse, but it's worth a visit simply because it's a collection of very fine work by both artists and work that we don't often have a chance to see. While I am very familiar with the Ocean Park series, for example, I'd never before seen any of the very early pieces in person, and the SF MoMA show includes Ocean Park No. 6 (1968), Ocean Park No. 12 (1968), Ocean Park No. 27 (1970) and Ocean Park No. 29 (1970). The early numbers look distinctly awkward. You can see Diebenkorn here struggling to find something he hasn't quite figured out yet. By Ocean Park No. 54 (SF MoMA) Diebenkorn has found his stride again. In the mature Ocean Park paintings, Diebenkorn reflects Matisse mostly in his palette and in the use of large, subtly varied planes of pale color broken up by linear elements, mostly lines parallel to the edges of the picture plane or at 45 degrees to those lines (although often ever-so-sligtly askew). Diebenkorn has now completely absorbed Matisse and removed the referential entirely, but, if seen beside Matisse's most experimental work, even these paintings are not so far removed from Matisse as they may at first seem—paintings like French Window at Collioure, from 1914, shown above, or his Seated Pink Nude (below).

There's a lot to see. Matisse/Diebenkorn is a show that will bear more than one visit—perhaps even three.

Matisse: Seated Pink Nude, 1935-36
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

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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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