Music I'm Listening To: The San Francisco Symphony

I attended the Friday, March 20 performance of the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall. On the program were Overture to Euryanthe (Carl Maria Von Weber), Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9, an early work that I have surely heard before but didn't really recognize, and Dvorak's Symphony No. 7, perhaps my favorite of them (but it's hard not to like No. 8 and No. 9 as well). The soloist in the Mozart was Jan Lisiecki, a Canadian-born pianist that appears to be well known, but I hadn't been aware of him. The guest conductor was Andrés Orozco-Estrada. 

Orozco-Estrada was a lot of fun to watch. Some conductors barely move. Orozco-Estrada was virtually dancing on the podium, and with great energy, his baton seemingly a wizard's wand. It was a uniformly excellent concert, but I thought his reading of the Dvorak was particularly good. The audience seemed to agree with me. The concert ended with a prolonged standing ovation. 

According to the program notes, Orozco-Estrada will take over as director of the Swedish Radio Symphony next season. He has in the past been the music director of the Houston Symphony, and conducted the Hesse Radio Symphony and the Vienna Symphony. 

Miscellaneous: A quiet moment of near symmetry

At Davies Symphony Hall last night, during intermission, I made my usual climb up the stairs (96 of them; I counted this time) to the balcony that overlooks Van Ness Avenue and City Hall. Near the doors that lead outside is a sitting area where I captured this quiet moment of near symmetry. 

Miscellaneous: Gas Prices

Thanks to the reckless actions of our Great Leader, gasoline prices have jumped, sharply. Two weeks ago, I was paying about $4.19/gallon for regular. Locally (Santa Rosa) gas is now approaching $6/gallon. In San Francisco last night, I saw it well over $6/gallon, with diesel near $7.50/gallon. 

Music I'm Listening to: Santa Rosa and San Francisco

Some odd and ends. I've been lazy about posting comments on recent concerts I've attended – which I do mostly so that I can look back and remember what performers I heard and where. So, just for the record, The Santa Rosa Symphony just finished three performances of Mahler's Symphony No. 3, which is one of my favorites. I applaud the music director for attempting such a long and challenging piece. I attended the February 23 performance. The orchestra is huge for the Mahler. There were nine French horns!

In January, at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, I heard Emanuel Ax with the San Francisco Symphony, Jaap van Sweden conducting.  Ax played Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25 and afterward played an encore, something familiar by Schubert, but I can't remember now what it was. Jaap van Zweden is a fierce-looking man on the podium. Ax gives the impression of being a gentle, kind man, but these are just impressions from the gallery. I attended the January 30 performance. Also on the program was Bruckner's Symphony No. 7. 

On February 27, at Davies Symphony Hall again, the Symphony, conducted by Manfred Honeck, performed Beethoven's Coriolan Overture – one of those Beethoven overtures I used to use in college as a musical pep talk. I'd play one, loud, before heading out for final exams. Somehow, the music ringing in my head convinced me I'd do well. Haydn's Symphony No. 93 followed. After intermission, Honeck led an unusual performance of Mozarts Requiem with additions and subtractions from the versions we usually hear – those filled out after Mozart died leaving the piece unfinished. Honeck played only the portions actually written by Mozart but interspersed with Gregorian chant and readings by an onstage performer of portions of a letter by Mozart to his father, by Bible excerpts, and some modern poetry. The performances were dedicated to the late Joshua Robinson, MTT's partner, who died a few days before concert I heard. 

Food I'm Eating/Places I'm Visiting: Yank Sing in San Francisco

Santa Rosa has a good restaurant for dim sum – San Francisco stalwart Hang Ah has a branch right here in town (2130 Armory Drive). It looks funny because the building was once an A&W Root Beer restaurant, but the food is good. Sometimes, though, I get a hankering for dim sum in the city (for those of you not in the SF Bay Area, here “the city” means San Francisco), which always feels more authentic. Having some business to attend to in nearby Berkeley yesterday (picking up a new futon we had made), we decided to make a day of it. 

My favorite dim sum place in San Francisco is a humble place called S&T Hong Kong Seafood, at 2578 Noriega St. We’ve been going there for years. Another favorite was Tom Kiang, on Geary St. near 20th Avenue (no longer in operation) along with the place right next door – until the chef changed at the latter and things went abruptly downhill.

However, thinking it would be fun to try something different, I went on line and searched “best San Francisco dim sum,” which brought up sites with recommended restaurants. The consensus was that Yank Sing in the Rincon Center was the best place in the city for good dumplings. When I saw on Yank Sing’s website that they offer $4 dollar parking with validation, I was sold. 

There was a bonus. The Rincon Center includes the historic Rincon Annex Post Office, an Art Deco building built in 1940, now part of a complex with apartments, offices, and shops. It preserves New Deal murals by artist Anton Refregier. The post office closed in the 1980s, but the lobby with the murals is intact, integrated into the Rincon Center development. The old post office lobby is worth a look if you have any interest in New Deal art, Art Deco architecture, or the history of the US Post Office. 

But, back to dim sum. Yank Sing was a disappointment. It was fun to pick dishes off the circulating carts (a feature many dim sum restaurants have abandoned) and I liked the elegant glass teapots. The curry and vegetable dumplings were an unusual variation and the barbecue pork rice noodles were good, but, on the whole, I was expecting more from a restaurant with a Michelin rating that people claim is the best in San Francisco. In addition, most of the offerings were not as hot as I would have liked (the xiao long bao buns were barely warm). 

The meal for two came to $138 plus tip, which I would have happily paid for a memorable experience, but, as I say, the food was mostly unexceptional. It felt quite overpriced. At S&T Seafood on Noriega, the same meal would have been about $65 and the food would have been as good or better. Additionally, S&T is always filled with Chinese families and friends speaking Cantonese, which adds to the charm (at Yank Sing, the only Asians present were working at the restaurant). At Yank Sing, you pay for the location. I won’t be going back, except perhaps to look at the post office lobby again if I happen to be in the neighborhood. 

After lunch, we strolled over to see what was new at the Ferry Building, stopped in briefly at the San Franciso Railway Museum (77 Steuart St), which presents the history of the municipal trolleys the city runs using cars purchased from defunct trolley systems all over the world, and then ran over to the Legion of Honor to see the Manet & Morisot show before heading home by way of the futon shop in Berkeley. All in all, a fun day despite disappointing dim sum.

Places I'm Visiting: Alameda on the 90th Anniversary of Transpacific Airmail

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m something of a nerd. My interests are many – art, art history, and particularly the history of pigments; cooking and fine wine, including making wine; birds and bird photography; classical music and classical record collecting; and, philately among them. This last, stamp collecting, I write about the least. That’s in large part because the USPS effectively destroyed stamp collecting for me when it switched from the little works of art that well-made stamps once were to the cheap adhesive stickers that today pass for stamps. The switch to “forever stamps” has not been helpful either as all US stamps are now the same denomination. I no longer actively collect stamps, but postal history still interests me (more about that below).

Aesthetics aside, the shift to cheap-looking stickers makes collecting mint stamps difficult because the stickers always have to be attached to their paper backings and they often don’t separate cleanly into individual stamps. Some long-time collectors have resorted to collecting full sheets of 20, but that multiplies the cost of collecting by 20 times, which discourages collecting by children in particular. That’s a shame because an active interest in philately among children can foster life-long curiosity about myriad subjects. Stamp collecting as a child greatly expanded my general knowledge of the world, knowledge that has often been useful in adulthood. Philately – stamp collecting – was once the most popular hobby in the world. Dedicated philatelic windows at post offices were once a commonplace in the US. Now they are virtually non-existent. Collecting used stamps, meanwhile, has become very difficult, as self-adhesive stamps (stickers) can’t be soaked off envelopes. 

The move to stickers was presumably intended to cut costs. I imagine it’s worked, as the US is not alone in having made the switch, but, as I say, to the detriment of aesthetics. Many other countries have adopted self-adhesives – for example, Canada, the UK, and Australia, according to Wikipedia. It‘s mostly in Europe that countries still issue traditionally perforated stamps with water-activated gum that often are beautifully printed miniature engravings. Ironically, stamp collectors are in some sense a postal service’s best customers: stamp collectors pay in advance for a service that they never demand.

I’ve been thinking about stamp collecting today because yesterday was the 90^th anniversary of the transpacific airmail service, flown by Pan Am flying boats (Pan Am “Clippers”) from San Francisco to Manila in the Philippines by way of Hawaii, Midway, Wake, and Guam, an event remembered at this remove by few but us nerds.

My mother collected stamps in her youth. Her mother collected stamps before her. Both were at one time members of the Dayton Stamp Club, in Dayton, Ohio. Their presence in such a club was unusual then. To this day, most philatelists are male. My mother appears to have often attracted benevolent attention from the older men in the club who would give her stamps and covers to foster her collecting (in the world of philately, a “cover” is a stamped envelope, either one that actually moved through the mails or one made as a commemorative of some kind). She was once given the cover that later inspired my particular postal history interest – a cover flown on the inaugural transpacific airmail service mentioned above. It was flown on the entire route from Manila to San Francisco, receiving colorful cachets and backstamps along the way (pictured). 

The first flight across the Pacific that carried official airmail (there were earlier survey flights) left the lagoon at the Alameda Naval Air Station on 22 November 1935. As Alameda is only a little over an hour from my home today in Santa Rosa, I designed commemorative covers for the 90^th anniversary and took them to Alameda to get them cancelled on the anniversary date (pictured). I was the only person doing such a thing and the postal employees I interacted with were unaware of the significance of the day despite working less than a mile from the Alameda departure point of the Clippers. 90^th anniversaries are perhaps little recognized compared with others. The US and several other countries issued stamps to commemorate the 50^th anniversary in 1985. There were events in Alameda in 2010 on the 75^th anniversary and I expect the USPS will issue a commemorative sticker in 2035 on the 100^th anniversary. We’ll see. 

In 1935, the start of transpacific airmail service was a big deal, reported on across the nation and around the world with the kind of hoopla that would later attend moon launches. The service reduced the time to send mail from the US West Coast to the Philippines from over two weeks (by ship) to about six days via Pan Am’s Clipper service, flown by Martin M-130 flying boats. Later the route was extended to Hong Kong and Macau. Passenger service, which started in 1936, cost about $42,000 one way in inflation-adjusted dollars. Needless to say, only the very rich took advantage. The mail, too, was expensive. One-way mail across the Pacific cost $0.75 – about $18.00 in today’s dollars.

After getting my commemorative covers cancelled at the Shoreline Dr. post office on Alameda, the closest extant post office to the old Naval Air Station (now a museum; it was temporarily closed, a casualty of the recent government shutdown), I determined to find California Historical Marker No. 968 (which commemorates the Clipper service). It’s at 950 West Mall Square, Alameda, I know now, but I was unable to locate it as I had inaccurate information. In front of the Naval Air Station building (where I expected to find it) I discovered instead a plaque commemorating an anniversary of the 1942 Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo, which was flown by bombers launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. The Hornet is now a static museum, berthed across the Clipper Lagoon, the lagoon from which the Pan Am Clippers were launched until the Clipper base was moved to Treasure Island in 1939 during the run of the Golden Gate International Exposition. Among other things, the Exposition celebrated the city's two newly built bridges: the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. There were other plaques in front of the building, but the Clipper plaque was not there. Next time I’m in the area, I will look for it again.

Frustrated in my search for the Clipper plaque, I decided I might as well tour the nearby Hornet. Being a “senior” saved me $10 on the $25 admission fee. The Hornet is an impressive vessel even though compared with an aircraft carrier of today, such as the USS Gerald R. Ford, it is significantly smaller in every dimension. The Gerald R. Ford is about 338 meters long. The Hornet is about 267 meters long and it displaces only a little over 28,000 tons, while the newer carrier displaces over 100,000 tons.

You enter the Hornet today on its spacious hangar deck, on which several aircraft are displayed, some from the WWII era (a Wildcat and a dive bomber) and others from later eras (the Hornet was decommissioned in 1970). Also on display are NASA-related artifacts, including a space capsule; Hornet recovered Neil Armstrong, “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins after their return to Earth from the first moon landing in 1969. Many areas one or two levels down are open to wander through. These include one of the ready rooms where pilots were briefed before missions and de-briefed afterwards; the sick bay, including operating rooms; crew quarters; the section occupied by the Marine contingent assigned to the ship; and a generator room, among others.

You exit the ship by ascending to the flight deck, where three or four other aircraft are on display, two in position on the ship’s launching catapults, which I was surprised to see are quite close to front of the vessel – a testament to the immense thrust generated by the hydraulic catapults. Murch more of the deck was used for landings. The positions of the arresting cables are indicated and still visible are the pylons from which emergency arresting nets were deployed to stop aircraft that for whatever reason couldn’t rely on the arresting cables (typically because of a missing tail hook or when fuel was so low that a pilot had no chance of making more than one landing attempt). 

The flight deck offers excellent views across the Clipper Lagoon toward the Naval Air Station building. At the edge of the Lagoon, three concrete ramps that were used to launch the Clippers into the water or to bring them up on land for maintenance and repair are still there. To the left, looking over the back end of the Hornet’s flight deck, the Bay Bridge is visible. Further in the distance and shrouded in fog were the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Clippers were towed out of the Clipper Lagoon into the open water here to make their take-off runs out toward the bridges. Over the bow of the Hornet, at its opposite end, Oakland Airport’s control tower was visible. At regular intervals, I saw modern aircraft departing over the same waters that launched the Clippers almost a century ago. 

In between visiting the post office and the Hornet, I spent about an hour walking along the water at Shoreline Drive. There were a couple thousand shore birds resting on the flats. I noted Dunlin, Black-bellied Plovers, Western Sandpipers, Least Sandpipers, Whimbrels, Avocets, Marbled Godwits, Willets, Greater Yellowlegs, Snowy Egrets, Black-necked Stilts, a number of gull species, and even a Bald Eagle flying high over the water. The birds were strongly backlit, making it difficult to see details sometimes and making photography rather challenging, but I include here a few of my better bird shots from the day. 

 

Serendipitous art: Chinatown security fence

I saw this security fence in front of a closed shop in San Francisco's Chinatown. Looked like art to me. Unintended art. Serendipitous art. 

For more serendipitous art, see my Serendipitous Art blog at serendipitous art.com. 

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.

Music I'm Listening To: The San Francisco and Santa Rosa Symphonies

I attended the Santa Rosa Symphony concert last night (November 8 2025) at the Green Music Center. On the program was Clarice Assad's Baião ‘N’ Blues, Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra, and Manuel de Falla's El Sombrero de Tres Picos [The Three-Cornered Hat]. The soloist in the Concerto was Raphaël Feuillâtre (Guitar). The vocalist in the Three-cornered Hat was mezzo-soprano Leah Finn.

It was a very impressive performance by the symphony, I thought – among the best I've seen. Feuillâtre was impressive in the concerto as well and he wowed the crowd with an exciting encore. Tickets are probably still available for the Monday night performance. 

In San Francisco, the night before, I heard the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall. French pianist Alexandre Kantorow made his debut with the Symphony (in concerts on November 7, 8, and 9) playing Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto. Karina Canellakis conducted.

Places I'm Visiting: 140 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco

Yesterday, I drove into San Francisco to attend an open house at Crown Point Press, on Hawthorne St. I had to leave the event fairly early to take part in a zoom call about Art Trails, Sonoma County’s premier open studios event scheduled for the second two weekends in October. I had brought my laptop along in the car to join the meeting. I parked on the street near The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MOMA) after leaving the Minna St. Garage to listen to the call and left the key in the ignition. It must have been turned to the standby position as, 40 minutes later, my battery was dead.

I called AAA and, while I waited for a battery jump to arrive, I strolled around the neighborhood and found myself in front of the building at 140 New Montgomery Street, a building I’ve often admired looking up from the patio outside the café at SF MOMA. It has some great exterior decoration in the Art Deco style, especially near the top of the tower, but I had never been in the building, so I stopped in for a look at the lobby. 

According to Wikipedia and other sources, it was built as the headquarters of the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company, completed in 1925, so it has now stood for a century. It is 26 storeys high. Apparently, it was referred to as simply the Telephone Building although its official name was the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company Building (not surprisingly), and, later (after 1984), as The Pacific Bell Building or The PacBell Building. 

At completion, it was the tallest building in San Francisco, and, along with the Russ Building, which was the same height (built two years later), it retained that honor until 1964. AT&T sold the building in 2007 after which it remained empty for about six years before a renovation that updated the interior and adapted it to mixed office use. It was designed by architects Timothy L. Pflueger, James Rupert Miller, and Alexander Cantin of architecture firms Miller and Pflueger and Perkins & Will. Construction began in 1924. The doors opened in May 1925. Wikipedia says the building's design was influenced by Eliel Saarinen’s Tribune Tower, in Chicago, particularly the stepped setbacks on the upper floors (Eliel Saarinen was the father of Eero Saarinen, who designed the beautiful TWA Flight Center at JFK International Airport, probably the first important building I ever experienced, as a child living in Brooklyn).

Reflecting its connection with the Bell Telephone company, terra cotta decorations on the façade and decorations in the lobby feature bell motifs. There is a large bell over the arched front entryway, for example, and there are bells in the metalwork around the elevators inside. It was the large statues of eagles at the top of the building that first caught my eye when viewing it from SF MOMA (always putting me in mind of the main train station in Milan; I neglected to photograph the eagles yesterday). According to Wikipedia again, the eagles are each 4m high and originally made of granite, but those visible today are fiberglass replicas of the originals, which were damaged beyond repair in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. 

In the lobby, most striking are the superbly polished stone floors, the dark marble walls, intricate metalwork detailing, the chandeliers, and the fancy ceiling decorated with botanical motifs, clouds, dragons, and phoenixes. The ceiling looks like a Chinese textile. Wikipedia also notes that Winston Churchill visited the building in 1929 and that from it he made his first transatlantic phone call, to his home in London (presumably routed through somewhere like New York on the East Coast). As I’ve always wondered about 140 New Montgomery St., I didn’t let my battery issue perturb me too much. I enjoyed the opportunity to see the historic lobby and to learn a little about this interesting structure. 

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.