The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) never looked better than on the occasion of the celebration of its 75th year of exhibitions on January 18, 2010. All of its floors were accessible, and visitors flowed easily from one space to another. No one seemed in a rush to take it all in, instead, we assumed we had to come to appreciate the vast shows in different media. From painting and sculpture to photographs and film this was the result of an all-out curatorial effort to make sense of the museum’s past and present. The museum galleries felt dense with content and meaning.
The sprawling, appropriately entitled Anniversary Show, and organized by curators Janet Bishop, Corey Keller, and Sarah Roberts, mostly from the permanent collection, is the most ambitious act of this celebration. Why is it ambitious? Because it aims at representing the best modern and contemporary artists have done since the beginning of the last century, with an introspective angle. It illustrates the history of the museum itself, of its changing interests, and of the tacks different curators and collectors have taken during its course. This is an enterprise of grand proportions, not one reduced by a regional and provincial flavor. It puts SFMOMA on the world map of art museums but also defines its particular character.
The show highlights communities of artists and their public who congregate around loosely defined ideas. There is an emphasis on the West, as there should be, and this point is made by the artists who gravitated around the San Francisco Art Institute from the 1930s through the 1960s, a list including Mark Rothko, David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham, among many others. Their work was informed by the geography and the light quality of the region, and was conceived and refined within this artistic culture.
David Park, SFMOMA 75th Anniversary
In a particularly poignant section of the show dedicated to Grace McCann Morley, the museum’s founder and first director, we can almost live through her struggle to introduce the modern art she had admired in Paris to her San Francisco audience. The public’s reaction to her acquisition of one of Paul Klee’s prints, for example, was not kind. But she had a receptive audience in the young community of artists who were searching for new forms of expression. She was far from fixed in one manner of art and established the collection of works of photography at the museum. “The first thing you must do,” Ansel Adams told her in no uncertain terms, “is to stand for photography with equal force and impact as you stood for Picasso.” She purchased a group of photographs by Alfred Stieglitz from Georgia O’Keefe. She was even interested in industrial design.
Of course there are Picassos, Calders, Rauschenbergs, Warhols, or Lichtensteins in the show, but, without casting judgment on the particular pieces, those are the required credentials for any museum of modern art. There are also works that represent the visual and conceptual recklessness of the late 1980s and 1990s, such as the glittering, clownish Michael Jackson and Bubbles by Jeff Koons, from a time when SFMOMA indeed looked for guidance at the New York scene.
But if I had to choose, I would prefer to linger in front of David Park’s Two Bathers and Richard Diebenkorn’s Woman in Profile, both from 1958. Sure there are figures in these paintings, but the figurative elements are just a starting point, no more so than a light-filled landscape could be in a Mark Rothko painting. What I actually admire is the artists’ struggle to peel away the superficial layers of perception to expose the underlying structure of the world.
So what does the Anniversary Show say about the museum? Some continuity emerges from the initial impulses, such as the focus on modern art in all of its manifestations, or the presence of Western artists not as representatives of a provincial view of the world, but as masters of an art that could have grown only in this part of the world. But there are some tectonic shudders as well with the inclusion of some media, such as architecture and design objects, that fit as comfortably as square pegs in the round holes of the museum’s long-term narrative.
Left: Richard Diebenkorn. Woman in Profile. 1958. Oil on canvas.
Right: David Park. Bathers. 1954. Oil on canvas.
Three of Eva Hesse’s sculptures or Jim Goldberg’s photograph, Watching Oprah, Greece, 2004, is included in the show. They belong in it with full rights, because the intensity and discipline they communicate confirms a direct line with their modern antecedents. But I view other inclusions with a mixture of great interest, impatience, and suspension of belief. Are some artists young enough to be still contemporary or even relevant? What have they done recently to justify their appearance? What were they thinking? Where do we find the cutting edge, these days?
Other long standing museum customs appear as well, such as the bond between artists and patrons. Without Alfred Bender, Grace McCann Morley would have had empty galleries. Not only did he provide funds for acquisitions, but he was instrumental in shaping the culture of artists and intellectuals who were the museums first audience. That tradition has evolved and solidified, and SFMOMA has a large board of trustees with deep pockets even during these grim economic times, many of them art collectors. Substantial portions of the museum’s permanent collection are the result of gifts from such collectors.
But things have changed. The commitment patrons had to their city, not just San Francisco but any city has weakened. Today’s patrons put their investments—and, no mistake here, art is a form of investment—where they are likely to provide the biggest return. Return on investment means not only dollar signs but especially increase in social standing and personal reputation, or brand awareness, as some would likely put it. That could happen just about anywhere in this era of fleeting attention spans and twittering depth.
In the end, the Anniversary Show makes the best case for the continuing well being of SFMOMA itself. It shows that an appreciation for the Arts by a loyal museum public that demands permanence, work, discipline, and discriminating choices. It is the one place where we can look at a painting not as a picture at 72 dpi on a computer screen but as a layered work, full of pigments, ridges, textures, with light changing from every angle. In other words, we look at it not only as a finished work, but as a process. From this process, we make our own connections, establish our own timelines, and see art not as it is described in books but as our own.