Surprises in San Francisco

I thought I knew the SF museums well, but it’s fun to keep finding new ways of seeing familiar places.
SFMOMA – Oy! I forgot how much the new building mimics NYMoMA (or the last iteration, not the coming one). Long lines for both tickets and members area (I chose to show my ICOM card at the tickets line, which moved faster than the members line). Then the awkwardly placed ropes and stanchions for crowd control and entry; it’s as if they didn’t know they would have ticketed entry when they designed that area, which is awkward to access in any case.  But the real discovery(?) for me was the Magritte exhibition. He’s really boring (or at least they make him seem so), and a painter of limited abilities. The familiar stuff is fine (but a yawn in this installation, and in the hi-falutin art-speak on the wall panels). When he experiments(?), he’s just not a very good painter (which is why we haven’t seen those paintings in most previous exhibitions). As for the collections, it reminded me of the menus that say “market price” on some items. It’s filled with too much of the same “great names of modern/contemporary art” and too little else. (It’s difficult not to remember that many of these paintings would fetch more than Rembrandt, et al, at auction.) One can only hope that determined visitors (there didn’t appear to bee too many) will manage to find the “old” SFMoMA collections, hidden near the entry level, where the spectacular Haas Matisse is still spectacular, as are a lot of other wonderful works that remind you SFMoMA was once an early force in shaping American museum directions in contemporary art (e.g., Grace McCann Morley, etc. — she was also a pioneering woman museum director: 1935!!).  And it’s here that you will encounter some (if not enough) of the California artists you might have thought would make it upstairs in the new building.

The Contemporary Jewish Museum – It was never high on my list of admirable places, especially since the raison d’être was sort of like “if we are cultured and community-minded, then that’s the same as being Jewish [since we really wish we weren’t Jewish in the first place]”.  And it includes another one of Libeskind’s unusable (common euphemism for them: “challenging”) spaces.  So I was pleasantly surprised at the current exhibition “Contraption: Rediscovering California Jewish Artists” (16 of them) — a concept that would ordinarily be a complete turnoff to me.  But starting with Rube Goldberg (one of the few here actually born in California), this is an eclectic and interesting exhibition, with a range of artists and ideas that are much more engaging than the limited tastes shown at SFMoMA, and sort of unified by the concept that their “work refers to the machine either literally or metaphorically.”  It even includes an amazing huge interactive piece by Bernie Lubell, who was once (long ago) married to my wife’s cousin.

Legion of Honor – A bunch of not very interesting Julian Schnabel “paintings” interspersed with Rodin don’t make a convincing case for his current work. (Maybe he should stick with film?). And I forgot how uneven (that’s the kindest word) the European collection is, although there are some zappo paintings (just not enough of them). But there’s a wonderful small Cubist illustrated artist book exhibition downstairs. And a Pre-Raphaelite show, which I skipped, because my ICOM card was only good for general admission and I wasn’t about for fork over $28 for a special exhibition.

DeYoung – I’m not a big fan of the Herzog/deMeuron building (and in any case you only get to sort of see it all if you’re at the Academy of Science across the plaza). But I thought the range of what’s on view very impressive. The American art is really exciting (thanks to the Rockefellers, but not only to them), with whole groups of substantial first rate works (landscapes, portraits, trompe l’oeil

genre, etc.) and good wall panels to tell you something about each room (the Legion does that as well, but has less to work with). The display of “craft” artists (loathesome way of categorizing, my term, not theirs) is also great, mostly segregated from the rest of the art, but occasionally not. Why don’t we see Voulkos,

DeStaebler,

Viola Frey or a slew of these other artists at SFMoA (which has them in the collection)?  The strength and range of the Saxe gifts is super, especially since it does so much to expand our understanding of an important aspect of California art. There’s also a powerful Judy Dater exhibition,

as well as an exciting installation of their modern/contemporary collection that juxtaposes interesting works with one another.

 The deYoung shows real respect for California artists (which is more than you can say for SFMoMA). It may not be a truly encyclopedic museum, but it is energetic and exciting in its range. (Again I didn’t see the special exhibition, “Cult of the Machine”, because I wasn’t about to pay $28.)
Moral(?) of the story: You need to keep going back to familiar places because you see them differently every time you visit.