San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Opens

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) has for years been the major destination in America for those looking for the best collection of modern art. But that has changed with the recent opening of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

The building was designed by the Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta, and seamlessly integrates a 10-story expansion with the original Mario Botta-designed building.  The rippled surface of the building made of more than 700 uniquely shaped panels of fiberglass reinforced polymer embedded with silicate crystals is said to have been inspired in part by the waters and fog of the San Francisco Bay and looks like a cross between a spaceship and natural forms.

With 170,000sq ft of space, nearly three times more than previously it is now the biggest contemporary art museum in North America. It has opened with 19 special exhibitions, including a curated selection of 260 post-war and contemporary works from the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, the first exhibition of more than 600 works promised through the museum’s Campaign for Art, major works from SFMOMA’s permanent collection and works specially commissioned for the new museum.

SFMOMA can now boast a collection of more than 33,000 works of architecture and design, media arts, painting, photography and sculpture, as well as a significant 100-year partnership to show the collection  of Doris and Donald Fisher, the founders of GAP which is one of the world’s greatest private collections of post-war and contemporary art.

As well as lending the collection to the gallery, the Fisher family also made a major contribution to the building project. In return, their names are on some of the gallery spaces. One of the conditions of the collection loan is that there will be a major show of at least 10%  of the collection every 10 years.

Among the 260 works on view from the Fisher Collection at the opening are important works of American abstraction, pop, minimal and figurative art by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Lee Krasner, William de Kooning and Jasper Johns.

There are a couple of rooms devoted to the work of Andy Warhol although one of the works, “Triple Elvis,” has had to be removed from the exhibition as a gallery visitor tripped and put an elbow through it.

Agnes Martin’s work, inspired by musical patterns, is in a contemplative circular space while more than a dozen Ellsworth Kelly works, representing his range of experimental paintings and constructions, are spread over several rooms.  There are a number of works by Phillip Guston and Cy Twombly

Chuck Close is well represented with several of his large-scale photo-realist works as well as his abstract form-based portraits while Cindy Sherman has a selection of her self -portraits

There is a range of Alexander Calder works from the late 1920s to the late 1960s; as well as sculptures by leading British artists including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Dame Barbara Hepworth and Richard Long. 

Ai Wai Wai, the Chinese artist, has a set of Neolithic ceramic vases which have been splashed with coloured paint while Sherrie Levine has a bronze remake of Duchamp’s “Fountain” and one room is given over to a Mathew Barney installation and video.

Although the Fisher collection provides a backbone to the huge exhibition of work, there are other collections featuring major works by the same artists so that one keeps coming across works by many of the artists over several floors of the gallery, which is both confusing and surprising.

Postwar German art is well represented with several gestural and abstract works by Sigmar Polke. Gerhard Richter is represented by a range of his styles – abstract, landscape, gestural colour works and a number of works based on photographs. There are eight large works by Anselm Kiefer as well as a large sculptural work “Melancholia.” There is also a room of small works by Joseph Beuys

Iranian artist Shirin Nashat’s film Passage, with a soundtrack by Phillip Glass is part of the video and film works on show as well as Jananne Al Ani’s Shadow Sites.

There are a number of large sculptural works around the gallery entrance points as well as in several sculpture courts. Alexander Calder’s 27-foot-wide mobile, Untitled (1963), is suspended above the main entry foyer while another entry features Richard Serra’s monumental sculpture Sequence” (2006),

Richard Serraalso has a couple of rooms given over to his smaller balanced steel plate works, including one of his Gutter Corner Splash installations.

The third-floor Sculpture Terrace is home to the largest public living wall in the US where there are more than 19,000 plants as well as sculptures by George Segal, Barnett Newman, Alexander Calder and Ellsworth Kelly and there are even more sculptures adjacent to the restaurant on the roof garden.

A new Pritzker Center for Photography offers the largest exhibition, interpretation and study space dedicated to photography in any art museum in the US. The inaugural exhibition includes works artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Phil Chang. 

Bernd and Hilla Becher are represented with what must be the largest collection of their photographic images of industrial plants and cooling towers.

SFMOMA has received more than 3000 promised and outright gifts of artworks from 230 donors through the Campaign for Art. The inaugural exhibitions highlight the range and quality of 600 of these newly committed and acquired modern and contemporary works, including special installations focused on photography, contemporary art and drawing.

The art museum has a digital program offering accessible, interactive experiences that link art, entertainment and learning. The museum’s new app includes immersive phone-in-pocket audio journeys through the galleries, with brief reflections and fresh perspectives on artworks by composers, comedians, artists, playwrights and others; and a series of audio walks through San Francisco’s urban fabric, beginning inside the building and moving out into the local neighbourhood.  

The museum is incorporating digital tools into participatory learning environments, such as the Photography Interpretive Gallery, and two interactive spaces in the painting and sculpture galleries, which feature touch screens and digital tables that allow visitors to explore artworks and the careers of artists.

Tune into NBR Radio’s Sunday Business with Andrew Patterson on Sunday morning, for analysis and feature-length interviews.