MY MAGICAL ATTIC: APPROACHING TO AMERICAN ABSTRACTION: THE FISHER COLLECTION AT SFMOMA

APPROACHING TO AMERICAN ABSTRACTION:

THE FISHER COLLECTION AT SFMOMA

May 14, 2016 - Ongoing

APPROACHING TO AMERICAN ABSTRACTION:

THE FISHER COLLECTION AT SFMOMA

May 14, 2016 - Ongoing

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection is among the world’s greatest private collections of contemporary art. Founders of San Francisco–based Gap Inc., the couple began collecting prints to enliven the company’s offices in the mid-1970s, and they soon expanded their efforts to include paintings, sculpture, and drawings. They agreed early on that they would never buy a work unless they both liked it, a decision that has ensured that the collection reflects their shared sensibilities. Never interested in working with an advisor or a curator, they developed their knowledge independently by visiting galleries, museums, and artists’ studios around the world, building lifelong friendships with many artists along the way. As the late Don Fisher once put it: “The collection is the result of our looking a lot and then looking some more.”

The Fishers delved into the work of artists they admired over the course of many years, and as a result the collection is distinguished by significant concentrations of works by Alexander Calder, Ellsworth Kelly, William Kentridge, Anselm Kiefer, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol, among others. Spanning more than three floors of the museum, the initial installation of the Fisher Collection at SFMOMA honors that strength with numerous monographic galleries and highlights the collection’s notable focus on American abstraction; American Pop, Figurative, and Minimal art after 1960; and German art after 1960.

Although the Fishers lived with many favorite artworks in their home, their belief in the power of art to enrich lives and spur creativity led them to share much of their collection with Gap employees by displaying it throughout the offices and in dedicated gallery spaces at the company’s headquarters. A similar spirit has guided the Fishers’ decades-long relationship with SFMOMA. Since the 1980s they have served on the museum’s Board of Trustees, made exceptional gifts of art, and supported numerous major exhibitions, acquisitions, and education programs. The family’s connection to SFMOMA now extends into the future through an unprecedented partnership to present the Fisher Collection at the museum. With the inaugural exhibitions in 2016–17, a collection built on one couple’s shared passion for art becomes a vital part of the cultural fabric of San Francisco.

Installation of the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at SFMOMA is supported in part by the Henry Luce Foundation and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

https://www.sfmoma.org/artists-artworks/fisher-collection/

CHUCK CLOSE, JAMES, 2002

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 276.23 cm x 213.36 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

CHUCK CLOSE, JAMES, 2002 ( DETAIL )

CHUCK CLOSE

B. 1940, MONROE, WASHINGTON

Chuck Close was born in Monroe, Washington, in 1940. In 1962 he received a BA from the University of Washington, Seattle, and in 1964 an MFA from Yale University. After graduate school, he lived in Europe and studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna with the assistance of a Fulbright grant.

As a student, Close painted biomorphic abstractions, later experimenting with figuration. In the late 1960s he began directly copying simple head-and-shoulders photographic portraits onto canvas, using a limited palette of black and white, as in Big Self-Portrait (1967–68). In 1970 he returned to color, continuing to use photographic portraits as a model but incorporating a new technique in which he constructed the image from a gridded arrangement of individual color squares, each of which is like an abstract painting; viewed from afar, they form a unified, highly realistic image. Close would continue to employ a realist approach based on photographic reproductions in the decades that followed. In a series of works begun in 1971, he limited his palette to cyan, magenta, and yellow in imitation of color printing techniques used for the mass reproduction of images, as in Linda(1975–76). The rigorous systems Close employed as he explored different modes of representation link him not only to Photorealists such as Richard Estes and Audrey Flack, but also to Conceptual art.

In December 1988 Close suffered a seizure that left him paralyzed from the neck down. After "The Event," as Close calls it, he underwent months of rehabilitation, eventually regaining some movement in his arms and legs. He continued to paint, using a brush strapped to his wrist with tape. Close also began to create wall-size portraits in tapestry, depicting both celebrity icons (such as Kate Moss) and friends (such as Cindy Sherman and Philip Glass), as well as himself.

Close's first solo show was at the Bykert Gallery, New York (1970), and his first museum exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1973). In 1979 his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the following year his portraits were the subject of an exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. A major midcareer retrospective of his work was mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998. In 2003 the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston presented a survey of his prints, which traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the following year. In 2010 Close was appointed by President Barack Obama to the President's Committee on Arts and Humanities, an advisory body to federal arts agencies. Close lives and works in the city of New York.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/Chuck-Close

CHUCK CLOSE, JAMES, 2002 ( DETAIL )

CHUCK CLOSE, LORNA, 1995

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 259.4 cm x 213.36 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

CHUCK CLOSE, AGNES 1998

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 259.4 cm x 213.36 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

CHUCK CLOSE, ROY I, 1994

Oil on Linen

Dimensions: 259.4 cm x 213.36 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

JOAN MITCHELL, HARM’S WAY - 1987

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 281.94 cm x 201.3 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

JOAN MITCHELL

Joan Mitchell’s primary medium was oil paint on canvas. Mitchell’s professional period began around 1950 and can be loosely defined as the point when she moved into full abstraction. Throughout her life she never ceased to deepen and refine her relationship to and facility with the medium. Her oeuvre can be broken down into a multitude of periods; shifts in her work typically coincide with a shift in her surrounding landscape, personal relationships, or some major life event.

“My paintings repeat a feeling about Lake Michigan, or water, or fields...it’s more like a poem...and that’s what I want to paint.” The myriad things that comprised and moved within Mitchell’s world - water, sky, trees, flowers, weather, dogs - created images and memories from which she worked. These things are often named in her titles, which were always attributed after a painting’s completion. She observed her landscape intensely, and her acute visual observations of form, space and color in life are part of the visual memories she drew upon while painting.

Mitchell worked primarily at night and rarely if ever painted from life. In order to prepare herself for painting, she might read poetry or listen to music. She worked in solitude, except for the company of her dogs. Her paintings were built slowly and carefully; she would stand back and look at a blank canvas or painting in progress for long periods of time, decide where each mark should go, then approach the work to place paint quickly and confidently. The arc of her arm can be seen in the brushstrokes in many of her paintings, especially at the top where she was extending her reach. Indeed, her approach to painting was both physically and mentally rigorous. An accomplished athlete throughout her childhood, Mitchell had a great deal of experience with discipline, practice, balance, and a relaxed and fluid faculty of control. These principles of physical action, combined with careful, precise visual observation of her environment, underscore her life-long approach to painting.

Although her larger paintings are better-known, she made small ones as well. In the 1970s, with more space to paint at her home in Vétheuil, she began to make paintings comprised of multiple panels, often very large. Working in this manner made it possible to create monumentally sized works while still easily managing the movement of canvases around the studio on her own, and to create a composition in a horizontal format without sacrificing the final size of the works. In these works, the panels within a single work often repeat and mirror the structure of the other. Within each repetition are variations from which balance emerges.

Mitchell’s process is informed by a range of emotional states, points in time, and positions in landscape, and her work is an affirmation that people experience landscapes, emotions and memories in a complex, interconnected way. This is evident in the tension and balance between figure and ground, between paint and surface, and between one or more colors. She said, “What excites me when I’m painting is what one color does to another and what they do to each other in terms of space and interaction.” Often a single bit of a color found nowhere else in a painting seems to anchor and create equilibrium in the whole composition. Her work synthesizes a multitude of contrasting concepts and forms: light and dark, warm and cool, space and density, growth and decay, gravity and lightness. When asked why she painted, Mitchell replied to biographer Marion Cajori, “…because I don’t exist anymore—it’s wonderful. I’ve always said it’s like riding a bike with no hands.”

http://joanmitchellfoundation.org/work/artwork/cat/paintings

JOAN MITCHELL, BRACKET - 1989

Oil on Canvas, Three Joined Panels

Dimensions: Overall: 270.51 cm x 471.81 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Estate of Joan Mitchell

ANDY WARHOL, NINE MARILYNS ( REVERSAL SERIES ), 1979 - 1986

Acrylic Paint and Silkscreen Ink on Linen

Dimensions: 138.11 cm x 106.05 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ANDY WARHOL, MAO, 1972

Silkscreen Ink on Linen

Dimensions: 208.92 cm x 154.94 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ANDY WARHOL, NINE MARILYNS ( REVERSAL SERIES ), 1979 - 1986 ( DETAIL )

ANDY WARHOL, TUNAFISH DISASTER - 1963

Silver Paint and Silkscreen Ink on Linen

Dimensions: 135.89 cm x 176.53 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ANDY WARHOL, SELF-PORTRAIT ( CAMOUFLAGE ), 1986

Acrylic Paint and Silkscreen Ink on Linen

Dimensions: 203.2 cm x 203.2 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ANDY WARHOL

POP ARTIST & CULTURAL ICON

More than twenty years after his death, Andy Warhol remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture. Warhol’s life and work inspires creative thinkers worldwide thanks to his enduring imagery, his artfully cultivated celebrity, and the ongoing research of dedicated scholars. His impact as an artist is far deeper and greater than his one prescient observation that “everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” His omnivorous curiosity resulted in an enormous body of work that spanned every available medium and most importantly contributed to the collapse of boundaries between high and low culture.

A skilled (analog) social networker, Warhol parlayed his fame, one connection at a time, to the status of a globally recognized brand. Decades before widespread reliance on portable media devices, he documented his daily activities and interactions on his traveling audio tape recorder and beloved Minox 35EL camera. Predating the hyper-personal outlets now provided online, Warhol captured life’s every minute detail in all its messy, ordinary glamour and broadcast it through his work, to a wide and receptive audience.

The youngest child of three, Andy was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928 in the working-class neighborhood of Oakland, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Stricken at an early age with a rare neurological disorder, the young Andy Warhol found solace and escape in the form of popular celebrity magazines and DC comic books, imagery he would return to years later. Predating the multiple silver wigs and deadpan demeanor of later years, Andy experimented with inventing personae during his college years. He signed greeting cards “André”, and ultimately dropped the “a” from his last name, shortly after moving to New York and following his graduation with a degree in Pictorial Design from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1949.

Work came quickly to Warhol in New York, a city he made his home and studio for the rest of his life. Within a year of arriving, Warhol garnered top assignments as a commercial artist for a variety of clients including Columbia Records, Glamour magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, NBC, Tiffany & Co., Vogue, and others. He also designed fetching window displays for Bonwit Teller and I. Miller department stores. After establishing himself as an acclaimed graphic artist, Warhol turned to painting and drawing in the 1950s, and in 1952 he had his first solo exhibition at the Hugo Gallery, with Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote. As he matured, his paintings incorporated photo-based techniques he developed as a commercial illustrator. The Museum of Modern Art (among others) took notice, and in 1956 the institution included his work in his first group show.

The turbulent 1960s ignited an impressive and wildly prolific time in Warhol’s life. It is this period, extending into the early 1970s, which saw the production of many of Warhol’s most iconic works. Building on the emerging movement of Pop Art, wherein artists used everyday consumer objects as subjects, Warhol started painting readily found, mass-produced objects, drawing on his extensive advertising background. When asked about the impulse to paint Campbell’s soup cans, Warhol replied, “I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it”. The humble soup cans would soon take their place among the Marilyn Monroes, Dollar Signs, Disasters, and Coca Cola Bottles as essential, exemplary works of contemporary art.
Operating out of a silver-painted and foil-draped studio nicknamed The Factory, located at 231 East 47th Street, (his second studio space to hold that title), Warhol embraced work in film and video. He made his first films with a newly purchased Bolex camera in 1963 and began experimenting with video as early as 1965. Now considered avant-garde cinema classics, Warhol’s early films include Sleep (1963), Blow Job (1964), Empire (1963), and Kiss (1963-64). With sold out screenings in New York, Los Angeles, and Cannes, the split-screen, pseudo documentary Chelsea Girls (1966) brought new attention to Warhol from the film world. Art critic David Bourdon wrote, “ word around town was underground cinema had finally found its Sound of Music in Chelsea Girls. ” Warhol would make nearly 600 films and nearly 2500 videos. Among these are the 500, 4-minute films that comprise Warhol’s Screen Tests, which feature unflinching portraits of friends, associates and visitors to the Factory, all deemed by Warhol to be in possession of “star quality”.

Despite a brief self-declared retirement from painting following an exhibition of Flowers in Paris, Warhol continued to make sculptures (including the well known screen printed boxes with the logos of Brillo and Heinz Ketchup) prints, and films. During this time he also expanded his interests into the realm of performance and music, producing the traveling multi-media spectacle, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, with the Velvet Underground and Nico,

In 1968 Warhol suffered a nearly fatal gun-shot wound from aspiring playwright and radical feminist author, Valerie Solanas. The shooting, which occurred in the entrance of the Factory, forever changed Warhol. Some point to the shock of this event as a factor in his further embrace of an increasingly distant persona. The brush with death along with mounting pressure from the Internal Revenue Service (stemming from his critical stance against President Richard Nixon), seem to have prompted Warhol to document his life to an ever more obsessive degree. He would dictate every activity, including nothing the most minor expenses, and employ interns and assistants to transcribe the content of what would amount to over 3,400 audio tapes. Portions of these accounts were published posthumously in 1987 as The Warhol Diaries.

The traumatic attempt on his life did not, however, slow down his output or his cunning ability to seamlessly infiltrate the worlds of fashion, music, media, and celebrity. His artistic practice soon intersected with all aspects of popular culture, in some cases long before it would become truly popular. He co-founded Interview Magazine; appeared on television in a memorable episode of The Love Boat; painted an early computer portrait of singer Debbie Harry; designed Grammy-winning record covers for The Rolling Stones; signed with a modeling agency; contributed short films to Saturday Night Live; and produced Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes and Andy Warhol’s TV, his own television programs for MTV and cable access. He also developed a strong business in commissioned portraits, becoming highly sought after for his brilliantly-colored paintings of politicians, entertainers, sports figures, writers, debutantes and heads of state. His paintings, prints, photographs and drawings of this time include the important series, Skulls, Guns, Camouflage, Mao, and The Last Supper.

While in Milan, attending the opening of the exhibition of The Last Supper paintings, Warhol complained of severe pain in his right side. After delaying a hospital visit, he was eventually convinced by his doctors to check into New York Hospital for gall bladder surgery. On February 22, 1987, while in recovery from this routine operation, Andy Warhol died. Following burial in Pittsburgh, thousands of mourners paid their respects at a memorial service held at Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The service was attended by numerous associates and admirers including artists Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, and entertainer Liza Minnelli. Readings were contributed by Yoko Ono and Factory collaborator and close friend, Brigid Berlin.

Plans to house The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh were announced in 1989, two years after the establishment of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Through the ongoing efforts of both of these institutions, Andy Warhol remains not only a fascinating cultural icon, but an inspiration to new generations of artists, curators, filmmakers, designers, and cultural innovators the world over.

http://warholfoundation.org/legacy/biography.html

ANDY WARHOL, SELF – PORTRAIT, 1986

Acrylic Paint and Silkscreen Ink on Linen

Dimensions: 203.52 cm x 203.52 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of

Modern Art; © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ANDY WARHOL, TRIPLE ELVIS ( FERUS TYPE ) - 1963

Silver Paint, Spray Paint, and Silkscreen Ink on Linen

Dimensions: 208.92 cm x 300.99 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ANDY WARHOL, JACKIE TRIPTYCH, 1964

Acrylic Paint, Spray Paint, and Silkscreen Ink on Linen

Dimensions: Each: 50.8 cm x 40.64 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

SAM FRANCIS, MIDDLE BLUE III, 1959

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 182.56 cm x 243.84 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

SAM FRANCIS, UNTITLED, 1955 - 1956

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 185.42 cm x 197.49 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ELLSWORTH KELLY, GAZA, 1956

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Four Joined Panels, 227.97 cm x 200.66 cm

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Promised Gift of Helen and Charles Schwab;

ELLSWORTH KELLY, CITE 1951

Oil on Wood

Dimensions: Twenty Joined Panels, Overall: 143.51 cm x 179.71 cm x 4.45 cm

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at

the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and

promised gift of Helen and Charles Schwab; © Ellsworth Kelly

ELLSWORTH KELLY, RED ON RED, 2001

Oil on Canvas

Two Joined Panels, Overall:

Dimensions: 215.9 cm x 199.39 cm x 8.26 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ELLSWORTH KELLY

B. 1923, NEWBURGH, NEW YORK; D. 2015, SPENCERTOWN, NEW YORK

Ellsworth Kelly was born in 1923 in Newburgh, New York. He studied at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, from 1941 to 1943. After military service from 1943 to 1945, he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1946 to 1948. In 1949, Kelly went to France and enrolled at the École des beaux-arts, Paris, under the GI Bill, although he attended classes infrequently. In France, he discovered Romanesque art and architecture as well as Byzantine art. He was also introduced to Surrealism and Neo-Plasticism, which led him to experiment with automatic drawing and geometric abstraction. In his work Kelly abstracts the forms in his paintings from observations of the real world, such as shadows cast by trees or the spaces between architectural elements.

In 1950, Kelly met Jean Arp and that same year began to make shaped-wood reliefs and collages in which elements were arranged according to the laws of chance. He soon began to make paintings in separate panels that could be recombined to produce alternate compositions, as well as multipanel paintings in which each canvas is painted a single color. During the 1950s, he traveled throughout France, where he met Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Alberto Magnelli, Francis Picabia, and Georges Vantongerloo, among other artists. His first solo show took place at the Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Paris, in 1951.

Kelly returned to the United States in 1954, living first in a studio apartment on Broad Street, New York, and then at Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, where his neighbors would through the years include Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, Fred Mitchell, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. Kelly continued to develop and expand the vocabulary of painting, exploring issues of form and ground with his flatly painted canvases. His first solo show in New York was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956, and three years later he was included in 16 Americans at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. In 1958, he also began to make freestanding sculptures. In 1959, art historian Jules Langsner termed the current of American geometric abstraction "Hard-edge painting," connoting the shaped panels of bright color and rigid form created by Kelly and his contemporaries. Kelly moved out of Manhattan in 1970 and set up a studio in Chatham and a home in nearby Spencertown, New York; he lived and worked there until his death in 2015.

Kelly's first retrospective was held at MoMA in 1973. The following year, he began an ongoing series of totemic sculptures in steel and aluminum. He traveled throughout Spain, Italy, and France in 1977, the same year that his work was included in Documenta in Kassel, West Germany. He has executed many public commissions, including a mural for UNESCO in Paris (1969), a sculpture for the city of Barcelona (1978), and a memorial for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. (1993). Kelly's extensive work has been recognized in numerous retrospectives, including a sculpture exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1982); an exhibition of works on paper and a show of his print works that traveled extensively in the United States and Canada (1987–88); and a career retrospective organized by the Guggenheim Museum (1996), which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Gallery, London; and Haus der Kunst, Munich. Since then, solo exhibitions of Kelly's work have been mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1998); Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1999); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2007); and MoMA (2007).

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/ellsworth-kelly

ELLSWORTH KELLY, RED WHITE, 1962

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 212.09 cm x 170.18 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ELLSWORTH KELLY, STELE I, 1973

Weathering Steel

Dimensions: 548.64 cm x 304.8 cm x 2.54 cm

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and promised gift of Helen and Charles Schwab;

ELLSWORTH KELLY, SPECTRUM I - 1953

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 153.04 cm x 153.04 cm

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Doris and Donald Fisher

Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and promised gift of

Helen and Charles Schwab; © Ellsworth Kelly

BRICE MARDIN, THE SISTERS, 1991 - 1993

Oil on Linen

Dimensions: 213.36 cm x 149.86 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

BRICE MARDEN, 6 ( COURSE ), 1987 - 1988

Oil on Linen

Dimensions: 213.36 cm x 152.4 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

BRICE MARDEN, EPITAPH PAINTING 1, 1996 - 1997

Oil on Linen

Dimensions: 245.11 cm x 241.3 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ANTONY GORMLEY, QUANTUM CLOUD VIII, 1999

Steel

Dimensions: 224.16 cm x 124.46 cm x 96.52 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Antony Gormley

BRITISH ARTIST ANTONY GORMLEY
You may visit to find out information about Antony Gormley general and seven different exhibitions news to click below link fromMy Magical Attic.

https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2013/12/british-artist-antony-gormley.html

LEE KRASNER, POLAR STAMPEDE - 1960

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 243.84 cm x 412.43 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ANSELM KIEFER, SULAMITH, 1983

Oil, Emulsion, Shellac, Acrylic Paint, Woodcut, and Straw on Linen

Dimensions: 288.29 cm x 370.84 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ANSELM KIEFER,WAYS: MARCH SAND, 1980 ( DETAIL )

ANSELM KIEFER

Anselm Kiefer's monumental body of work represents a microcosm of collective memory, visually encapsulating a broad range of cultural, literary, and philosophical allusions—from the Old and New Testaments, Kabbalah mysticism, Norse mythology and Wagner’s Ring Cycle to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan.

Born during the closing months of World War II, Kiefer reflects upon Germany’s post-war identity and history, grappling with the national mythology of the Third Reich. Fusing art and literature, painting and sculpture, Kiefer engages the complex events of history and the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos. His boundless repertoire of imagery is paralleled only by the breadth of media palpable in his work.

Kiefer’s oeuvre encompasses paintings, vitrines, installations, artist books, and an array of works on paper such as drawings, watercolors, collages, and altered photographs. The physical elements of his practice—from lead, concrete, and glass to textiles, tree roots, and burned books—are as symbolically resonant as they are vast-ranging. By integrating, expanding, and regenerating imagery and techniques, he brings to light the importance of the sacred and spiritual, myth and memory.

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany. After studying law and Romance languages, he attended the School of Fine Arts at Freiburg im Breisgau and the Art Academy in Karlsruhe while maintaining a contact with Joseph Beuys.

Kiefer’s work has been shown and collected by major museums worldwide, including the following: “Bilder und Bücher,” Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (1978); “Verbrennen, verholzen, versenken, versanden,” West German Pavilion, 39th Biennale di Venezia, Italy (1980); “Margarete — Sulamith,” Museum Folkwang, Germany (1981); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (1984, traveled to ARC Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; and Israel Museum, Jerusalem); “Peintures 1983–1984,” Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux (1984); and Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (1987, traveled to Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, through 1989).

Further museum exhibitions include “Bücher 1969–1990,” Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany (1990, traveled to Kunstverein München, Germany; and Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland, through 1991); Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, Germany (1991); “Melancholia,” Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo (1993, traveled to Kyoto National Museum of Art, Japan; and Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan); “Himmel-Erde,” Museo Correr, Venice (1997); and “El viento, el tiempo, el silencio,” Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1998).

In recent years, Anselm Kiefer’s solo exhibitions have included Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (2000); “Maleri 1998–2000,” Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebkæk, Denmark (2001); “Die sieben Himmelspaläste,“ Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2001); “I sette palazzi celesti,” Fondazione Pirelli, Milan (2004); “Heaven and Earth,” Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2005, traveled to Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Québec; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, through 2007); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (2007); “Sternenfall / Chute d’étoiles,” Monumenta, Grand Palais, Paris (2007); “Anselm Kiefer au Louvre,” Musée du Louvre, Paris (2007); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebkæk, Denmark (2010); “Shevirat Hakelim,” Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2011); “Beyond Landscape,” Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2013); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2014); “l’alchimie du livre,” Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (2015); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2015); “Kiefer Rodin,” Musée Rodin, Paris (2017, traveling to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia); and “For Velimir Khlebnikov — Fates of Nations,” State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (2017).

ßhttp://www.gagosian.com/artists/anselm-kiefer

ANSELM KIEFER,WAYS: MARCH SAND, 1980

Oil, Emulsion, Shellac, Gelatin Silver Print, Sand, and Charcoal on Linen

Dimensions: 285.12 cm x 440.69 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ANSELM KIEFER, THE RHINE, 1982

Woodcut and Ink on Paper Mounted on Canvas

Dimensions: 327.66 cm x 379.73 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ANSELM KIEFER, THE RHINE, 1982 ( DETAIL )

ANSELM KIEFER, MARGARETHE - 1981 ( DETAIL )

ANSELM KIEFER, MARGARETHE - 1981

Oil, Straw, Emulsion, and Gelatin Silver Print on Linen

Dimensions: 290.2 cm x 400.69 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ANSELM KIEFER, THE MASTERSINGERS - 1982

Oil, Acrylic Paint, Resin, Straw, and Paper on Linen

Dimensions: 280.04 cm x 380.37 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Anselm Kiefer

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

DORIS & DON FISHER

DIRECTOR OF SFMOMA NEAL BENEZRA

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

ROY LICHTENSTEIN, FIGURES WITH SUNSET, 1978

Oil and Magna on Canvas

Dimensions: 271.78 cm x 424.18 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

Avis Berman

Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most influential and innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He is preeminently identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate, and his first fully achieved paintings were based on imagery lifted from comic strips and advertisements and rendered in a style mimicking the crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction. These paintings reinvigorated the American art scene and altered the history of modern art. Lichtenstein’s success was matched by his focus and energy, and after his initial triumph in the early 1960s, he went on to create an oeuvre of more than 5,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, murals and other objects celebrated for their wit and invention.

Roy Fox Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923, in New York City, the first of two children born to Milton and Beatrice Werner Lichtenstein. Milton Lichtenstein (1893–1946) was a successful real estate broker, and Beatrice Lichtenstein (1896–1991), a homemaker, had trained as a pianist, and she exposed Roy and his sister Rénee to museums, concerts and other aspects of New York culture. Roy showed artistic and musical ability early on: he drew, painted and sculpted as a teenager, and spent many hours in the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Modern Art. He played piano and clarinet, and developed an enduring love of jazz, frequenting the nightspots in Midtown to hear it.

Lichtenstein attended the Franklin School for Boys, a private junior high and high school, and was graduated in 1940. That summer he studied painting and drawing from the model at the Art Students League of New York with Reginald Marsh. In September he entered Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus in the College of Education. His early artistic idols were Rembrandt, Daumier and Picasso, and he often said that Guernica (1937; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid), then on long-term loan to the Museum of Modern Art, was his favorite painting. Even as an undergraduate, Lichtenstein objected to the notion that one set of lines (one person’s drawings) “was considered brilliant, and somebody’s else’s, that may have looked better to you, was considered nothing by almost everyone.”Lichtenstein’s questioning of accepted canons of taste was encouraged by Hoyt L. Sherman, a teacher whom he maintained was the person who showed him how to see and whose perception-based approach to art shaped his own.

In February 1943, Lichtenstein was drafted, and he was sent to Europe in 1945. As part of the infantry, he saw action in France, Belgium and Germany. He made sketches throughout his time in Europe and, after peace was declared there, he intended to study at the Sorbonne. Lichtenstein arrived in Paris in October 1945 and enrolled in classes in French language and civilization, but soon learned that his father was gravely ill. He returned to New York in January 1946, a few weeks before Milton Lichtenstein died. In the spring of that year, Lichtenstein went back to OSU to complete his BFA and in the fall he was invited to join the faculty as an instructor. In June 1949, he married Isabel Wilson Sarisky (1921–80), who worked in a cooperative art gallery in Cleveland where Lichtenstein had exhibited his work. While he was teaching, Lichtenstein worked on his master’s degree, which he received in 1949. During his second stint at OSU, Lichtenstein became closer to Sherman, and began teaching his method on how to organize and unify a composition. Lichtenstein remained appreciative of Sherman’s impact on him. He gave his first son the middle name of “Hoyt,” and in 1994 he donated funds to endow the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center at OSU.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lichtenstein began working in series and his iconography was drawn from printed images. His first sustained theme, intimate paintings and prints in the vein of Paul Klee that poked lyrical fun at medieval knights, castles and maidens, may well have been inspired by a book about the Bayeux Tapestry. Lichtenstein then took an ironic look at nineteenth-century American genre paintings he saw in history books, creating Cubist interpretations of cowboys and Indians spiked with a faux-primitive whimsy.

As with his most celebrated Pop paintings of the 1960s, Lichtenstein gravitated toward what he would characterize as the “dumbest” or “worst” visual item he could find and then went on to alter or improve it. In the 1960s, commercial art was considered beneath contempt by the art world; in the early 1950s, with the rise of Abstract Expressionism, nineteenth-century American narrative and genre paintings were at the nadir of their reputation among critics and collectors. Paraphrasing, particularly the paraphrasing of despised images, became a paramount feature of Lichtenstein’s art. Well before finding his signature mode of expression in 1961, Lichtenstein called attention to the artifice of conventions and taste that permeated art and society. What others dismissed as trivial fascinated him as classic and idealized—in his words, “a purely American mythological subject matter.”ⁱⁱ

Lichtenstein’s teaching contract at OSU was not renewed for the 1951–52 academic year, and in the autumn of 1951 he and Isabel moved to Cleveland. Isabel Lichtenstein became an interior decorator specializing in modern design, with a clientele drawn from wealthy Cleveland families. Whereas her career blossomed, Lichtenstein did not continue to teach at the university level. He had a series of part-time jobs, including industrial draftsman, furniture designer, window dresser and rendering mechanical dials for an electrical instrument company. In response to these experiences, he introduced quirkily rendered motors, valves and other mechanical elements into his paintings and prints. In 1954, the Lichtensteins’ first son, David, was born; two years later, their second child, Mitchell, followed. Despite the relative lack of interest in his work in Cleveland, Lichtenstein did place his work with New York dealers, which always mattered immensely to him. He had his first solo show at the Carlebach Gallery in New York in 1951, followed by representation with the John Heller Gallery from 1952 to 1957.

To reclaim his academic career and get closer to New York, Lichtenstein accepted a position as an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, in the northern reaches of the state. He was hired to teach industrial design, beginning in September 1957. Oswego turned out to be more geographically and aesthetically isolated than Cleveland ever was, but the move was propitious, for both his art and his career. Lichtenstein broke away from representation to a fully abstract style, applying broad swaths of pigment to the canvas by dragging the paint across its surface with a rag wrapped around his arm. At the same time, Lichtenstein was embedding comic-book characters figures such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in brushy, expressionistic backgrounds. None of the proto-cartoon paintings from this period survive, but several pencil and pastel studies from that time, which he kept, document his intentions. Finally, when he was in Oswego, Lichtenstein met Reginald Neal, the new head of the art department at Douglass College, the women’s college of Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The school was strengthening and expanding its studio art program, and when Neal needed to add a faculty member to his department, Lichtenstein was invited to apply for the job. Lichtenstein was offered the position of assistant professor, and he began teaching at Douglass in September 1960.

At Douglass, Lichtenstein was thrown into a maelstrom of artistic ferment. With New York museums and galleries an hour away, and colleagues Geoffrey Hendricks and Robert Watts at Douglass and Allan Kaprow and George Segal at Rutgers, the environment could not help but galvanize him. In June 1961, Lichtenstein returned to the idea he had fooled around with in Oswego, which was to combine cartoon characters from comic books with abstract backgrounds. But, as Lichtenstein said, “[I]t occurred to me to do it by mimicking the cartoon style without the paint texture, calligraphic line, modulation—all the things involved in expressionism.” Most famously, Lichtenstein appropriated the Benday dots, the minute mechanical patterning used in commercial engraving, to convey texture and gradations of color—a stylistic language synonymous with his subject matter. The dots became a trademark device forever identified with Lichtenstein and Pop Art. Lichtenstein may not have calibrated the depth of his breakthrough immediately but he did realize that the flat affect and deadpan presentation of the comic-strip panel blown up and reorganized in the Sherman-inflected way “was just so much more compelling”than the gestural abstraction he had been practicing.

Among the first extant paintings in this new mode—based on comic strips and illustrations from advertisements—were Popeye and Look Mickey, which were swiftly followed by TheEngagement Ring, Girl with Ball and Step-on Can with Leg. Kaprow recognized the energy and radicalism of these canvases and arranged for Lichtenstein to show them to Ivan Karp, director of the Leo Castelli Gallery. Castelli was New York’s leading dealer in contemporary art, and he had staged landmark exhibitions of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in 1958 and Frank Stella in 1960. Karp was immediately attracted to Lichtenstein’s paintings, but Castelli was slower to make a decision, partly on account of the paintings’ plebeian roots in commercial art, but also because, unknown to Lichtenstein, two other artists had recently come to his attention—Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist—and Castelli was only ready for one of them. After some deliberation, Castelli chose to represent Lichtenstein, and the first exhibition of the comic-book paintings was held at the gallery from February 10 to March 3, 1962. The show sold out and made Lichtenstein notorious. By the time of Lichtenstein’s second solo exhibition at Castelli in September 1963, his work had been showcased in museums and galleries around the country. He was usually grouped with Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Rosenquist, Segal, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana and Tom Wesselmann. Taken together, their work was viewed as a slap in the face to Abstract Expressionism and, indeed, the Pop artists shifted attention away from many members of the New York School.

With the advent of critical and commercial success, Lichtenstein made significant changes in his life and continued to investigate new possibilities in his art. After separating from his wife, he moved from New Jersey to Manhattan in 1963; in 1964, he resigned from his teaching position at Douglass to concentrate exclusively on his work. The artist also ventured beyond comic book subjects, essaying paintings based on oils by Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso, as well as still lifes and landscapes.

Lichtenstein became a prolific printmaker and expanded into sculpture, which he had not attempted since the mid-1950s, and in both two- and three-dimensional pieces, he employed a host of industrial or “non-art” materials, and designed mass-produced editioned objects that were less expensive than traditional paintings and sculpture. Participating in one such project—the American Supermarket show in 1964 at the Paul Bianchini Gallery, for which he designed a shopping bag—Lichtenstein met Dorothy Herzka (b. 1939), a gallery employee, whom he married in 1968. The late 1960s also saw Lichtenstein’s first museum surveys: in 1967 the Pasadena Art Museum initiated a traveling retrospective, in 1968 the Stedelijk Musem in Amsterdam presented his first European retrospective, and in 1969 he had his first New York retrospective, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Wanting to grow, Lichtenstein turned away from the comic book subjects that had brought him prominence. In the late 1960s his work became less narrative and more abstract, as he continued to meditate on the nature of the art enterprise itself. He began to explore and deconstruct the notion of brushstrokes—the building blocks of Western painting. Brushstrokes are conventionally conceived as vehicles of expression, but Lichtenstein made them into a subject. Modern artists have typically maintained that the subject of a painting is painting itself. Lichtenstein took this idea one imaginative step further: a compositional element could serve as the subject matter of a work and make that bromide ring true.

The search for new forms and sources was even more emphatic after 1970, when Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein bought property in Southampton, New York, and made it their primary residence. During the fertile decade of the 1970s, Lichtenstein probed an aspect of perception that had steadily preoccupied him: how easily the unreal is validated as the real because viewers have accepted so many visual conceptions that they don’t analyze what they see. In the Mirror series, he dealt with light and shadow upon glass, and in the Entablature series, he considered the same phenomena by abstracting such Beaux-Art architectural elements as cornices, dentils, capitals and columns. Similarly, Lichtenstein created pioneering painted bronze sculpture that subverted the medium’s conventional three-dimensionality and permanence. The bronze forms were as flat and thin as possible, more related to line than volume, and they portrayed the most fugitive sensations—curls of steam, rays of light and reflections on glass. The steam, the reflections and the shadow were signs for themselves that would immediately be recognized as such by any viewer.

Another entire panoply of works produced during the 1970s were complex encounters with Cubism, Futurism, Purism, Surrealism and Expressionism. Lichtenstein expanded his palette beyond red, blue, yellow, black, white and green, and invented and combined forms. He was not merely isolating found images, but juxtaposing, overlapping, fragmenting and recomposing them. In the words of art historian Jack Cowart, Lichtenstein’s virtuosic compositions were “a rich dialogue of forms—all intuitively modified and released from their nominal sources.” In the early 1980s, which coincided with re-establishing a studio in New York City, Lichtenstein was also at the apex of a busy mural career. In the 1960s and 1970s, he had completed four murals; between 1983 and 1990, he created five. He also completed major commissions for public sculptures in Miami Beach, Columbus, Minneapolis, Paris, Barcelona and Singapore.

Lichtenstein created three major series in the 1990s, each emblematic of his ongoing interest in solving pictorial problems. The Interiors, mural-sized canvases inspired by a miniscule advertisement in an Italian telephone book, delve again into the perceptual ambiguities of reflections from windows and mirrors. The Nudes reprise the theme of women in a romance-comic mode, which Lichtenstein had introduced in the 1960s and amplified in lush Surrealist-inspired beach scenes in the 1970s. As with the Interiors, there is ample quotation of elements from earlier canvases, the furniture of Lichtenstein’s painted world. He also used the series to investigate mixing chiaroscuro (which he devised with dots and shading) with flat areas of color. This effect was brought to an ultimate pitch in his Chinese Landscapes, Lichtenstein’s final encounter with a monumental art tradition—and one of his most subtle. Configurations of land, water, mountains and air found in Song dynasty paintings and scrolls are simulated by softly drifting fields of graduated dots. None of Lichtenstein’s usual black outlines define the monochromatic forms, which heightens the contemplative and abstract quality of the series.

In August 1997, Lichtenstein fell ill with pneumonia. He died unexpectedly of complications from the disease on September 29, 1997, at the age of 73, in New York City.

http://lichtensteinfoundation.org/biography/

ROY LICHTENSTEIN, REFLECTIONS ON THE SCREAM, 1990

Lithograph, Screenprint, Woodcut, and Metalized PVC Collage With Embossing

Dimensions: 123.83 cm x 165.74 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ROY LICHTENSTEIN, REFLECTIONS ON HAIR, 1990

Lithograph, Screenprint, Woodcut, and Metalized PVC Collage With Embossing

Dimensions: 142.24 cm x 114.3 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ROY LICHTENSTEIN, REFLECTIONS: WHAAAM!, 1990

Oil and Magna on Canvas

Dimensions: 178.44 cm x 194.63 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ROY LICHTENSTEIN, REFLECTIONSON CRASH, 1990

Lithograph, Screenprint, Relief Print, and Metalized PVC Collage with Embossing

Dimensions: 186.06 cm x 224.79 cm x 4.45 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

SOL LE WITT, WALL DRAWING 1: DRAWING SERIES II – 18 ( A & B ), OCTOBER 1968

Graphite on Wall

Dimensions: Two Elements, Each: 121.92 cm x 121.92 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

SOL LE WITT, WALL DRAWING 1: DRAWING SERIES II – 18 ( A & B ), OCTOBER 1968

Graphite on Wall

Dimensions: Two Elements, Each: 121.92 cm x 121.92 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ANISH KAPOOR, VORTEX, 2004

Wood, Fiberglass, and Lacquer

Dimensions: 140.02 cm x 140.02 cm x 48.26 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

ANISH KAPOOR: THE ARTIST IN THE ECHO CHAMBER OF HISTORY

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PHILIP GUSTON, AS IT GOES, 1978

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 193.04 cm x 259.72 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

GERHARD RICHTER, ABSTRACT PICTURE, 1992

Oil on Linen

Dimensions: 260.35 cm x 200.34 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

GERHARD RICHTER: REAL & TANGIBLE ACCOMPLISHMENTS

AS A YOUNG MAN

While the years immediately following the end of World War II were in many ways difficult, Richter also has fond memories of this time, not least because he found he had access to books that had previously been forbidden under Nazi control. Speaking to Robert Storr, Richter explained: "It was very nasty, [but] when the Russians came to our village and expropriated the houses of the rich who had already left or were driven out, they made libraries for the people out of these houses. And that was fantastic."¹ In a later conversation with Jan Thorn-Prikker, Richter elaborated, "Cesare Lombroso's Genius and Madness, Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Feuchtwanger, all that middle-class literature. It was a wonderful, care-free time … made it easy to forget the dark side of things."² Dietmar Elger, having described Richter's mother Hildegard's role in encouraging her son's interest in Nietzsche, Goethe, Schiller and others, notes that it was an "endless supply of illustrated books that prompted his own first drawings."³ In an interview with Jeanne Anne Nugent, Richter recalls studying art "from books and from the little folios with art prints that you used to get then – I remember Diego Velázquez, Albrecht Dürer, Lovis Corinth […] It was simply a matter of what was around, what we saw and bought for ourselves."⁴

It was around this time, at the age of 15 or 16, that Gerhard's passion for art began in earnest, having an early epiphany during an eight-week summer camp organized by the Russian-controlled State, where "for the first time he spent a lot of time drawing."⁵ One of the first drawings that Richter recalls and acknowledges producing⁶ as a young man in 1946 was a nude figure copied from a book, which his parents are said to have reacted to with both pride and embarrassment.⁷ He recalls also having made landscapes and self-portraits, and perhaps more unusually, often working in watercolours. In a 2002 interview with Storr, Richter describes a watercolour drawing he produced whilst living in the village of Waltersdorf of a group of people dancing. "Automatically I was an outsider. I couldn't speak the dialect and so on. I was at a club, watching the others dance, and I was jealous and bitter and annoyed. So in the watercolor, all this anger is included, at 16. It was the same with the poems I was writing – very romantic, but bitter and nihilistic, like Nietzsche and Hermann Hesse."⁸
In 1947, while still studying stenography, accounting and Russian at college in nearby Zittau, Richter began attending evening classes in painting. Little has been documented about these first painting lessons, although Elger records that before completing the course, Richter realized that he had learnt all that he was likely to from the teachers there.⁹ A year later, Richter moved into a hostel for apprentices in Zittau, leaving his family home in Waltersdorf.
While clearly passionate about art, on completing his studies in Zittau in 1948, Richter did not assume his career would be as a painter, and for a while considered an eclectic array of professions, including forestry, dentistry and lithography. Looking for openings that would use his artistic skills for trade and commercial purposes if not in the fine art arena, his first position was as a member of a team producing banners for the German Democratic Republic government. Storr recounts that during his five months in this post, Richter never had the opportunity to actually paint any of the banners himself, instead being charged with the task of taking the old banners and cleaning them up ready for his colleagues to paint.¹⁰ In February 1950 he was taken on as an assistant set painter for the municipal theatre in Zittau. Richter had recently been involved with an amateur theatre group¹¹, so it was perhaps through this, or even, as Storr proposes, through friends from his evening classes, that he was aware of and disposed to the role at the theatre. During his few months here, Elger notes that he enjoyed working on the sets for productions including Goethe's Faust and Schiller's William Tell among others. His career in the theatre came to an abrupt end, however, when the young Richter refused to do wall painting work on the theatre's staircases, and was promptly dismissed.¹²
Soon after leaving the theatre, he applied to study painting at the Dresden Art Academy [Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden]. It is unclear whether he had already been planning to do so whilst at the theatre, or whether his dismissal prompted fresh consideration of his future. But it was clearly an idea to which he was committed, as having had his first application rejected, he was advised by the examiners to find a job with a state-run organization in order to increase his chances of being accepted, which he duly did. As Elger explains, State employees tended to receive preferential treatment at that time, and the recommendation must have worked, as following eight months working as a painter at the Dewag textile plant in Zittau, he reapplied and was accepted onto the course.¹³ He returned to his birth city of Dresden in the summer of 1951, ready to begin his formal studies to be a painter.
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¹ Cited in Storr, Forty Years of Painting, p.20.
² Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker, 2004. Gerhard Richter: Text, p.467.
³ Elger, A Life in Painting, p.7.
⁴ Interview with Jeanne Anne Nugent, 2006, Gerhard Richter: Text, p.510-11.
⁵ Jürgen Harten [Ed.], Gerhard Richter Bilder Paintings 1962-1985, p.9.
⁶ Richter does not consider the vast majority of his early works, including most of the work he went on to produce whilst a student in Dresden, to constitute part of his œuvre. When asked why during a conversation with Birgit Grimm in 2000 Richter replied, "Because I felt like I was a student until then – someone who didn't yet know what he wanted, artistically speaking." Gerhard Richter: Text, p.355
⁷ Storr, Forty Years of Painting, p.20.
⁸ Interview with Richter by Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Text, p.375.
⁹ Elger, A Life in Painting, p.7.
¹⁰ Storr, Forty Years of Painting, p.20. It is unclear whether this is the same job as described on p.10 of Elger's Life in Painting, which also refers to an early role preparing signs for colleagues to paint; Elger's account suggests Richter was working for a shop sign business rather than on State advertising, though Storr's account suggests he might have moved on to a second job as a sign painter.
¹¹ Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker, 2004. Gerhard Richter: Text, p.467.
¹² Elger, A Life in Painting, p.10; Storr, Forty Years of Painting, p.20.
¹³ Elger, A Life in Painting, p.10; in Storr's account of Richter's second application to the Dresden Art School, he describes how the young artist presented a portfolio of drawings and water colours, "including a semi-abstraction that puzzled his examiners who gave it the title 'Volcano' to allay their discomfort". Storr, Forty Years of Painting, p.20.

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GERHARD RICHTER, ABSTRACT PICTURE, 1992 ( DETAIL )

GERHARD RICHTER, THE RUHNAU FAMILY, 1969

Oil on Linen

Dimensions: 129.54 cm x 200.03 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

GERHARD RICHTER, ABSTRACT PICTURE, 1987

Oil on Linen

Dimensions: 250.19 cm x 250.19 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

GERHARD RICHTER, BRIGID POLK, 1971

Oil on Linen

Dimensions: 100.33 cm x 125.73 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

BERND & HILLA BECHER, WINDING TOWERS, UNITED KINGDOM, 1966 - 1997

Gelatin Silver Prints

Dimensions: Nine Overall: 170.5 cm x 140.97 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

DAN FLAVIN, UNTITLED ( TO BARNET NEWMAN ) TWO, 1971

Red, Yellow, and Blue Fluorescent Lights

Dimensions: 243.84 cm - high, 121.92 cm Wide Across a Corner

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

BERND & HILLA BECHER, GAS HOLDERS, GERMANY, UNITED KINGDOM, 1971 - 1997

Gelatin Silver Prints

Dimensions: Nine, Overall: 170.5 cm x 140.97 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

JOEL SHAPIRO, UNTITLED, 1989

Bronze

Dimensions: 165.1 cm x 196.85 cm x 128.91 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

BERND & HILLA BECHER, BLAST FURNACES, UNITED STATES, GERMANY, FRANCE, LUXEMBOURG, BELGIUM, 1968 - 1993

Gelatin Silver Prints

Dimensions: Thirty, Overall: 170.69 cm x 464.19 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

DONALD JUDD, UNTITLED, 1988

Copper and Plexiglas

Dimensions: 10 Units, Each: 15.24 cm x 68.58 cm x 60.96 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

JOHN BALDESSARI, BLUE MOON/ YELLOW WINDOW / GHOST CHAIR, 1990

Photograph With Oil Tint and Vinyl Paint Mounted on Masonite,

Dimensions: 157.48 cm x 121.92 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

BERND & HILLA BECHER, WATER TOWERS, GERMANY, UNITED STATES, FRANCE, BELGIUM, LUXEMBOURG, 1963 - 1995

Gelatin Silver Prints

Dimensions: Thirty, Overall: 170.69 cm x 464.19 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

CY TWOMBLY, UNTITLED ( BACCHUS 1 ST VERSION IV ), 2004

Acrylic Paint and Crayon on Wood in Artist's Frame

Dimensions: 265.43 cm x 200.66 cm x 5.08 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

CY TWOMBLY, NOTE I, FROM THE SERIES III NOTES FROM SALALAH, 2005 - 2007

Acrylic Paint on Wood in Wood Artist's Frame

Dimensions: 248.92 cm x 371.48 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

CY TWOMBLY, SECOND VOYAGE TO ITALY ( SECOND VERSION ) 1962

Oil, Crayon, and Graphite on Linen

Dimensions: 149.86 cm x 200.66 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

CY TWOMBLY

In 1962 Cy Twombly (born 1928 in Lexington, Virginia) painted a work that illustrates many of the abiding engagements of his practice. Untitled is divided into two zones by a horizontal line about two thirds of the way up. Across the bottom edge of the canvas, Twombly has scribbled a textual fragment gleaned from the poet Sappho: “But their heart turned cold + they dropped their wings.” The phrase, suggesting a hovering between higher and lower realms, conjures up a distant classical realm, even as the grappling, awkward hand renders the words materially present.

In the upper third of the canvas, the artist provides a code for viewing: a white circle swirled with pink is labelled “blood”; an aggressive red “x” reads “flesh”; a glutinous dollop of brown paint, “earth” or possibly “youth”; a delicate disc of wispy white paint, “clouds”; and a shiny coin-shaped form in graphite pencil, “mirror”. Beneath this code, Twombly has rendered, within a drawn frame, an array of possibilities for mark-making per se, as though to set them apart from the more direct references of words.

The elements of the code come from three distinct experiential fields: the elemental (earth and clouds), the somatic (flesh and blood) and the subjective (mirror). And they can be mapped on to three corresponding traditional genres of oil painting, respectively: landscape, figure and self-portraiture. In Untitled we see Twombly’s invocation of myth and poetry, his wavering between high and low and his sustained dwelling on the threshold where writing becomes drawing or painting. Perhaps most importantly, we see in this painting how marks and words – in collaboration and counter-distinction – construct meaning differently. As John Berger has written, Twombly “visualises with living colours the silent space that exists between and around words”.

Although his work resonates strongly with generations of younger artists, ranging from Brice Marden to Richard Prince to Tacita Dean, it has a general propensity to polarise its audience between perplexity and unbridled admiration. (Remember the incident in summer 2007 of a woman planting a lipstick kiss on a Twombly canvas on show in Lyon?) Additionally, the critical and historical reception has seemed to describe two Twomblys – one about form, the other about content.

Some writers have concentrated on the materiality of the artist’s mark as aggressive, often illegible graffiti; others have followed the classical allusions to ferret out the references. Two elements might serve as metaphors for the predominant interpretations: the floating disc of white paint labelled “clouds” standing for the poetic and mythological aspects, and the scatological heap of brown paint designating “earth”. However, Twombly’s painterly palimpsests trace the progressions through which form and content, text and image are inextricably linked.

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CY TWOMBLY, UNTITLED, 1971

Oil - Based House Paint and Crayon on Canvas

Dimensions: 304.8 cm x 491.49 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fractional Purchase Through Gift;

AGNES MARTIN, NIGHT SEA, 1963

Oil, Crayon, and Gold Leaf on Linen

Dimensions: 182.88 cm x 182.88 cm

HENRY MOORE, WORKING MODEL FOR ‘ OVAL WITH POINTS ‘, 1968 - 1969

Bronze

Dimensions: 117.16 cm x 92.08 cm x 54.29 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

PAT STEIR, THREE POINTED WATERFALL, 1990

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 198.12 cm x 248.92 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

WILLEM DE KOONING, UNTITLED XIX, 1983

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 195.58 cm x 223.52 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

WILLEM DE KOONING

Willem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904, into a working class family in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Driven by an acutely perceptive mind, a strong work ethic, and persistent self doubt – coupled with the determination to achieve – the charismatic de Kooning became one of America’s and the twentieth century’s most influential artists.

Showing an interest in art from an early age, de Kooning was apprenticed to a leading design firm when he was twelve and, with its encouragement, enrolled in night school at the prestigious Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques (Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen te Rotterdam), which was renamed in his honor in 1998 as the Willem de Kooning Academie. With the help of his friend, Leo Cohan, in 1926 he stowed away on a ship to the United States, settling in New York City in 1927. At that point, it was not the life of an artist that he was in search of; rather, like many young Europeans, it was the movie version of the American dream (big money, girls, cowboys, etc.). Nevertheless, after briefly working as a house painter, he established himself as a commercial artist and became immersed in his own painting and the New York art world, befriending such artists as Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky.

In 1936, during the Great Depression, de Kooning worked in the mural division of the Works Project Administration (WPA). The experience convinced him to take up painting full time. By the late forties and early fifties, de Kooning and his New York contemporaries, including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, became notorious for rejecting the accepted stylistic norms such as Regionalism, Surrealism and Cubism by dissolving the relationship between foreground and background and using paint to create emotive, abstract gestures. This movement was variously labeled “Action Painting,” “Abstract Expressionism” or simply the “New York School.” Until this time, Paris had been considered the center of the avant-garde, and the groundbreaking nature of Picasso’s contributions was frustratingly difficult to surpass for this group of highly competitive New York artists. De Kooning said it plainly: “Picasso is the man to beat.”[i] De Kooning and this group finally stole the spotlight and were responsible for the historic shift of attention to New York in the years following World War II.

De Kooning became known as an “artist’s artist” among his peers in New York and then gained critical acclaim in 1948 with his first one-man exhibition held at Charles Egan Gallery, at the age of forty-four. The exhibition revealed densely worked oil and enamel paintings, including his now well-known black-and-white paintings. This exhibition was essential to de Kooning’s reputation. Shortly thereafter, in 1951, de Kooning made one of his first major sales when he received the Logan Medal and Purchase Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago for his grand-scale abstraction, Excavation (1950). This is arguably one of the most important paintings of the twentieth century. During this period, de Kooning gained the support of Clement Greenberg and later Harold Rosenberg, the two foremost and rivaling critics in New York.

De Kooning’s success did not dampen his need for exploration and experimentation. In 1953, he shocked the art world by exhibiting a series of aggressively painted figural works, commonly known as the “Women” paintings. These women were types or icons more than portraits of individuals. His return to figuration was perceived by some as a betrayal of Abstract Expressionist principles, which emphasized abstraction. He lost Greenberg’s support, yet Rosenberg remained convinced of his relevance. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, accepted de Kooning’s change in style as an advancement in his work and purchased Woman I (1950 – 1952) in 1953. What seemed to some as stylistically reactionary, to others was clearly avant-garde.

De Kooning’s dramatic rise to prominence between 1948 and 1953 was only the first act in a remarkable artistic career. While many of his contemporaries developed a mature “signature style,” de Kooning’s inquisitive spirit did not allow such constraint. Fighting adherence to any orthodoxy, he continued to explore new styles and methods, often challenging his own facility. “You have to change to stay the same,”[ii] is his frequently quoted adage.

De Kooning was equally comfortable working on paper and canvas. In fact, paper allowed for an immediacy that appealed to him. From September 1959 to January 1960, de Kooning stayed in Italy, during which time he produced a large number of experimental black-and-white works on paper known as the “Rome” drawings. After his return, he traveled to the West Coast. While in San Francisco, he worked with brush and ink, but, more interesting, he experimented with lithography. The two resulting prints ( known as Waves I and Waves II ) became prime examples of Abstract Expressionist printmaking.

By the late fifties, he had moved from women, to women in landscapes, tto what seemed to be a return to “pure” abstraction, with works respectively referred to as “Urban,” “Parkway” and “Pastoral” landscapes; yet he never completely left the world of actual objects for pure abstraction. In 1960, he said, “It’s really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. So I fear that I’ll have to follow my desires.”[iii] The figure reasserted itself, now in its more carnal form.

In 1963, de Kooning moved from New York City to Springs, in East Hampton, Long Island. Manipulating space as a sculptor would, he designed and built a soaring, butterfly-roofed, light-filled studio and home in a quiet, wooded neighborhood where he worked through the sixties before moving in permanently in 1971. The light and landscape of East Hampton reminded him of his native Holland, and the change in environment was reflected in his work. Colors softened and figures became loosely painted and fleshy, more “go-go” girl and “come hither” than angry and tooth-filled. He continued to experiment with his medium, adding water and safflower oil to make it slippery and wet, formulating what would seem to many an extremely difficult mixture to handle.

On a brief trip to Italy in 1969, after encountering a sculptor friend, Herzl Emmanuel, de Kooning produced thirteen small figures in clay, which were editioned in bronze. In the early seventies he explored both sculpture and lithography, producing a sizable body of work while continuing to paint and draw. In this period, more graphic elements appear in his paintings, some with flat applications of paint as opposed to a more painterly approach. This may derive from his exposure to Japanese art and design while in Japan in early 1970. His lithographs seem to reflect the influence of Japanese ink drawing and calligraphy as many exhibit a newly gained sense of open space, which in turn is also reflected in some of the paintings. The 1970s decade was marked first by material experimentation and then by breakthrough. Because of or in spite of the explorations, the late 1970s were a prolific period in which he produced voluptuous, thickly painted works which are among his most sensually abstract.

Visual struggle and wrestling are markers of much of de Kooning’s career. He was fortunate in his final decade to dispel some of the angst. Coming out of a methodology of sanding, drawing, layering, scraping, rotating the canvas and repeatedly stepping back to consider each change, the pared-down and at times serene paintings of the eighties can be seen as de Kooning’s ultimate synthesis of figuration and abstraction, of painting and drawing, and of balance and imbalance. Year after year throughout the 1980s, de Kooning explored new forms of pictorial space as revealed by works with ethereal ribbon-like passages; or some with cantilevers whereby straight lines may float or abruptly stop and balance against broad open areas; or others of crammed, bold, lyrical spaces. Vividly colored, predominately linear elements were juxtaposed against subtly toned white areas. With his avowed inclination to embrace the “ordinary,” he was free to acknowledge the unintellectual, mundane or humorous characters or objects at times perceptible in his abstract paintings. This again exemplifies his insistence on freedom from doctrinaire ideas of what art should be. It is also reflected in the spontaneity and simplicity of the light-hearted titles he gave to a few works in the 1980s, for example: The Key and the Parade, The Cat’s Meow and A Deer and the Lampshade. De Kooning had reached a more thoroughly open, less anxiously complex place in his artistic career.

Succumbing to the affects of old age and dementia, de Kooning worked on his last painting in 1991 and passed away in 1997 at the age of 92, after an extraordinarily long, rich and successful career. De Kooning never stopped exploring and expanding the possibilities of his craft, leaving an indelible mark on American and international artistsj and viewers.

De Kooning was awarded many honors in his lifetime, including The Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. His works have been included in thousands of exhibitions and are in the permanent collections of many of the finest art institutions abroad, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and in America such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Footnotes

[i] Harry Gaugh interview with Rudy Burckhardt, November 24, 1982. In Harry Gaugh, Willem de Kooning (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983): 112 note 17. This is a statement that de Kooning evidently repeated often in the late thirties and forties.

[ii] Willem de Kooning, quoted in Jack Cowart, “De Kooning Today,” Art International (Summer 1979): 16.

[iii] “Willem de Kooning,” in David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists ( Yale University Press, 2001): 48. The interview was recorded in March 1960, for BBC. An assemblage of excerpts was first published in Location (Spring 1963) under the title “Content is a Glimpse.”

http://www.dekooning.org/the-artist/biography

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WILLEM DE KOONING, UNTITLED XIV - 1976

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 177.8 cm x 203.2 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

SIGMAR POLKE, FOUNTAIN - 1996

Paint on Linen

Dimensions: 104.14 cm x 69.85 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

SIGMAR POLKE 1963–2010 REVEALS THE FIVE-DECADE CAREER OF

ONE OF THE MOST VORACIOUSLY EXPERIMENTAL ARTISTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY

ALIBIS: SIGMAR POLKE 1963 – 2010 AT MOMA NEW YORK

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SIGMAR POLKE, THE SPIRITS THAT LEND STRENGTH ARE INVISIBLE, 1988

Tellurium and Artificial Resin on Canvas

Dimensions: 401.32 cm x 299.72 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of

Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

GEORG BASELITZ, ELKE IN ARMCHAIR, 1976

Oil on Linen

Dimensions: 250.19 cm x 200.03 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco

GEORG BASELITZ

Painter, sculptor, printmaker and draughtsman, Georg Baselitz is one of Germany’s most celebrated living artists, with a distinguished career spanning over fifty years.

Born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938, he grew up in Saxony, an area that later became East Germany. Whilst studying painting at the Academy of Art in East Berlin (1956) he was sent down after one year for political immaturity‘. He then applied at the Academy in West Berlin and moved there in 1958, completing his studies in 1962. During this period he adopted the surname Baselitz, reflecting his place of birth Deutschbaselitz.

In searching for alternatives to the strongly narrative art of Social Realism and abstract painting, he became interested in art considered to be outside of the mainstream of Modernism. He began to look to Ferdinand v. Rayski, Michail Wrubel amomgst others and imagery that was rooted in the Art Brut. He was also inspired by Existentialist art and literature (Fautrier, Beckett, Ionesco, Artaud), by Dada (Schwitters, Picabia) and the works of the German authors Nietzsche and Gottfried Benn.

In 1963 Baselitz’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz, Berlin, caused a public scandal and several paintings were confiscated by the German authorities claiming that they were publicly indecent. Among them Die grosse Nacht im Eimer (‘The Big Night Down the Drain’), which depicted a masturbating dwarf-like figure. By the mid-1960s, Baselitz embarked on a series of paintings depicting monumental male figures, which he described as Rebels, Shepherds or New Types (‘Ein neuer Typ’). Viewed within the Romantic tradition, the rebel (or hero/partisan) is often regarded as an outsider associated with the figure of the artist. These paintings are often termed as the ‘Hero’ (‘Helden’) series and were prompted after Baselitz’s scholarship in Florence in 1965, where he became interested in Italian Mannerist prints. Baselitz depicted his figures located within mythical, ruined landscapes, each with symbolic attributes to identify their individual characters, such as army boots, knapsacks or uniform jackets, often with exaggerated and exposed sexual organs. The lone figure as a prophet or saint also alludes to home coming soldiers stumbling, dazed, through battle-scarred post-war Germany.

The ‘Fracture’ paintings of the late 1960s revealed Baselitz’s keen interest in forests and trees (and the motifs that have historically been associated with them, with rural landscapes peopled with woodsmen and hunters). They were divided into segments so that the imagery could be reorganised pictorially. In 1969, he decided to create and display work upside down in order to re-focus the viewer on the pure pictorial merits of the painting. By attempting to overcome the representational, content-driven character of his earlier work, this also enabled him to emphasise the abstract qualities of the composition.

By the late 1970s, he was making monumental sculptures of figures and heads with rudimentary and deliberately irregular forms. He used wood, he said, because “it enables avoidance of any attractiveness of form, any craft or elegance … objects in wood are unique, simple, unpretentious”. Having spent most of the early 1970s apparently working outside the mainstream, dominated at the time by Conceptual Art practice, by the 1980s he had established his international reputation (cemented by exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale in 1980 and ‘A New Spirit in Painting’ in 1981). During the 1980s and early 1990s, the canvases became denser and more heavily worked, and subject matter returned to play a greater role. He began introducing motifs from Slavic folk art, sometimes combining motifs with figures of family members taken from old photographs. The styles of German Romanticism inspired his more recent work and he even addressed works created in the Socialist Realism of Stalin’s era (which he rejected so forcefully at the beginning of his career). In 2005 Baselitz introduced the ‘Remix’ in his work, in which he has returned to key phases of his own art history (including ‘ The Big Night Down the Drain’ and ‘The Great Friends’) and made new versions of his work. They are painted intuitively, with quick and spontaneous flashes of bright, transparent colour. References to the Nazi leader Hitler, which in the earlier works had been more ambiguous, are more directly emphasised. These works have allowed Baselitz to revisit and excavate the past, pushing his own painterly vocabulary to create works that are fresh and liberated.

Baselitz has exhibited widely including major solo shows at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014), Albertina, Vienna (2013), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2011), Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2010), Galerie Neue Meister und Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister der Staatlichen Kunstsammlung Dresden (2009), Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2009), Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina, Naples (2008), the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2007), Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen (2006), Musée d'Art de la Ville de Paris (1997) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1995).

http://whitecube.com/artists/georg_baselitz/

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GEORG BASELITZ,THE LAST SELF-PORTRAIT II - 1982

Oil on Linen

Dimensions: 250.19 cm x 200.03 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

FRANK STELLA, THE CHASE, THIRD DAY, 1989

Mixed Media on Etched Magnesium and Aluminum

Dimensions: 255.27 cm x 368.3 cm x 97.79 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

FRANK STELLA

B. 1936, MALDEN, MASSACHUSETTS

Frank Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he went on to Princeton University, where he painted and majored in history. Early visits to New York art galleries would prove to be an influence upon his artistic development. Stella moved to New York in 1958 after his graduation.
Stella’s art was recognized for its innovations before he was twenty-five. In 1959, several of his paintings were included in Three Young Americans at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, as well as in Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1959–60). Stella joined dealer Leo Castelli’s stable of artists in 1959. In his early series, including the Black Paintings (1958–60), Aluminum Paintings (1960), and Copper Paintings(1960–61), Stella cast aside illusionistic space for the physicality of the flat surface and deviated from the traditional rectangular-shaped canvas. Stella married Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic, in 1961.
Stella’s Irregular Polygon canvases (1965–67) and Protractor series (1967–71) further extended the concept of the shaped canvas. Stella began his extended engagement with printmaking in the mid-1960s, working first with master printer Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G.E.L. In 1967, Stella designed the set and costumes for Scramble, a dance piece by Merce Cunningham. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella’s work in 1970. During the following decade, Stella introduced relief into his art, which he came to call “maximalist” painting for its sculptural qualities. Ironically, the paintings that had brought him fame before 1960 had eliminated all such depth. After introducing wood and other materials in the Polish Village series (1970–73), created in high relief, he began to use aluminum as the primary support for his paintings. As the 1970s and 1980s progressed, these became more elaborate and exuberant. Indeed, his earlier Minimalism became baroque, marked by curving forms, DayGlo colors, and scrawled brushstrokes. Similarly, his prints of these decades combined various printmaking and drawing techniques. In 1973, he had a print studio installed in his New York house.
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella created a large body of work that responded in a general way to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. During this time, the increasingly deep relief of Stella’s paintings gave way to full three-dimensionality, with sculptural forms derived from cones, pillars, French curves, waves, and decorative architectural elements. To create these works, the artist used collages or maquettes that were then enlarged and re-created with the aid of assistants, industrial metal cutters, and digital technologies.
In the 1990s, Stella began making freestanding sculpture for public spaces and developing architectural projects. In 1992–93, for example, he created the entire decorative scheme for Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre, which includes a 10,000-square-foot mural. His 1993 proposal for a kunsthalle (arts center) and garden in Dresden did not come to fruition. His aluminum bandshell, inspired by a folding hat from Brazil, was built in downtown Miami in 1999. In 2001, a monumental Stella sculpture was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Stella’s work was included in several important exhibitions that defined 1960s art, among them the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s The Shaped Canvas (1964–65) and Systemic Painting (1966). His art has been the subject of several retrospectives in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Among the many honors he has received was an invitation from Harvard University to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in 1983–84. Calling for a rejuvenation of abstraction by achieving the depth of baroque painting, these six talks were published by Harvard University Press in 1986. The artist continues to live and work in New York.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/frank-stella

FRANK STELLA, QUATHLAMBA II FROM THE V SERIES, 1968

Lithograph

Dimensions: 40.64 cm x 73.34 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

FRANK STELLA, IFAFA I FROM THE V SERIES, 1968

Lithograph

Dimensions: 41.28 cm x 56.83 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

FRANK STELLA, EMPRESS OF INDIA I FROM THE V SERIES, 1968

Lithograph

Dimensions: 41.28 cm x 89.85 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

RICHARD SERRA, SEQUENCE, 2006

Weatherproof Steel

Dimensions: 388.62 cm x 1240.47 cm x 1986.76 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE, DRAWING FOR II SOLE 24 ORE ( WORLD WALKING ) 2007

Charcoal, Gouache, Pastel, and Colored Pencil on Paper

Dimensions: 213.36 cm x 149.86 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE, PREPARING THE FLUTE, 2005

Model Theater With Drawings (Charcoal, Pastel, and Colored Pencil on Paper) and 35mm Animated Film Transferred to Video, With Sound, 21:06 min.,

Dimensions: 241.3 cm x 111.76 cm x 153.67 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, fractional purchase and promised gift;

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE, DRAWING FOR II SOLE 24 ORE ( WORLD WALKING ) 2007 ( DETAIL )

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, SLEEP FOR YVONNE RAINER, 1965

Mixed Media and Paper Collage With Screenprint

Dimensions: 214.63 cm x 153.67 cm x 18.42 cm

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

RICHARD SERRA

Richard Serra was born in 1939 in San Francisco. While working in steel mills to support himself, Serra attended the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara from 1957 to 1961, receiving a BA in English literature. He then studied as a painter at Yale University, New Haven, from 1961 to 1964, completing his BFA and MFA there. While at Yale, Serra worked with Josef Albers on his book The Interaction of Color (1963). During the early 1960s, he came into contact with Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, and Frank Stella. In 1964 and 1965 Serra received a Yale Traveling Fellowship and traveled to Paris, where he frequently visited the reconstruction of Constantin Brancusi’s studio at the Musée National d’Art Moderne. He spent much of the following year in Florence on a Fulbright grant and traveled throughout southern Europe and northern Africa. The young artist was given his first solo exhibition at Galleria La Salita, Rome, in 1966. Later that year, he moved to New York where his circle of friends included Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson.

In 1966 Serra made his first sculptures out of nontraditional materials such as fiberglass and rubber. From 1968 to 1970 he executed a series of Splashpieces, in which molten lead was splashed or cast into the junctures between floor and wall. Serra had his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York. By 1969 he had begun the Prop pieces, whose parts are not welded together or otherwise attached but are balanced solely by forces of weight and gravity. That year, Serra was included in Nine Young Artists: Theodoron Awards at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He produced the first of his numerous short films in 1968 and in the early 1970s experimented with video. The Pasadena Art Museum organized a solo exhibition of Serra’s work in 1970, and in the same year he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. That year, he helped Smithson execute Spiral Jetty at the Great Salt Lake in Utah; Serra, however, was less intrigued by the vast American landscape than by urban sites, and in 1970 he installed a piece on a dead-end street in the Bronx. He received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 1975 and traveled to Spain to study Mozarabic architecture in 1982.
Serra was honored with solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany, in 1978; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1984; the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany, in 1985; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1986. The 1990s saw further honors for Serra’s work: a retrospective of his drawings at the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; the Wilhelm Lehmbruck prize for sculpture in Duisburg in 1991; and the following year, a retrospective at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. In 1993 Serra was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1994 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale by the Japan Art Association and an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the California College of the Arts, Oakland. Serra has continued to exhibit in both group and solo shows in such venues as Leo Castelli Gallery and Gagosian Gallery, New York. He continues to produce large-scale steel structures for sites throughout the world, and has become particularly renowned for his monumental arcs, spirals, and ellipses, which engage the viewer in an altered experience of space. From 1997 to 1998 his Torqued Ellipses (1997) were exhibited at and acquired by the Dia Center for the Arts, New York. In 2005 eight major works by Serra were installed permanently at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and in 2007 the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a major retrospective of his work. Serra lives outside New York City and in Nova Scotia.

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artists/bios/1377

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ALEXANDER CALDER

B. 1898, LAWNTON, PENNSYLVANIA; D. 1976, NEW YORK

Alexander Calder was born on July or August 22, 1898, in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, into a family of artists. In 1919, he received an engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey. Calder attended the Art Students League, New York, from 1923 to 1925, studying briefly with Boardman Robinson and John Sloan. As a freelance artist for the National Police Gazette in 1925, he spent two weeks sketching at the circus; his fascination with the subject dates from this time. He also made his first wire sculpture in 1925, and the following year he made several constructions of animals and figures with wire and wood. Calder’s first exhibition of paintings took place in 1926 at the Artist’s Gallery, New York. Later that year, he went to Paris and attended the Académie de la grande chaumière. In Paris, he met Stanley William Hayter, created his famous Cirque Calder, which he began performing in the fall of 1926, and exhibited at the 1927 Salon des Indépendants. The first show of his wire animals and caricature portraits was held at the Weyhe Gallery, New York, in 1928. That same year, he met Joan Miró, who became a lifelong friend. Subsequently, Calder divided his time between France and the United States. In 1929, the Galerie Billiet gave him his first solo show in Paris. He met Frederick Kiesler, Fernand Léger, and Theo van Doesburg and visited Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930. Around this time, he also encountered James Johnson Sweeney, future director of the Guggenheim Museum, who would become a close friend and supporter. Calder began to experiment with abstract sculpture and in 1931–32 introduced moving parts into his work. These moving sculptures were called “mobiles”; the stationary constructions were to be named “stabiles.” He exhibited with the group Abstraction-Création (Abstraction Creation, 1931–36) in Paris in 1933. In 1943, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, gave him a retrospective.

During the 1950s, Calder traveled widely and executed “gongs” (sound mobiles developed in the 1940s) and “towers” (wall mobiles developed around 1951). He won the Grand Prize for sculpture at the 1952 Venice Biennale. He exhibited, along with other pioneers of Kinetic art including Yaacov Agam and Jean Tinguely, in Le mouvement (Movement) at the Galerie Denise René, Paris, in 1955. Late in the decade, the artist worked extensively with gouache; from this period, he executed numerous major public commissions. In 1964–65, the Guggenheim Museum presented a Calder retrospective. He began the “totems” in 1965 and the “animobiles” in 1969; both are variations on the standing mobile. A Calder exhibition was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1976), and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2003). Calder died on November 11, 1976, in New York.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/alexander-calder