SFMOMA opens 75th anniversary celebration  
# Saturday, December 26, 2009

SFGate | December 19, 2009 | By Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic

People expecting flashiness from "The Anniversary Show" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art may come away disappointed at first, but those who revisit the show that kicks off the museum's 75th anniversary festivity a month early will leave each time more impressed with the curatorial decisions that shaped it.

A museum celebrating itself inevitably risks exaggerating its prestige, influence or prescience. To the credit of "The Anniversary Show's" organizers, curators Janet Bishop, Corey Keller and Sarah Rogers, they have refreshed our view of the institution while keeping its claims for itself in proportion. Their selections weave together accounts of patronage, exhibition and collecting history, within a sketchy outline of nearly a century of international art production.

The exhibit, which runs for 13 months, takes the form of a head-snapping re-hanging of the permanent collection on the second floor that it customarily occupies. Only the gallery contractually devoted to the Anderson Collection of Pop Art figures as a still point around which everything else seems to have pivoted, including chronology and thematic groupings.


A wall full of San Francisco views on the second floor landing provides a seemingly superfluous but frankly thrilling reminder of where we are. "San Francisco Views, 1935 to Now" encompasses everything from a Timothy Pflueger graphite and charcoal "Bird's-Eye View of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge On-Ramps" to Rigo 98's panoramic ink on paper "Study for Looking at 1998 San Francisco From the Top of 1925," a view west from the roof of Pflueger's 1925 Pacific Telesis building, SFMOMA's immediate neighbor.

Even signature images such as John Gutmann's 1938 "Nob Hill, San Francisco" and Max Yavno's Filbert Street "Garage Doors" (1947) regain life alongside less familiar pictures by William Gedney, John Harding and Mary Kocol.

Absorbed in the historical zigzag the pieces on view trace, you forget you are looking at a core sample of SFMOMA's holdings.

Such triumphs of fascination over didactics occur throughout "The Anniversary Show," though it effectively pays tribute to defining personalities such as SFMOMA's founding patron, Albert Bender, and its dynamic early director, Grace McCann Morley.

In recognition of Morley's unblinkered vision, the curators have hung opposite canonical works by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Alexander Calder 100 watercolors made by teenage boys in 1950s Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) that Morley acquired through the Chirodzo Art Centre there.

A wall full of San Francisco views on the second floor landing provides a seemingly superfluous but frankly thrilling reminder of where we are. "San Francisco Views, 1935 to Now" encompasses everything from a Timothy Pflueger graphite and charcoal "Bird's-Eye View of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge On-Ramps" to Rigo 98's panoramic ink on paper "Study for Looking at 1998 San Francisco From the Top of 1925," a view west from the roof of Pflueger's 1925 Pacific Telesis building, SFMOMA's immediate neighbor.

Even signature images such as John Gutmann's 1938 "Nob Hill, San Francisco" and Max Yavno's Filbert Street "Garage Doors" (1947) regain life alongside less familiar pictures by William Gedney, John Harding and Mary Kocol.

Absorbed in the historical zigzag the pieces on view trace, you forget you are looking at a core sample of SFMOMA's holdings.

Such triumphs of fascination over didactics occur throughout "The Anniversary Show," though it effectively pays tribute to defining personalities such as SFMOMA's founding patron, Albert Bender, and its dynamic early director, Grace McCann Morley.

In recognition of Morley's unblinkered vision, the curators have hung opposite canonical works by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Alexander Calder 100 watercolors made by teenage boys in 1950s Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) that Morley acquired through the Chirodzo Art Centre there.

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