SAN FRANCISCO — Despite its problems, tops among them a stratospheric level of housing prices and vast homelessness, this city remains a magnet for creative design of all sorts. A compendium of art we saw at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF-MOMA) helps launch our new Cities Cities section at the davidwinch.website.
The sensational 6th floor of SF-MOMA offers a panorama of 20th-century American modernism. We missed a few high-profile favourites there — not much Robert Motherwell on display, and no Rauschenberg that I saw — but otherwise Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and others are given the pride of place they earned.
Clean, spacious white-walled rooms on a top floor with ample views at the corners. The sixth floor of SF-MOMA is very good for leisurely viewing.
Joan Mitchell’s work at the San Francisco MOMA; a New York 1950s explorer, she is perhaps best known in Canada as part of a reclusive duo with Jean-Paul Riopelle. They worked largely in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s.
Roy Lichtenstein, who most know through his almost-comic takes on commercial and pop culture imagery, does a novel take on a classic Matisse window view. His light touch and wavy blue flourishes match the tone and style of the master.
In another take on a master, Lichtenstein offered a thoughtful take on Van Gogh’s darker original work portraying sowers in field at evening.
Dan Flavin erupted into the sixties art world by taking fluorescent light seriously. See above a cross-section of his work.
