American Icons: Masterworks from SFMOMA and the Fisher Collection (Icnes

Amricaines: Chefs-doeuvre du SFMOMA et de la collection Fisher)

Grand Palais, Galerie Sud-Est, Paris

April 8 - June 22, 2015

Published at Hyperallergic herehttp://hyperallergic.com/212090/revisiting-postwar-american-art-in-paris/

Roy Lichtenstein, Live Ammo (Tzing!) (1962) oil on canvas; 176.53 x 146.05 cm; The Doris and Donald Fisher

Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Estate of Roy Lichtenstein; photo by Ian Reeves

Andy Warhol, Liz #6 [Early Colored Liz] (1963) silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen, 101.6 x 101.6 cm, San

Francisco Museum of Modern Art, fractional purchase and bequest of Phyllis Wattis; Andy Warhol Foundation for

the Visual Arts / ARS, New York; photo by Ben Blackwell

During Paris in the spring, one frequently meets beaming American newly weds on their

honeymoon. That identifiable lovers on cloud 9 scenario pretty well sums up American

Icons: Masterworks from SFMOMA and the Fisher Collection. No snark intended.

Curated by Gary Garrels, it is a tasty modestly sized show of postwar painting and

sculpture that merely demonstrates what is to come once they get home to San Francisco

where the Fisher Collection and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will form an

amalgamation. That union is a result of an unprecedented arrangement to house and

display at SFMOMA the massive art collection of Donald (who unfortunately passed

away in 2009) and Doris Fisher, the founders of the Gap. In 2007 the Fishers announced

plans to build a museum of their own in the San Francisco Presidio to house the art

collection. However, the plan stirred opposition from historic preservationists and was

canceled. American Icons includes a fraction of the 1,100 works from that collection of

185 artists that now have joined SFMOMA for good. On view are only a few (14) of

these artists with wonderful well-known paintings and sculptures by Americans. The full

union of the two collections will surge forth in 2016 within a new Snhetta-designed

expanded building that SFMOMA is now building.

The Fishers started collecting art in the 1970s with fine art prints from Gemini or Tyler

Graphics that they hung in an office building for Gap, the retail company they co-

founded in 1969. Eventually they added paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs, and

other media by American and European artists that were obtained from the likes of Paula

Cooper, Mary Boone, Marian Goodman, Andr Emmerich, Pace and Anthony dOffay.

These buying binges brought in key examples of first wave Pop Art, Minimalism,

Abstraction, Figurative Art, and Color Field painting.

The Fisher Collection is narrow but deep, with often 40 or more pieces by a single artist,

such with Gerhard Richter (47), Ellsworth Kelly (45), Alexander Calder (40), Sol LeWitt

(40) and Andy Warhol (20). The 14 artists presented here in the mixing of the 2

collections each get either an entire gallery devoted to their work or share a very large

gallery with another artist to mutual benefit. They are all blue-chip white males (but one):

Calder, Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol, LeWitt, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre,

Richard Diebenkorn, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly, Chuck Close, Philip Guston and

Agnes Martin.

Calder, who first moved to Paris for a time in 1926 and then in 1962 settled in France at

Indre-et-Loire, opens the show with 4 delightful Joan Mir influenced works of utter

dynamic balance from the 1940s and 50s, including Tower with Painting (1951). These

early abstract motion experimentations show perfectly his engineering-technical acumen

mixing with his artistic sensibility for machine-like play.

Alexander Calder, Tower with Painting (1951) metal, wood, thread, and paint with oil on canvas mounted on wood,

101.6 x 152.4 x 42.2 cm; The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;

Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

This swinging Calder reception gallery is followed by one devoted to Kelly, where I was

very impressed with his early painting Cit (1951). It is a chance-based (originally

movable) piece very much influenced by his meeting Jean Arp while living in Paris from

1948 to 1954. Cit came from a dream Kelly had at the Cit Internationale

Universitaire in Paris and is constructed of twenty joined wood panels whose abutting

edges amplify the flickering rhythm of the painted stripes. The work reflects Kellys

belief that his paintings are objects, but the other early work Spectrum I (1953)

explores as well the retinal aspects of the color spectrum.

Ellsworth Kelly, Cit (1951) oil on wood, twenty joined panels; overall: 56 1/2 x 70 3/4 x 1 3/4 in.; San Francisco

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

Helen and Charles Schwab Collection; Ellsworth Kelly; photo by Ben Blackwell

Following a group of typically freeform Cy Twombly paintings, there are a number of

very beautiful canvases by Richard Diebenkorn and Philip Guston that have been

juxtaposed in a room of sensual painting. Besides the Matisse influenced Ocean Park

#54" (1972), there were two sensational gushy paintings by Diebenkorn from 1955

Berkeley #23 and Berkeley #47 that took me by surprise. Gustons distinctive

abstract painting for his wife, For M. (1955), a small pinkness fracas, was intelligently

positioned next to his much woolier Evidence (1970), thereby bringing decades of

theoretical combatants to their knees.

Philip Guston, Evidence (1970) oil on canvas; 191.14 x 290.2 cm; San Francisco Museum of ModernArt, gift of the artist; Estate of Philip Guston; photo by Ben Blackwell

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #54" (1972) oil and charcoal on canvas; 254 cm x 205.74 cm, San Francisco

Museum of Modern Art, gift of Friends of Gerald Nordland; Richard Diebenkorn Foundation; photo by Ben

Blackwell

Then the show cools way down with a big gallery containing 3 Donald Judd stacks, that

includes the terrific horizontal To Susan Buckwalter (1964), some Carl Andre floor

sculptures, and two delicate wall drawings by Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 1: Drawing

Series II 18 (A & B) (1968) and January 2002, Wall Drawing 1A: Drawing Series II 18

(A & B) (2002).

Donald Judd, To Susan Buckwalter (1964) galvanized iron, aluminum, and lacquer; 76.2 x 358.14 x 76.2 cm; The

Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Judd Foundation / Licensed by

VAGA, New York; photo courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York; photo: Ian Reeves

The show physically climaxes with an enormous Andy Warhol gallery, particularly with

Warhols 2 silver chefs-doeuvres, Silver Marlon (1963) and National Velvet (1963).

Of course, it is with Warhol where the term Icon in the title of the show is appropriate, as

he piggy-backs on Hollywood movie stars promotional material, rendering stud Marlon

Brando and cute Liz Taylor as flickering, glamorous, almost devotional images in

courageous deterioration. For all those for whom art is message, that room has everything

we love about attempts to approximate the misty complexity of media.

Andy Warhol, National Velvet (1963) silkscreen ink, graphite, and silver paint on linen, 346.39 cm x 212.09 cm,

Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Barbara and Gerson Bakar, Doris and Donald Fisher, Evelyn, and Walter Haas,

Jr., Mimi and Peter Haas, Byron R. Meyer, Helen and Charles Schwab, Danielle, and Brooks Walker, Jr., and Judy

C. Webb; Albert M. Bender Fund; Tishler Trust; Victor Bergeron, Fund; Members' Accessions Fund; and gift of the

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Detail pf Andy Warhol, National Velvet (1963) photo by the author

Andy Warhol, Silver Marlon (1963) silkscreen ink, spray paint, and silver paint on linen; 177.17 x 201.93 cm; The

Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Andy Warhol Foundation for the

Visual Arts / ARS, New York

Partial installation view of Andy Warhol room, photo by the author

If you follow the commonsensical path, the show closes with a hat trick of Brice Marden

noodle line paintings, a shinning pair of classic Dan Flavins and three large Agnes Martin

meditations on tonality. Quality all the way down.

The 60s heavy artwork holdings within the integration of these two mega collections are

impeccable and impeccably installed. If there is a fault, it is that it lacks the punch of

d !o!u!b!t!. Only Warhols work continues to conceptualize doubtful questions through fragile

criticality: Is this painting? Is this printmaking? Is this rip-off? Is fame worth it?

Everything else in American Icons is a Masterwork that projects one aspect or another of

assured American self-confidence. Such a professionally polished presentation of

assurance conveyed in old existential Paris reminded me of what Andr Malraux said

about culture: that it is not inherited, but won through efforts to think and speak as an

individual against bureaucratic culture. It is a thought that closes the door on the criteria

of mastery if held as replacement for innovative aesthetic criteria. In that sense, American

Icons reminds us that art matters.

Dan Flavin, "untitled (to dear, durable Sol from Stephen, Sonja, and Dan) one" (1969) daylight and cool white

fluorescent light; 243.84 x 243.84 cm; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Phyllis C. Wattis Fund for Major

Accessions; Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo by Don Ross and Katherine Du Tiel

Agnes Martin, Falling Blue (1963) oil and graphite on linen; 182.56 x 182.88 cm; San Francisco Museum of Modern

Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Moses Lasky; Estate of Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo by

Ben Blackwell

American Icons: Masterworks from SFMOMA and the Fisher Collection (Icnes

Amricaines: Chefs-doeuvre du SFMOMA et de la collection Fisher) will move to

Muse Granet, Aix-en-Provence from July 11 - October 18, 2015

Joseph Nechvatal