Exhibit of the week: The Anniversary Show

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Through Jan. 16, 2010

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art would not exist precisely “as it does today” if it weren’t for a woman named Grace McCann Morley, said Katie Worth in the San Francisco Examiner. In 1915, to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal and the rebuilding of San Francisco following its 1906 earthquake, the city held the Pan-Pacific International Exhibition. “Museums from around the world lent great works of art,” and after it was all over, a group of local artists and “art-savvy San Franciscans” decided their city needed its own permanent institution dedicated to exhibiting 20th-century painting, sculpture, and photography. Still, two full decades of hard work lay ahead before Morley, the museum’s first director, opened the doors to SFMOMA’s permanent home.

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Now, to celebrate its 75th anniversary, SFMOMA has undertaken a radical reinstallation of its holdings, said Sura Wood in the San Jose Mercury News. Encompassing more than 400 works, the show reveals the “behind-the-scenes stories” of how the collection came together over the course of the century. Morley acquired works by major European modernists, from Pablo Picasso to Paul Klee. Henri Matisse’s early fauvist “masterpiece Femme au Chapeau (1905) remains the museum’s crowning glory. Her Continental tastes, though, were balanced by founding trustee Albert Bender’s “affinity for local artists”—including photo­graphers Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Imogen Cunningham—and the Mexican modernism of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

“People expecting flashiness” from this exhibition “may come away disappointed at first,” said Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle. To its credit, SFMOMA hasn’t just mounted a greatest-hits show but a “head-snapping rehanging” that provides a considered account of the institution’s own history. “A museum celebrating itself inevitably risks exaggerating its prestige, influence, or prescience.” In truth, SFMOMA wasn’t at the forefront of every single artistic movement, and this exhibition doesn’t pretend that it was. One area where it did wield influence, however, was in discovering and promoting such Bay Area artists as Wayne Thiebaud, Bruce Conner, and Jay DeFeo. Yet the “real surprises” here are among San Francisco artists from earlier in the century. Little-known works by such sculptors as Beniamino Bufano, Robert B. Howard, and the African-American Sargent Johnson fit right in alongside accepted masterpieces by Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, and Constantin Brancusi—a tribute to the “unblinkered vision” of the museums’ founders.