The Fisher Collection at SFMOMA 1: The Donald

Bob Fisher, one of the sons of Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher, addressed the cultural press on Wednesday morning at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.



He was there as the Fisher family representative for a major, hastily assembled exhibition, "Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection," which is opening on Friday the 25th.



Donald Fisher, in one of many pugnacious moves over the course of his lifetime, was insisting until recently that his 1,110 piece modern art collection should be housed in a modernist building to be constructed in the middle of Presidio Park.



The idea of a massive new development in a national park didn't go over so well with many San Franciscans, some of them fairly rich and powerful themselves. However, it seemed a done deal because of Fisher's massive wealth and political connections, not to mention the fact he was the first Chairman of the Presidio Trust when the military base was transformed into a supposedly self-sufficient national park.



People wondered why he didn't just donate his collection to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he and his wife had long been trustees, and from reading between the lines the issue was one of control. Fisher demanded it and the museum wouldn't cede it, so Fisher decided to build an institution in what he probably considered "his" park.



In September of 2009, the 81-year-old patriarch Donald Fisher died of cancer, and the next day there was an announcement in the San Francisco Chronicle that the entire Fisher Collection had been donated to SFMOMA after all.



There were some conditions, including building a huge addition to the 10-year-old museum, which is supposed to be completed in five years or so if the money is raised.



The cliche "Behind every fortune lies a great crime" is pertinent in Mr. Fisher's case. Besides being a union-hating, right-wing Republican, his corporation's subcontractors routinely used child slave labor (click here for a 2007 U.K. Guardian article) and along with son Bob, he formed the Humboldt Redwood Co. which specialized in clear cutting old growth redwood trees in Mendocino County (click here for the gapsucks.com website).



Like many malevolent robber barons before him, Donald Fisher laundered the fruits of his capitalism into art treasures, and the impressive result now belongs to the people of San Francisco.

Official Groundbreaking at SFMOMA

Wednesday morning, in a back alley downtown behind SFMOMA, there was an official groundbreaking ceremony for the huge new addition to the museum which will close down the current building for the next three years.



The ceremony was attended by press, a few politicians, architects and builders, along with museum trustees such as Doris Fisher above center and Cissy Swig posing in an SFMOMA hardhat below. The grande dames of San Francisco seemed to be having a marvelous time at the short ceremony, and even the weather cooperated.



It was also interesting seeing who was not there, namely the two powerbrokers Dede Wilsey and Willie Brown, Jr.



The museum sits in Supervisor Jane Kim's District 6, and she was looking particularly glamorous during her short speech praising the museum for its proposed new policy upon its reopening of free admission for youth under the age of 18. "I grew up in New York where going to museums frequently was a part of everyone's childhood."



There was a strange moment when the speeches started, and the VIPs sat down in about two dozen chairs at the front while everybody else remained standing. Kim had taken a seat that had been reserved for her, but Charlotte Schultz (above center with JD Beltran on the left) did not seem to be one of the official VIPs and did not have a seat. This was something I have never seen before, since Schultz usually seems to be running every detail at every event she attends. From what I could make out, it looked like she was there to babysit Mayor Ed Lee for the morning. Anyway, Supervisor Kim had set her purse down on the seat next to her, and Charlotte finally squeezed in as if she was a Muni passenger trying to get the last empty seat that somebody was hogging with their belongings. Kim eventually picked up the purse and they politely smiled at each other.



Charles Schwab, another San Francisco self-made Republican billionaire like the late Don Fisher whose collection is the impetus for this museum expansion, gave a self-deprecating speech that started with a joke about the half-destroyed fire station at the construction site being the latest modern art acquisition for the institution. He then went on to praise Mayor Ed Lee below for being a visionary "who can get things done."



It would have been more truthful, though slightly less politic, to say Mayor Lee is somebody who enables billionaires to "get things done," but it was not that kind of event. Lee gave his usual stumbling, bland mumblecore speech, and told us how excited he was about going to Lowell High School's graduation later that day where he was going to tell them all about the free admission for youth.



Craig Stryker above, the Norwegian architect from Snøhetta that is designing the new building, was smart and charming in person, but his public speech started with an unfortunate analogy. He told us that creating a large public building was like a birth, except there were many partners, so it was a polyamorous situation which could get a bit sticky. It was very funny watching everyone try not to show their discomfort as his analogy only got worse as it went along.



A small contingent of schoolchildren from Bessie Carmichael Elementary School nearby were brought to the groundbreaking site, and after a countdown, pushed the button that set off a spectacular confetti bomb.



Starting today, SFMOMA is free of charge to the public for the last four days of the old building's existence. There are performances, special displays, and a whole host of activities planned for this weekend, including an all-night party on Saturday night on the rooftop. Click here for a schedule. It should be a lot of fun.

The New SFMOMA 3: A Few of Our Favorite Things

The Fisher Family collection has brought a number of treasures to the public sphere at SFMOMA, including the huge, wonderful Cy Twombly 1971 Untitled painting above, where a docent was dutifully explaining its significance to a young couple.



There is also a beautiful Diebenkorn, the 1973 Ocean Park #67.



In a New York Times review of the building's opening, Roberta Smith wrote: "The cornucopia of new or newly promised gifts includes a cache that is neither: the 1,100-work postwar collection — of which a selection of 260 is on view — accumulated by Donald and Doris Fisher, founders of the Gap, who had once considered building a private museum. In 2009, their holdings were lent to the museum for 100 years, which is also a bump up of some kind, although the collection is entirely too white, male and blue-chip, and comes with stipulations that may prove restrictive." At least we have Duane Hanson's 1994 hyperreal sculpture Policeman to guard all that treasure.



It was refreshing leaving the floors dedicated to the Fisher Collection and stumbling across a small, second floor exhibition dedicated to Northern California artists, including the great hippie-era UC Davis ceramics guru Robert Arneson represented by the California Artist self-portrait above.



Nearby was another recent museum acquisition, a late, 1963 Edward Hopper painting, Intermission.



Also representing NoCal was a gorgeous Wayne Thiebuad, the 1997 Flatbed River.



My favorite discovery of the afternoon was the feminist, Communist painter Alice Neel (1900-1984) whose 1978 portrait of a gay artist friend, Geoffrey Hendricks, and his boyfriend Brian perfectly captures that moment in time.

The Fisher Collection at SFMOMA 2: Gigantism

The current exhibit on the top two floors of the museum is only displaying 160 out of the 1,100 piece collection, and you can see why.



They are all huge.



No wonder he wanted his own monster museum.



When Donald Fisher died in 2009, there were respectful obituaries in all the local media with the exception of Matt Smith in the SF Weekly who had just read a ghost-written autobiography of Donald Fisher, where he brags about his union-busting and support of charter schools where he was an early investor (click here).



One of the most damning quotes from the book is about his art collecting methods:

"One of my principles is to never buy an artist that I can't sell at auction... Buying art pieces in [the $5,000] price category means I might hit one out of 20, where the artist becomes very valuable. So what do I do with the other 19 that are worth only $5,000 each or less? I don't like those odds. I'd rather spend more money on an artist who is worth something right now and figure that piece has a good chance to appreciate. Then, if I don't like it later, at least I can sell it. Good modern art and the business of fashion make great style-mates."

In other words, he went for the blue-chip artists of his time, like Gerhard Richter (above) and Frank Stella (below).



There are a lot of wonderful works, though, that have probably bolstered the museum's permanent collection by an order of ten.



A few of my favorite things are some Martin Puryear sculptures...



...a trio of major Chuck Close portraits...



...a gorgeous Diebenkorn...



...and one of the sweetest and smallest (in context) paintings, a Hockney double portrait.



I look forward to getting to know them.

The New SFMOMA 1: Admiring Les Femmes

Last month I was the guest of my friend Patrick Vaz for a first look at the newly expanded SFMOMA, which has tripled in size in order to house the modern art collection of the late Donald Fisher, who bequeathed his fortune in art to the institution on his deathbed in 2009. We entered through the Third Street lobby, and noticed that the most striking part of the original Mario Botta design from 1995, the striped, stone staircase, had been replaced with a maple Scandinavian Modern stairway that strangely diminishes the space.



In an interesting review of the new building by L.A. Times architectural critic Christopher Hawthorne, he writes about the change: “Taking its place is a much smaller staircase by Snohetta [the Norwegian architects of the expanded building], clad in maple, that leads directly from the new lobby down to the old one. The really striking quality of that moment of aggression toward the Botta building is that is seems altogether out of character with the rest of the addition. In almost every other way the Snohetta design is handsome, carefully intelligent, self-effacing and agreeable.”



The new ticketing lobby is now on the second floor, and it looks a bit like an ugly small city airport.



The lighting, in particular, makes one want to flee.



The lobby does allow for an aerial view of a huge Richard Serra sculpture, Sequence, that engulfs the secondary, Howard Street lobby, which you can walk through without paying admission.



Our plan was to survey the entire, seven-story museum, but before suffering from art fatigue, we decided to worship two highlights, starting with SFMOMA’s version of the Mona Lisa, Henri Matisse’s 1905 painting, Femme au chapeau.



Then it was up an elevator to the fourth floor where there was supposed to be an octagonal room devoted to paintings by Agnes Martin.



To get to Agnes, one has to wade through lots of Ellsworth Kelly and other modernist dudes, which is either annoying or inspiring depending on your point of view.



Agnes Martin seems to be having a cultural moment right now, with a huge retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum that has been traveling around the world receiving rapturous reviews.



Half the fun of the little Agnes Martin chapel at SFMOMA was watching people indulging in their own worshipful rites, including the new sacrament of the Selfie. After our own obeisance at the Agnes Altar, we were ready to take on the rest of the museum.

The New SFMOMA 2: Weird Feng Shui

On the top floor of the new SFMOMA, there is an outdoor balcony where you are greeted by ominous signage.



There are a few sculptures along a narrow walkway that stretches across most of the eastern side of the building.



In the L.A. Times, Christopher Hawthorne wrote: "Outside, as a presence in the cityscape, the Snohetta tower, clad in rippling off-white panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer, is even more apologetic about both its ambition and its bulk. It is everywhere shaved off and pinned back, forever curving away from you as you stand on its one of extensive outdoor terraces and try to assess its scale and civic personality.



The contrast between that attitude and the way the other new towers in San Francisco's thickening skyline carry themselves is extreme. As you look east from the higher of the two terraces, on the seventh floor, you are confronted with the aggressively large and broad-shouldered dark-glass form of a new 26-story office building at 2nd and Howard streets, designed by Thomas Phifer and leased by LinkedIn. The SFMOMA tower is by comparison all stooping form and retreating volume."



Hawthorne continues: "The unfortunate symbolism of this relationship — the cultural building practically tripping over itself to stand down and out of the way, the new commercial buildings blithely taking up as much space in the sky as they can — seems typical of the balance of power in the new, money-drenched San Francisco. (The arts are not so much on the run here — how could they be, when there is so much wealth on so many boards of trustees? — as keenly aware of their place in the pecking order.)"



At the end of the 7th floor terrace, instead of a public exit/entrance that would allow for the smooth circulation of museum attendees, there is a clumsy sign insisting you retrace your steps to exit, an example of bad feng shui which is unfortunately mirrored in a number of the galleries.



The stairways on the Third Street side of the structure have been eliminated, except for the first couple of floors, so to move from one level to another you have the choice of a set of elevators, or a series of long, narrow staircases that are wedged into the new wing. All I could think of was what a mess it would be in an earthquake.



On the third floor, there is another outdoor space framed by the nation's largest "Living Wall," which I was looking forward to except that the terrace itself is so narrow one feels hemmed in rather than liberated.



Next to the Living Wall is the Alexander Calder Motion Lab, housing a huge collection of Calder mobiles collected by Donald Fisher.



"Motion Lab" is a misnomer, though. None of the mobiles are moving, which sort of defeats the purpose of kinetic sculpture.

Next Installment: A few of our favorite things at SFMOMA.