Last weekend, I visited De Young Museum to see the special exhibit: Modernism from the National Gallery of Art: The Robert & Jane Meyerhoff Collection.
The exhibition included many important modern masters, with works in the styles ranging from almost realism to schematic abstract and cartoonish.
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To me, the most astonishing offering was a series of paintings by Barnett Newman, titled The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani, created from 1958 to 1966. Spartan and aesthetically pleasing, the group paintings had an otherworldly beauty and spirituality. The scope of the paintings was vast; and despite the long period of the creation, this series never veered away from the clearly defined concept, and these canvases could be appreciated individually or as a whole:
Similarly, I found this Rothko's abstract piece, in very subdued palettes, exceedingly beautiful. It surely made a stark contrast to his more vibrantly painted pieces, particularly his red and purple pieces. It is a very meditative piece:
Untitled, 1969, Mark Rothko
The Bradley Walker Tomlin painting was definitely vibrantly colorful and also amazingly beautiful, and even orderly, despite the deceptive chaos:
Maneuver for Position, 1947, Bradley Walker Tomlin
Hans Hoffmann's piece included was a typical Hofmann - strong color contrasts, geometric pattens seemed ever moving on the canvas. Very dynamic:
Autumn Gold and detail, 1957, Hans Hofmann
Other pieces with similar complexities and contrasts are these pieces below, in turn subtle, bold, schematic, and chaotic:
Essex and Hester (Red), 1958, Grace Hartigan
Desert Landscape, 1951, William Baziotes
Perilous Night, 1982, Jasper Johns
Souvenirs, 1980-84, Howard Hodgkin
The following group included the most representative and visually complex offerings, intricate in patterns and meanings:
La round des images, 1977, Jean Dubuffet
Saigon, Minnesota, 1985, Eric Fischl
Archive, 1963, Robert Rauschenberg
Courtroom, 1970, Philip Guston
The following group paintings were the most schematic and purely abstract, and some of them were quite lovely, such as those by Ad Reinhardt:
Graphics Tablet, 1998, Terry Winters
Picasso's Skull, 1989-90, Brice Marden
Untitled (Yellow and White), Untitled (Red and Gray), 1950, Ad Reinhardt
1951-N, 1951, Clyfford Still
Study for Homage to the Square_ Light Rising, 1950, altered 1959, Josef Albers
First Theme, 1964, Burgoyne Diller
Untitled #2, 1981, Agnes Martin
And lastly, there were some Roy Lichtenstein's cartoonish paintings - certainly there was no denying that there was some beauty in them, but they just didn't speak to me, as to some other absorbed patrons:
Painting with Statue of Liberty, 1983, Roy Lichtenstein
Entablature, 1974, Roy Lichtenstein
The exhibit was in the Herbst Special Exhibition Galleries of De Young Museum and it ran from June 7, 2014 to October 12, 2014. Highly recommended.
And you can tweet about it:
Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
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- Last Trip to a Museum in 2012 - The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism at De Young Museum in San Francisco
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- Venetian Masterpieces from Vienna at De Young Museum
- Birth of Impressionism at De Young Museum, San Francisco
- Post-Impressionism Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, De Young Museum, San Francisco 2010-11
- Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris - De Young Museum, San Francisco
- Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay at De Young Museum, San Francisco
- My Favorite De Young Museum Collections
- My Favorite Paintings at National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
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