Yesterday we did something we had been meaning to do for a long time: we went to see the Picasso and the Americans show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was big, and it was brash, and we enjoyed it immensely.
Our docent was a matronly schoolteacher who clearly knew her stuff. The pieces she chose for comparison, and the anecdotes with while she connected them, gave our mature audience, also well-informed themselves, a much better understanding of the influence the Spanish master had on his younger American counterparts, Max Weber, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Louise Bourgeois, and others.
The entire fifth floor of the MOMA had been given up for the show, and all the galleries were well arranged. The show is due to close on May 28, so if you want to see it, you still have about three weeks to go.
Also on view on the museum's fourth floor are paintings by Brice Marden, whose panels of flat color filled several galleries (and frankly did nothing for us visually or emotionally) but whose large canvases of sensuous lines of muted color were worth contemplating.
It was all in all an afternoon well spent in The City.
A compendium of images - most original, some not - words, and links, sometimes musical, gathered for the exclusive enjoyment of friends and relatives, some old, and some new.
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