Exceptional art exhibitions this year
The year’s highlights include Old Masters and new insights
It’s a good year for a “10 best” list of outstanding attractions at Bay Area museums. Fortunately, there’s still time to catch five of the best before 2015 comes to an end.
Many of the year’s notable exhibits surveyed cultures as well as art: Hawaii’s royal family, India’s past and present, the crosscurrent between Japan and the West.
If there were fewer major exhibits, one reason is that two major museums were closed all year.
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will reopen in a new home Jan. 31. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art reopens May 14 in a vastly expanded building.
Here are the year’s highlights (with shows that are still running so noted):
1 “Jewel City”: As San Francisco celebrated the centennial of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the de Young Museum actually recreated a portion of it with artwork that was shown at the fair. Opening in October, it surveys European and American impressionism (still audience favorites) and modernist paintings (still looking fresh). A bonus: charming paintings of the 1915 exposition palaces and gardens. (Runs through Jan. 10.)
2 “Looking East”: Art and design flowing back and forth between the United States and Japan is common nowadays, but how did it start? One answer arrived in October, with a fascinating collection at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. It more than lives up to its subtitle, “How Japan Inspired Monet, Van Gogh and Other Western Artists.” The influence displayed is vast, from California artists’ woodblock prints to Mary Cassatt’s domestic scenes and Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters. (Runs through Feb. 7.) 3 Richard Diebenkorn: Known for big, colorful paintings that edged from abstract to figurative, Diebenkorn was equally bold — on a smaller scale — early in his career. He studied art at Stanford in the 1940s, and the university’s Cantor Arts Center is offering a revealing look at his sketchbooks, watercolors and a series of paintings of familiar California scenes. It opened in September, giving a rare look at the roots of a major artist’s style and content. (Runs through Aug. 2.) 4 “Promised Land: Jacob Lawrence”: His vast series of paintings on the migration of African-Americans from south to north early in the 20th century brought him fame. But Lawrence’s paintings, lithographs and illustrations, from a long career, were not often seen in their original form. Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center brought him to the forefront in April with the stunning display of a major donation — 16 of his paintings and 39 prints and an illustrated book. It only began the Cantor’s “conversation” with the notable artist. (Closed.)
5 National Galleries of Scotland: If San Francisco museums are short of Old Masters, this exhibit of “Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland” filled the gaps splendidly. It was like a museum-within-a-museum at the de Young in March through May. Here, within ambling distance, were Botticelli, van Dyck, Veronese, Titian, Rembrandt and Hals. Plus Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin and Americans such as Thomas Church and John Singer Sargent. It was like an art tour of Europe, without the cramped airliner. (Closed.)
6 “J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free”:
It helped to have seen Mike Leigh’s “Mr. Turner.” The film suggested the shocking impact of the eccentric English painter, which was easily imagined in the exhibit at the de Young
Museum opening in June. The show covered only the last 15 years of his career, but many paintings were so intensely, achingly personal that his entire life seemed to pass before our eyes. The almost-abstract scenes eclipsed the historical pageantry. (Closed.)
7 “Royal Hawaiian Featherwork”: The colors are vibrant, even iridescent. The capes and cloaks and leis created from thousands of feathers look both historic and modern. But the stories they tell of Hawaii’s past royalty offer just as much impact and intrigue at the de Young Museum. One cape was worn by the crown prince of Kauai when he visited Boston in 1789, another by a Hawaiian senator who fought against statehood in the 1950s. (Opened in August; runs through Feb. 28.)
8 Contemporary Asian Art: San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum took a break from touring shows in September, drawing on its own stock to produce “First Look: Collecting Contemporary at the Asian.” The survey of 57 works by Asian and Asian-American artists updated a wide variety of media. They ranged from Korean ceramics to Cambodian weaving to a Chinese landscape with a video overlay of factories and freeways. The show brought the museum smartly into the present, too. (Closed.)
9 Indian Photography: Historic photographs of India in the 19th century have received their share of attention in museums. But what if contemporary photographers reconsidered the past with fresh ideas from the present? That was the fascinating,
almost kaleidoscopic effect of “Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India.” The February-to-August exhibit offered another strong, unique cultural survey at the San Jose Museum of Art. (Closed.)
10 “The Forty
Part Motet”: If you could walk among a 40-voice choir singing a 16th-century work, it might be called “performance art.” If you streamed each voice through a separate speaker, arranged in a circle, and allowed visitors to stand or sit or walk among them, it’s a “spatial re-enactment.” That’s what Canadian artist Janet Cardiff calls this sound installation of the Salisbury Cathedral Choir performing Thomas Tallis’ “Forty Part Motet.” It is set up in an otherwise bare room at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center, co-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art, and it is transcendent. (Runs through Jan. 18. Free, but advance reservations are available at MotetTickets.org.)