San Francisco Proud Of Modern Art Museum

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27680, 9 June 1955, Page 11

San Francisco Proud Of Modern Art Museum

[U.S. Information Service]

San Francisco. The twentieth anniversary of the San Francisco Museum of Art is attracting many thousands of visitors. “This is the most important and inclusive exhibition drawn from local sources that we have ever presented,” said Dr. Grace L. Morley, who has been director of the museum since its opening in 1935. The exhibit, which has been selected from 70 private collections in the San Francisco Bay area, includes works by such modern masters as Renoir, Degas, Utrillo, Matisse, Picasso, de Chirico, Lehmbruck, Hofer, Kokoschka, Feininger, Tanguy, Dufy, Rouault, Modigiani, Miro,. O’Keefe Marin, and many others. Since its foundation, the San Francisco Museum of Art has devoted itself primarily to contemporary art, American and European, and it plays a rolte in the community much like that of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

One of the pieces on display in the present anniversary exhibit is the newly-acquired portrait of Sarah Stein, painted by Henry Matisse in 1916. Another new gift to the museum is a portrait of her husband Michael Stein. The Steins were well-known art collectors who brought back the first Matisse works to the United States from Paris. Michael Stein was a brother of Gertrude Stein the famous American writer and friend of Ernest Hemingway. These two paintings will be the nucleus of a planned Stein Memorial collection of the museum. Matisse himself sent two drawings to the collection just before his death last year.

Other works on display that receive, special attention from the visitors are Picasso’s “Street Scene,” Franz Marc’s “Mountains,” Diego Rivera’s “Flower Vendor” and two handsome paintings by Braque, “The Table” and “Vase, Palette and Mandolin.”

The history of the museum goes back to 1871 when the San Francisco Art Association was formed to bring temporary exhibitions to the city. After the Panama Pacific International Exhibit, held in 1915 in San Francisco, the association began holding yeararound shows at the Palace of fine Arts and these met with immediate success. The attendance rose to 200,000 a year. In 1935 the association found a permanent home for the museum in the marbled, skylighted Veterans Building in the San Francisco Civic Centre. In the past two decades, the museum’s policy has been one of educating

the artists and the public in the current trend of contemporary art. During the first decade it presented up to 100 exhibitions annually; but later it decreased the number to 45 in order to present large shows which were able to “explore systematically a movement or a personality important to contemporary trends,” as Dr. Morley explained. “Thus.” she said, “a survey of landscape painting, a number of exhibitions on different aspects of impressionism, on Cezanne. Gauguin, Klee and others, ?n S i! an d art, futurism, and 19th century American forerunners of contemporary American art provided the perspective and background for appreciating the evolution of art locally and for understanding contemporary developments.”

This programme has proved very successful for the museum. Membership in the museum association had grown to more than 3500. Even more important, Dr. Morley feels, is that the character of the membership has changed. Twenty years ago members of the museum were older persons with a great deal of leisure time. Now the museum has built up a large public hf young persons. One result of this is that the museum became the first in the United States to remain open to public until 10 p.m. daily, so that visitors can come to enjoy the treasures after working hours. Another innovation introduced by the museum was the establishment in 1947 of a large “Rental Gallery.” Local artists bring their works to the museum to be rented and members of the association take them home for a period of three months. If the customer feels that the work “wears well” he may buy it, or he may return it to the museum where it is rented out to another prospective customer. Other activities of the San Francisco Museum of Art include concerts, educational television programmes and art classes for both adults and children. One programme that has achieved notable success is the “Art in Cinema” series presented every year. Prominent motion picture directors attend showings of their films and comment on their work.

San Francisco has two other museums with large collections of modern art, the de Young Memorial and the Californian Palace of the Legion of Honor. Theses museums, however, do not concentrate exclusively on cantemorary -art. The San Francisco Museum of Art is one of the three American institutions—the others are in New York and Boston—devoted solely to the display of modern art.