This one almost got away from us. Originally scheduled on a Thursday morning, we discovered the museum opens late on Thursdays so we moved our visit to Tuesday. But the driver/docent developed sniffles and only the two of us who were planning to go by train/ferry on a crisp winter day made the trip. Also, with no RSVP, I felt someone had to show up in case there was anyone we didn’t know about (there wasn’t).

The artist’s early abstract expressionism was commercially very successful. Abstract in the sense you could tell the subject was a dog or a toddler, her canvasses featured heavy impasto and were sought by NYC and L.A. galleries and collectors. After the birth of her child, the artist’s style began to change to something more like Picasso’s, whom she admired. Her work became biographical, as Picasso’s is, and she developed her own distinctive visual style, as Picasso did. But large faces are hard to live with, and collectors planning to display in a residential setting were not attracted. Nevertheless, she kept painting, divorcing, marrying, traveling and seeking spiritually.

There were many self-portraits, and Dianne noticed one with the artist wearing a similar jacket and a wild 1960s hat, so she asked for this shot. Dianne knew how to get to the glass elevator that rises on an angle to reach Salesforce Park where we walked the length on our way to the museum. I had some fun posing in front of the gold curtain by the 1960’s exhibit.

War Side of Mask Sculpture
photo by Nanette Simmons

Walter Byck, owner of the sculpture garden at Paradise Ridge Winery, gave the OLLI Art Club a tour, followed by a lunch hosted by Connie Codding.

This bus-shelter shaped sculpture has a WAR side holding ceramic masks of horror and loss. Stepping inside, one can see the inside of each mask, painted with the emotions of rage, revenge, domination and all that leads to war. On the other side of the “bus-shelter” are the PEACE masks: both the inside feelings and the outside manifestations of peace, joy, connection, safety, friendship and community.

Walter, in his 90s, walked us around, pointing with his cane at the kinetic sculpture by Ned Kahn and other electronic, motion-sensor, sound-emitting works. He unlocked “The Shoe” and Steering Committee Member Nanette went all the way up, taking photos of the top floor. More than twenty people joined us for the tour and talk.

Visited the fabulous Guo Pei Exhibit at the Legion of Honor — it is as astonishing as my friends described!

This dress looks like a tabernacle to me.

I got a ride to San Francisco with hiking buddy Laura because the lease on her electric car is coming to an end and she needs to use up the miles. My membership in the Fine Arts Museum allows two tickets, so it worked out for both of us!

The photographs do not capture the architecture or dazzling use of materials by Guo Pei. It is truly something that needs to be seen in person to be appreciated. I’m so glad that the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco art show more work by people who aren’t straight, Christian, able-bodied white males.

Linda Loveland Reid took this snap of me standing next to one of her three paintings on display at the opening reception for the Apple Blossom Festival. Interestingly, in the main gallery adjacent at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, a poem by Linda was on display next to the painting to which it referred — an example of Ekphrasis. Notice my “Covid hair” styled to hide the growing-out blonde tresses.

Photo by Linda Loveland Reid

A few days ago, Linda Loveland Reid gave a wonderful talk on Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as a fundraiser for the Sebastopol Center for the arts. As I though about Abstract Expressionism and its impact on artists, I sent this Email to Linda.

I have been thinking about what you said about Abstract Expressionism. I remember Judy Chicago’s rage at being excluded from prestige museums despite producing art that seemed to be exactly what they defined. The ones we saw at the DeYoung show were “perfect.”

I think the art establishment used the stringent intellectual shibboleths as a way to exclude people they didn’t like — clangorous Judy Chicago, for example, or not-straight white males like Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. The Art Establishment clinging to their elite status was like trying to hold a wolf by the ears.

Their forceful superiority got knocked down so far that the neo-Dadaists were supplanted by Pop artists. And yet two prime examples of tall, slim, elegant, educated, congenial, social male artists are Diebenkorn and Jeff Koons. I never could figure out why Koons got away with the stuff he peddled until I saw him speak on a panel at the Getty Museum in Malibu as part of their “Plato” show. The Getty was actually displaying his “Play-Doh” as part of the exhibition ancient Greek and Roman art as a play-on-words. The room-size sculpture is made of enameled aluminum, and yet somehow it seemed to smell like the children’s toy.

When elegant, refined Koons spoke, I could see why the new-money in L.A. swooned over him. It really felt, to me, like “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

Koons’s work made me long for abstract expressionism in all its christian-white-male-chauvinist glory.