Three Art Exhibits

I am trying to integrate three art exhibits I visited in San Francisco last week.  Reading an old (1980) book,  “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” by Lewis Thomas,  I came away thinking about an idea he presented about scientists.  Thomas reflected you can tell a good scientist from one of lesser caliber by how quickly they find a fruitful line of research.  A good scientist knows what kind of questions to ask, when to forge ahead, when to let go of an experiment.  Back to art, with this idea,  I wonder how an artist chooses what subject to paint.  Does a good artist just know what to paint?  How is the artist influenced by or reactive to the culture in which they live?   The first exhibit I saw was a large collection of Andy Warhol’s work at SFMOMA.  I must confess,  on the whole, Warhol’s art seemed like silk-screened commercial graphic art aimed at the teeming masses:  the tomato soup cans, the Brillo pad boxes and the many different colored pictures silk screens of Mao and of Marilyn Monroe.  I sat in front of many silk screens of the same Mao, each picture with different colors, pondering how the colors used affected what I saw and how I felt about the pictures.  So many of his topics were taken from our commercial culture.  Was he saying the value of everything, even art, is understood in purely dollar amounts or is he telling us, folks, this is your culture?

The second exhibit was of early Ruben’s art at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.  His topics, biblical and mythological, were inspired by the high culture of early 17th century Europe.  As I looked at the huge masterful works of Daniel in the Lion’s Den or the Annunciation, it seemed to me his art was aimed at the elite at the time.  I was taken by his use of the color red in each painting, red being a dye only the very wealthy could afford, he was raising up the wealthy to biblical status.  The rich noblemen, kings and clergy could see themselves portrayed in his paintings with all the billowing silk of the clothes and with the colors.  Even the baby Jesuses were European, with blond hair.

In contrast to the first two, the third exhibit was a very small one at the Minnesota St. Project in San Francisco.  It is a huge factory gutted with only the rusted vertical steel beams and ceiling beams remaining of the interior with two stories of small galleries on each side of the building.  It was a beautiful clean open space in a part of SF called Dogpatch, where I’d never been before.  Gallery 200 (Institute of advanced Uncertainty) had small shows of two artists’ —-Cappy Coates and Mandy Fitzhugh Wallace—work.  We came to see Cappy’s paintings but it was Mandy that captured our interest because she was there in the gallery.  We engaged her in conversation and learned how she came to paint the subjects she did.  She used images from the past, in one case half completed buildings seen in Giotto’s Annunciation, were repeated and tied to modern images she pulled from her unconscious.  It got me thinking about how the themes seen in paintings haven’t changed so much, just the expression of them.  Themes of power, beauty, inspiration, love and violence are seen in all the exhibits.  Art is about seeing things.  I came away wondering if we only see what is in our minds already.  Do we need a mental model to guide us and help us see and interpret the art?  How hard is it to see something totally new and begin to wrestle with its meaning?   Maybe that’s what art is trying to do, to give us something new to think about in the language of our present culture?