San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
I just saw the Ansel Adams & Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit at SFMOMA. I admire both artists, but the show was a poor curatorial choice. Ansel Adams would have hated it. He preferred to have his photographs shown against dark walls, to give better luminosity to the prints. The walls here were stark white.
Adams’ work was small (they featured none of his larger works), detailed, and black & white. O’Keeffe’s work was larger, soft, and vibrantly colored. There was only one set of images that worked well together. He has a photograph and she has a watercolor of the same church in Taos, New Mexico. (Interestingly enough, these two images were chosen for the cover of the show catalog.) If you looked at the rest of the artworks together, Adams’ work looked a bit too dark and O’Keeffe’s looked a bit too flashy. I had to go through the show twice; ignoring Adams’ work on the first pass and ignoring O’Keeffe’s on the second. They were friends in real life, but so were Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Excellent work, but commingling them was a curatorial failure.
On the other hand seeing the work prints and contact sheets for Robert Frank’s “The Americans” was a wonderful treat.
Adams’ work was small (they featured none of his larger works), detailed, and black & white. O’Keeffe’s work was larger, soft, and vibrantly colored. There was only one set of images that worked well together. He has a photograph and she has a watercolor of the same church in Taos, New Mexico. (Interestingly enough, these two images were chosen for the cover of the show catalog.) If you looked at the rest of the artworks together, Adams’ work looked a bit too dark and O’Keeffe’s looked a bit too flashy. I had to go through the show twice; ignoring Adams’ work on the first pass and ignoring O’Keeffe’s on the second. They were friends in real life, but so were Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Excellent work, but commingling them was a curatorial failure.
On the other hand seeing the work prints and contact sheets for Robert Frank’s “The Americans” was a wonderful treat.