New SFMOMA: The Whirlwind Tour

Last week we opined on SFMOMA's new house; now we take a look at what's inside.

The excitement that greets a new building comes with an opportunity for a museum to reintroduce itself to the art world and invigorate donors who want their collections displayed in a high-profile destination venue. SFMOMA, clearly thriving with triple the previous exhibition area at their disposal, is currently showing off some 1,900 objects, over 600 of them new and promised gifts, in a classy, understated arena where they can luxuriate and shine.

This is especially true for the Doris and Donald Fisher postwar and contemporary art collection that's on a century-long loan to SFMOMA, and was the raison d'etre for the expansion. 260 of the Fishers' 1,100 works, portions of which occupy four floors, really pop in the cool, spacious galleries, and benefit greatly from Senior Curator Gary Garrels' impeccable installation.

For example, the late Ellsworth Kelly's paintings, with their crisp lines and potent color fields, seem more bracingly beautiful than ever, and a curved chapel gallery for Agnes Martin's pale minimalist abstract canvases adds a solemn grace note. A generous amount of space is allocated to post-1960 German Art, where Gerhard Richter's oils reign and Anselm Kiefer's huge, rangy, unhinged paintings and collaged pieces have plenty of room to maneuver.

Kiefer draws from a stew of cabalistic, Germanic, Christian and Nordic mythology, Wagner's Ring cycle and literary sources, marinated in the aftermath of Nazi annihilation; seeing these works stirred fond memories of the museum's exhilarating and unforgettable Kiefer retrospective in 2006. I counted nine epic works on the 6th floor, including the battered "Melancholia" (1990-91), a grounded war plane of lead and steel, a refugee, perhaps, from the artist's early childhood amid the rubble and privation of post-WWII Germany. There's the ominous "Sulamith" (1983), a behemoth acrylic-and-oil woodcut with shellacked straw, which evokes underworld darkness and dread, death-camp crematoria and the bowels of hell; the architecture of a Nazi Memorial Hall was one of its inspirations. Three additional, recently gifted/promised Kiefers are on the 4th floor.

Had enough Sturm und Drang? Unmitigated delight is one flight down in the Alexander Calder Motion Lab, an assortment of the maestro's ingenious mobiles and stabiles from the late 1920s through the late 60s. Installed both inside and outdoors, they each achieve a perfect balance between wit, playfulness and engineering. The terrace with the so-called Living Wall is home to "Big Crinkly" (1969), a red-based, long-necked stabile that could be a headless giraffe separated from the herd; three cheerful geometric pieces, one white, the others blue and black, are impossibly suspended, weather vane-style, from a wire across the top. The light-filled gallery containing Calder's mobiles features his famous "Aquarium" (1929), where he twisted black wire into the shape of a fish bowl with the astonishing ease of someone dashing off a sketch.

Wander into the Material Meditations section and you'll come upon a gathering of chairs better admired than sat upon. Michael Young's semi-circular molten throne chair in geological blue, pressure cast with gas at 8,000 degrees, looks as if it had been forged in a volcano, but my personal favorite is Marijn van der Poll's smashed steel "do hit" chair, which comes with a handy sledgehammer in case the urge to inflict more damage should overtake you.

The advent of the Pritzker Center for Photography, the largest gallery, research and interactive space dedicated to photography at an American art museum, is a boon to those who love the medium. "California and The West," one of the center's two inaugural exhibitions, charts how the Golden State's landscape has evolved, from 1856 to 2014, and the approaches photographers have taken in documenting it, capturing its majestic beauty and turning wild nature into art. The show of 200 recent and promised gifts features local icons Carleton Watkins, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Ansel Adams, Minor White and Dorothea Lange, among many others.

"About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change," an ambitious undertaking incorporating over 160 images in a range of formats, many of them fascinating to ponder, reflects on the elusiveness of time in a medium that has been in a state of flux since its invention. The concept of arresting time - the photograph as a bid for immortality and a vehicle for preserving a fleeting moment - is flexible enough to allow exhibition curator Corey Keller to exercise her astute eye and taste for the unusual, i.e., Andrew Davidhazy's "Portrait of Toni Ferri" (1970-72), whose subject was shot with a split-scan camera during a long exposure. The technology, used in movie special effects, produced a weird 360-degree view of a distended head in a single image.

Then there's Sam Taylor-Johnson's magnetic/repulsive time-lapse video "A Little Death" (2004), which starts out like a traditional Dutch still life of a dead rabbit hanging by one leg, then accelerates the process of decay. Taylor-Johnson, a woman with serious artist credentials despite directing the soft-porn fiasco "Fifty Shades of Grey," dares viewers to avert their eyes.

If you walk by too quickly you might miss Kiki Smith's bronze sculpture "The Guard" (2005), a uniformed figure with a pageboy stationed on the 7th-floor terrace. If she could talk, she'd tell you there are many more galleries in which to while away an afternoon and more to see than alluded to here. Charles Ray's wonderful solid stainless-steel sculpture "Sleeping Woman" could well be a voracious visitor who collapsed on a bench from exhaustion.

For more info: (415) 357-4000; sfmoma.org/tickets. Booking tickets in advance is advised