Chagall

Amalia and I finally got around to seeing the retrospective of Marc Chagall at SFMOMA. I have never been totally smitten by Chagall, and was expecting to see a better view of him than I have ever seen. I was correct, as there were tons of paintings, including early works.

My verdict: Chagall was even worse of a painter than I used to think. Was he colorblind? Once in a while he would hit on a sound color chord. The rest of the time, his work was just garish. Combined with his weak sense of composition and his perfectly wretched paint handling, these works are astonishing in their utter lack of craftsmanship.

However, there is something there. His ideas were often good, and I think that there is a real thirst for portrayals of mythologies. The public is obvioulsy enthralled, as evidenced by the line around the block (fortunately we are members and could walk right up). Melanie thought that the crowd was probably in love with the color. Perhaps, but one can get powerful color in Pierre Bonnard, who was a much better painter. The difference in the public's eye is that Bonnard painted domestic scenes: the view out his window, his wife, the cat on a sofa, etc. Chagall gives us flying goats in wedding dresses, and touches on part of our imagination in a way that for many has not been touched since childhood.

Afterwards we went downstairs to the permanent collection. For reasons rather suspect, they have two Barnett Newman paintings on display. There never was a more overrated painter (if we can call him that) than Newman. The contrast between his work and Chagall's is illuminating. Chagall might have been a hack, but he was a hack who gave us flights of imagination that transcend even his own lack of painterly talent. I found myself enjoying paintings upstairs that were really quite atrocious as paintings.

But looking at Newman only brings feelings of contempt. This fellow was one of the few abstract expressionists (if we can call him that) to paint to the theory. Others may have claimed it, because it was good press, but they were first and foremost about the painting. Even the weaker ones, like Clyfford Still, had moments of greatness when they let go of the preposterous notions that were thick in the art world air in the 1950's and simply painted. There is none of that in Newman. His work embodies the worst of minimalism with the worst of the verbiage of abtract expressionism.

If you take a long look at a good Rothko or a Still (or better yet a Diebenkorn or a Ryman), you will be rewarded. If you take a long look at a Newman, you will find next to nothing.

I was also annoyed at the lack of Diebenkorns on display, considering the number of his masterpieces that SFMOMA owns. Certainly a 1955 Berkeley Diebenkorn abstraction would have been a better choice than a Newman.

In other depressing news, the contemporary art was all junk, derived from the worst ideas of the last 50 years, executed without a shred of talent, and puffed up with laughable text on the side. And it is time to put the hatchet in multi-media art and to start over. Sure there are some good pieces here and there, but to sift through all the rest is painful, and it has to be done with more time than one can dismiss a gallery full of paintings (an unfortunately easy thing to do these days).

On a happy note, we ran into Amalia's godfather at the beautifully restored ferry building, had a great conversation with an Armenian-American grape farmer from Dinuba (mostly on the finer points of roasting whole lambs), ran into a friend of mine from high school who I haven't seen in over seven years, had a wonderful dinner at the Fog City Diner, and (highlight of Amalia's day) got to ride in two choo-choos and a bus. It was a balmy day in the City, with a pale blue sky and views that make me wonder how anyone could ever leave the Bay Area (the other time I get that feeling is when I do venture out of the Bay Area).

One of the fun moments was walking down the Embarcadero with Amalia riding on my shoulders and proclaiming to her godfather that she was tall. She rides grasping my hair in both hands, so I think we may have a natural English-style rider on our hands.