The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco announce 2019 Exhibitions
Nov 29, 2018
Monet: The Late Years
de Young museum \ February 16–May 27, 2019
Though Claude Monet is widely known as a master of Impressionism, Monet: The Late Years redefines him as one of the most original and influential painters of the modern age. Exploring Monet’s final years, the exhibition shows how the artist reinvented his style of painting, producing increasingly abstract work with bold color combinations and dramatic brushstrokes, during the final years of his life and career. The first exploration of this artistic period in the United States in over 20 years, Monet: The Late Years assembles works from major public and private collections in Europe, the United States, and Asia, including the holdings of the Fine Arts Museums and the Kimbell Art Museum. More than 20 of Monet’s beloved water lily paintings, large-scale murals, and exquisite examples of his late easel paintings, several of which will be seen for the first time in the United States, will be on view in the exhibition.
The exhibition is co-organized with the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, with the exceptional support of the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, and will be on view at the Kimbell from June 16 through September 15, 2019.
Matt Mullican: Living in That World
de Young museum \ Opening March 9, 2019
California native Matt Mullican has been the subject of multiple exhibitions in Europe over the past two decades, but this is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States in over 20 years. His exhibition at the de Young takes over the museum’s free public atrium with rubbings, billboards, and light boxes that draw the viewer into the expansive pictorial universe through which he maps and analyzes his experience of being in the world.
Mullican will also present a performance as That Person, his alter ego. Under hypnosis, he treats his own psyche as yet another medium for reflection and interpretation.
Early Rubens
Legion of Honor museum \ April 6–September 8, 2019
In 1608, after a period of artistic study in Italy, Peter Paul Rubens returned to his hometown of Antwerp. He found a city ready to support him, a bold artist who worked at a pace and at a scale that could repopulate the city’s churches with religious images while also supplying private collectors with dramatic works rendering historical moments from ancient Greece and the Bible. Early Rubens is the first exhibition dedicated to the pivotal years between 1609 and 1621, when the Northern Baroque master built his career. In more than 30 paintings and 20 works on paper, many on view in North America for the very first time, the exhibition traces Rubens’s early development as a master painter, his unique gifts for depicting seductive and shocking narratives, and the role played by Antwerp in his meteoric rise to the first rank of European painters and international fame.
Early Rubens is co-organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, where it will be on view from October 12, 2019, through January 5, 2020.
Art for Life: Ed Hardy and the Tattoo Renaissance
de Young museum \ Opening July 2019
The major retrospective Art for Life: Ed Hardy and the Tattoo Renaissance explores the renowned tattoo artist’s inspiration from both traditional American tattooing of the first half of the 20th century and the graphic arts produced by Japan’s ukiyo-e era culture. Based on a major acquisition of Hardy’s works by the Achenbach Foundation of Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums, in dialogue with pieces from Hardy’s personal collection, the exhibition includes more than 300 paintings, drawings, prints, and three-dimensional works that, in the words of the artist, “reflect the disturbing nature of tattooing itself, the blurry patina of aged tattoos that have been in the skin for many decades, of design sheets yellowing on old tattoo parlor walls—a faded world almost extinct” in the popularized fad tattooing of contemporary culture.
James Tissot, 1836–1902
Legion of Honor museum \ October 12, 2019–February 9, 2020
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, are co-organizing James Tissot, 1836–1902, the first major reassessment of the artist’s career in over 20 years. This international retrospective examines approximately 60 paintings, along with works on paper and cloisonné enamels by Tissot. Exhibition highlights include works drawn from the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, including Tissot’s Self Portrait (ca. 1865) as well as prints and photographs from the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, plus Portrait of Mademoiselle L. L. (1864) and The Circle of the Rue Royale (1868) from the Musée d’Orsay. New scholarship on the artist presented in this collaboration demonstrates that even Tissot’s most ebullient society paintings reveal rich and complex commentary on topics such as 19th-century society, religion, fashion, and politics, rendering him an artist worthy of reassessment in the 21st century.
Additional Exhibitions at the de Young
Gauguin: A Spiritual Journey
November 17, 2018–April 7, 2019
Ordinary Objects / Wild Things
December 15, 2018–June 23, 2019
Contemporary Projects at the de Young: Ana Prvački:
Detour
In collaboration with Google Arts & Culture
Opening January 29
David Hockney: The Four Seasons
April 13–December 8, 2019
Bouquets to Art
June 3–9, 2019
Cosima von Bonin: For Lazy Lobsters
Summer 2019