San Francisco, October 2012—The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco present a diverse roster of upcoming exhibitions at the de Young Museum. Dates are subject to change. For access to the most current schedule of exhibitions, please consult the exhibition pages of the de Young website.

The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism
September 15, 2012­–December 30, 2012; Herbst Special Exhibition Galleries
A selection of major works from the William S. Paley Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York will be featured in an exhibition opening this fall. A pioneering figure in the modern entertainment, communication and news industries, Mr. Paley (1901–1990) was a founder of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and a dedicated philanthropist and patron of the arts. The Paley Collection, which includes paintings, sculpture and drawings, ranges in date from the late 19th century through the early 1970s. Particularly strong in French Post-Impressionism and modernism, the collection includes multiple works by Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, as well as significant works by Edgar Degas, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Andre Derain, Georges Rouault and artists of the Nabis School such as Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard.

Among the works that will be exhibited at the de Young are Gauguin’s The Seed of the Areoi (1892), an important female nude from the artist’s first trip to Tahiti; Cezanne's Milk Can and Apples (1879-80); Degas’ exquisite pastel Two Dancers (1905); Derain’s dynamic Fauve painting Bridge over the Riou (1906); Picasso’s celebrated Boy Leading a Horse (1905-06); Matisse’s masterpiece Woman with a Veil (1927) and Francis Bacon’s Study for Three Heads (1962).

This World Is Not My Home: Photographs by Danny Lyon
September 29, 2012–January 27, 2013
This exhibition of more than 60 photographs and photographic montages from 1962 to the present traces the fascinating and wide-ranging career of Danny Lyon. A leading and explosive figure in the American street photography movement of the 1960s, Lyon distinguished himself from his peers through his direct engagement with his subjects and his concern for those on the margins of society.

His goal, he says, was “to destroy Life magazine” by presenting powerful alternatives to the bland pictures and stories that permeated American mass media in the late 1950s, when he came of age. In the process, he created numerous photographs of striking psychological, political, and aesthetic power.

Lyon began his career while a student at the University of Chicago. In 1962, after seeing an image of University of Michigan student newspaper editor and activist Tom Hayden being beaten during a voter registration drive, he hitchhiked to the segregated South to try his hand at photojournalism. In the 1970s, Lyon started to divide his time between New York City and Bernalillo, New Mexico, where he photographed his mostly Chicano neighbors and his own growing family.

The exhibition title comes from a hymn of the same name that Lyon recalls singing with a friend one night on a Chicago beach in 1963. The friend passed away shortly afterwards. A lightning tour through an inspired photographic life, This World is Not My Home celebrates 50 years of Lyon’s unique, self-described “romantic realism.”

Contemporary Ömie Bark Cloth
October 6, 2012–February 10, 2013
Boldly patterned with graphic designs, the bark cloth that is made by Ömie women in the Oro province of Papua New Guinea expresses a great diversity of abstracted elements from the natural world. The making of contemporary bark cloth in the Ömie territory is the exclusive creative and spiritual domain of 71 women artists. The cloth is crafted only by female chiefs and only within the community’s territory. It is produced according to strict ceremonies in accordance with past traditions. Artists are expected to command traditional wisdom in the making and decorating of the bark cloth with designs created by the ancestors. Girls learn the art from their mothers, grandmothers, or aunts, usually beginning as teenagers.

The first major museum exhibition of Ömie bark cloth took place at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, in 2009. This exhibition features a selection of 10 works borrowed from that museum’s permanent collection, now on view for the first time in the United States.

Rudolf Nureyev: A Life in Dance
October 6, 2012–February 17, 2013
This special exhibition is dedicated to the life and work of the legendary dancer and choreographer Rudolf Nureyev (1938–1993). It will showcase more than 80 costumes and 50 photographs from the dancer’s personal collection, entrusted to the Centre national du costume de scène, France, by the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation, and will incorporate key loans from active ballet companies.

The Soviet-born Nureyev was a rising star in his native country before he defected to France in 1961. He was soon recognized worldwide as the most magnificent and charismatic dancer of his time. Incredibly driven, he traveled the world to work with leading figures in the dance world in order to absorb their techniques and to promote Soviet dance. Nureyev loved sumptuous shows and was particular about his costumes, often imposing changes and improvements. The costumes on view expose the wear and tear of daily use, bearing witness to the lives and bodies of Nureyev and his partners Margot Fonteyn, Noella Pontois and so many others.

Crown Point Press at 50
Anderson Gallery of Graphic Art
October 20, 2012–February 17, 2013
Crown Point Press at 50 marks the press’s 50th anniversary and features prints by 15 internationally renowned artists made at the press over the course of five decades. Some, such as Robert Bechtle and Wayne Thiebaud, have returned to the press throughout their careers; others, including Darren Almond, Chris Ofili, and Kiki Smith, are more recent additions to the roster. All share an enthusiasm for expanding their artistic practice by making prints.

When Kathan Brown established Crown Point Press in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1962, she expressed a commitment to etching that was remarkable for the time. Most workshop-based print publishing ventures in the 1960s focused on lithography and screenprinting. Brown offered an alternative and welcomed artists who were new to intaglio, giving them an opportunity to explore an alternative printmaking possibility that was ideally suited to contemporary expression.

Witnessing the evolution of artistic movements such as Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Neo-figuration over the last 50 years, the press has applied a constant level of innovation to etching while working with visiting artists, regardless of style, to realize complex ideas.

Reflections: Celebrating 50 Years of the Studio Glass Movement
October 20, 2012–January 27, 2013
To celebrate the 50-year anniversary of the studio glass movement, the Fine Arts Museums will present a small-focus exhibition of works by some of the medium’s pioneering artists, drawn from the collection of George and Dorothy Saxe. To show both the artists’ personal evolutions and the evolution of the movement, the six-case installation will display an early and a late work each by Harvey Littleton, Dominick Labino, Dale Chihuly, William Morris, Thomas Patti, and Mark Peiser. The exhibition will also feature one work by Bay Area–based Marvin Lipofsky, founder of the glass program at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland.

Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis
Herbst Special Exhibition Galleries
January 26, 2013–June 2, 2013
The de Young will be the first venue in the American tour of paintings from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague. This jewel box of a museum, housing one of the world’s most prestigious collections of Dutch Golden Age paintings, has not lent a large body of works from its holdings in nearly 30 years. An extensive two-year renovation makes this extraordinary opportunity possible.

The exhibition features 35 paintings representing the range of subject matter and technique characteristic of 17th-century painting in the Dutch Republic. Among the works traveling to the United States is the Mauritshius’ celebrated masterpiece Girl with the Pearl Earring (c. 1665) by Johannes Vermeer and the enchanting The Goldfinchm (1654) by Carel Fabritius. The painting Vase of Flowers by the gifted Rachel Ruysch, one of the few female painters of the Dutch Golden Age, is being restored especially for the American tour.

Rembrandt’s Century
Herbst Exhibition Galleries
January 26, 2013–June 2, 2013
Drawing largely from the world-renowned collection of works on paper in the Fine Arts Museums’ Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, this exhibition examines a wide range of artworks from the 17th century. Complementing the upcoming Girl with a Pearl Earring at the de Young, opening in January 2013, Rembrandt’s Century sheds light on a fascinating roster of artistic personalities, both famous and forgotten, of the late Mannerist and Baroque eras. At its core is a generous selection of etchings by Rembrandt van Rijn—arguably his generation’s most influential artist.

The exhibition explores Rembrandt’s predecessors and his impact on followers both in Holland and internationally as it explores the rich print culture of the era, focusing on representations of artists and their world, portraiture, natural history, scenes of daily life, landscape and subjects drawn from mythology and religion.

Works by painter-printmakers such as Adriaen van Ostade, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione and Jusepe de Ribera are balanced against contributions by specialized graphic artists such as Jacques Callot, Wenceslaus Hollar and Lambert Doomer. Virtuosic engravings, ambient etchings, exquisite ink drawing, fanciful watercolors and more illustrate the enormous range and appeal of printmaking and drawing techniques in the time of Rembrandt.

Eye Level in Iraq: Photographs by Kael Alford and Thorne Anderson
Fisher Family Gallery
February 9–June 15, 2013
This exhibition presents the photographs of Kael Alford (American, b. 1971) and Thorne Anderson (American, b. 1966), two American-trained photojournalists who documented the impact and aftermath of the U.S.-led coalition’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003. They made these photographs during a two-year span that began in the months leading up to the incursion, and continued into the period when armed militias emerged to challenge the coalition forces and, later, the new central Iraqi government.

In an attempt to get closer to the daily realities of Iraqi citizens, the photographers worked outside the confines of the U.S. military’s embedded journalist program. They wanted to show Iraq from an important and often neglected point of view. This shift in physical perspective placed them in great danger, but they sought to learn how the war and the seismic political and cultural shifts that accompanied it were affecting ordinary people.

A decade later, reflecting on why this work was made, Alford has stated: “I consider these photographs invitations to the viewer to learn more, to explore the relationships between public policy objectives and their real-world execution, and to consider the legacies of human grief, anger, mistrust, and dismay that surely follow violent conflict. I hope that these images will also open a window on the grace of Iraq and perhaps help to give a few of these memories a place to rest.”

Objects of Belief from the Vatican: Art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas
February 9, 2013–September 29, 2013
The rarely seen holdings of the Vatican Ethnological Missionary Museum include 80,000 objects that represent artistic achievements by indigenous cultures from Asia, Oceania, Africa, and the Americas. This very special exhibition, the first time that a U.S. exhibition will focus on the Vatican’s collection of ethnographic art, will investigate varying approaches, perspectives, and cultural practices surrounding diverse religious beliefs.

Each of the objects in the exhibition, a number of which are unique in the world, was created to function as a “materialization of spirituality.” Objects of Belief from the Vatican will celebrate the multiple paths to spirituality represented by these objects and will invite viewers to engage in a dialogue that spans religions, cultures, and history.

Mapping the Contemporary Print: Selections from the Anderson Gallery
Anderson Gallery of Graphic Art
February 27–July 7, 2013
Drawn primarily from the Anderson Graphic Arts Collection at the Fine Arts Museums, Mapping the Contemporary Print surveys some of the strategies that printmakers have employed in their representations of space and place over the last 45 years. 

The idea of “space” is understood in various ways by different cultures, and representations of the concept are similarly diverse. The hyperrealistic close-ups of sea and sky in Vija Celmins etchings, the conceptual linear formations of Julie Mehretu, and the manipulated geographies of Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney, and Wayne Thiebaud demonstrate just some of these approaches. Ed Ruscha takes mapping a step further, incorporating the physicality of the Mixografia technique—which allows for the production of deeply textured prints with fine surface detail—to describe topographical variations in the area surrounding Los Angeles.

Mediating landscapes, seascapes, and skyscapes, the artists included in this exhibition translate their multisensory familiarity with the world into visual terms. Their works challenge viewers to consider alternative modes of seeing and understanding spaces that are themselves subject to continual reformation.

Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953–1966
June 22, 2013–September 29, 2013
Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953–1966, on view at the de Young Museum in summer 2013, will be the first exhibition to explore in-depth the work produced by Diebenkorn between 1953 and 1966, when he lived in Berkeley, California. These years bracket a remarkable period of exploration and innovation in his art—one marked by a double metamorphosis. The period opens with Diebenkorn employing a vivid language of abstract landscapes steeped in the natural conditions of the Bay Area. Then, in 1955, came a dramatic shift to a representational style, with the artist becoming a leader in the Bay Area Figurative Movement. The character of this transformation—and the artist’s oscillations between the two styles—has long been seen as one of the most interesting chapters in post-war American art.

Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953–1966 will present approximately 100 of the artist’s paintings and drawings assembled from collections across the country, many of them rarely or never before seen in public exhibitions.

de Young Visitor Information
The de Young is housed in a copper-clad landmark building designed by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron. It showcases the institution’s significant collections of American painting, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 17th to the 21st centuries; art from Oceania, Africa, and the Americas; a diverse collection of costumes and textiles; and international contemporary art.