This afternoon we visited yet another richly endowed museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It is stuffed with examples from the impressionists, the cubists, the fauvists and the surrealists but also, as interestingly, with American modernists. Indeed, here, more than in any other art museum we have visited, I got a sense of how America developed its own, distinctive modern art. Thus, whilst San Francisco collectors continued to splurge on French art they also started to buy up on more homegrown artists (Frieda Kahlo and Diego Riviera, who stayed in the Bay area for 18 months, played cameo roles in the process.) . The blurb in one of the exhibition spaces states that ‘The US is a country defined in many ways by the unique geographic spaces it encompasses. But the nation’s topography has equally been formed by the urban environments that generations of Americans have created.’ That is surely spot on. The Ralston Crawford in the picture, for example, is so obviously immediately American, yet how do we know? The museum cleverly illustrates the procession of modern American art to its own inheritance.
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