Floor 5: 5th Floor Landing (exiting Kelly West)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are at the 5th Floor Landing.
This floor has 10 galleries organized in a long rectangular layout. You are currently at the short end. The 5th floor tactile map is to your right, on the same wall as the exhibition title and graphic. The entrance to the galleries is behind you. The elevators and a sculpture by Sol LeWitt are in front of you.
The entrance to the Alexander Calder Gallery and a video about the artist is also to your left. The QR code is at the threshold on the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
Line, Form, Color was the title that twenty-eight-year-old Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) gave to a proposed book project in 1951 (later published in 1999), which he described as “an alphabet of plastic pictorial elements.” This floor is dedicated to the work of Kelly and two other leading twentieth-century US artists, Alexander Calder (1898–1976) and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), all of whom explored essential elements of line, form, and color.
Their work emerged from varied starting points, from modern abstraction in 1930s Paris (Calder) to the reaction against modernism in1960s New York (LeWitt). Kelly—who spent formative years in Paris after World War II and befriended Calder there—occupied something of a middle position. Despite these differences, we can see unexpected affinities: Kelly and LeWitt both made work consisting of repeating elements, while many of Calder’s mobiles are composed of similar, if always slightly varying, units. Each artist engaged architecture and real space, whether projecting or suspending sculptures from walls and ceilings (Calder), making multi-panel and shaped paintings that turn the wall into a ground (Kelly), or conceiving ephemeral wall drawings (LeWitt). All three also opened their artworks to external elements, from passing air currents (Calder), to found forms and processes guided by chance (Kelly), to allowing the interpretation of their instructions by different drafts people at changing sites (LeWitt).
These parallel presentations of Calder, Kelly, and LeWitt demonstrate how each artist radically innovated by investigating art's basic building blocks. In the adjoining Co-Lab on this floor, visitors of all ages can explore some of these concepts hands-on.
Gamynne Guillotte
Chief Education and Public Engagement Officer
Ted Mann
Project Assistant Curator, Fisher Collection
Visionary support for Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10 is provided by Fisher Art Foundation.
Lead support is provided by Penny S. and James G. Coulter, Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, and Diana Nelson and John Atwater.
Presenting support is provided by Dana and Bob Emery. Major support is provided by Katie Hall and Tom Knutsen. Significant support is provided by Concepción S. and Irwin Federman, Alexandria and Kevin Marchetti, and Deborah and Kenneth Novack.
Meaningful support is provided by Alka and Ravin Agrawal, Sabrina Buell and Yves Béhar, Nancy and Alan Schatzberg, and Susan Swig.
Label
"How can art be realized?
Out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe . . .
Spaces, volumes . . . juxtaposed, pierced by vectors, crossed by speeds.
Nothing at all of this is fixed.
Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe."
—Alexander Calder, 1932
"Sculpture has become . . . an aerial act," wrote an enthusiastic critic in 1929 about the work of Alexander Calder (born 1898, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 1976, New York). Although this observation was prompted by Calder's early, figurative wire sculptures, it could just as well describe the hanging "mobiles" the artist began creating in the early 1930s. In these extraordinary constructions, carefully counterbalanced elements move with passing air currents. Sculpture had traditionally meant solid, unmoving forms, but through these and other works, Calder transformed the medium into an art of lightness, space, motion, and time.
The works on view in this gallery span from the late 1920s, when Calder was a young artist in Paris, to 1976, the year of his death, and include a variety of mobiles alongside other standing and wall-mounted works that testify to his restless invention.
Calder's work combines a lasting interest in the physical forms of the natural world with a talent for experimentation. Using mostly simple tools (shears and pliers) and modest materials (wire, painted sheet metal, paint, wood), Calder produced dynamic and energetic compositions of color, shape, movement, and sometimes even sound.
Related Media
Artwork Label Text
Alexander Calder in the studio with his son.
Excerpt from Works of Calder (1950).
Produced by New World Film Productions for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Directed and cinematography by Herbert Matter; produced and narrated by Burgess Meredith; music by John Cage.
Digitized 16mm color film, with sound, 3:18 min.
Transcript
Narrator:
Today, this boy went to the beach. It was a sunny, windy day, and he was alone; he wandered about and investigated, and the wind made everything move.
He found some jellyfish, and under the water they were moving, too. So was the water, and the milkweed, and the sun.
Then he walked and came to a place with big glass windows. There was a lot of noise going on inside. When he looked in, he saw a house full of things that moved.
There was a man in there, very busy. He was making the noise—hammering and banging, and scraping and bending things into shape.
The boy asked the man why he was doing that. The man said he enjoyed doing so. He explained that the things he made were called “mobiles” because they move by themselves.
“The mobiles were made out of everything,” he said: tin, wood, steel, and wire. He made them by himself. He worked hard, as though in a factory, but the things came out different.
Sometimes they moved all around him, and he enjoyed that. It was like having his own private sky.
The boy watched them so long he got rather dreamy. And the things he saw in the house, and the things he had seen outside, got mixed up together in his head. The man said that was what they were supposed to do.
He said everybody saw something different, after all, depending on the way they looked at the mobiles. Only the mobiles were exactly what they were and nothing else. He hammered and bent, and cut them and fixed them, so that they would move.
Label
Floor 4
- KAWS: FAMILY
- Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists
- Rose B. Simpson: Behold
- New Work: Sheila Hicks
- White Box
Tactile Description
Map Overview
This tactile map shows Floor 4 of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It has two primary regions. On your left is the legend oriented vertically and surrounded by a rough-dotted rectangular outline. On your right is the map of the museum, outlined in thin, smooth, double lines.
Legend
Start in the bottom left corner and find the dashed rectangle outline. Inside, at the top left, is the Braille word “Legend.”
- The solid five-pointed star means “You Are Here”
- Two stacked triangles pointing up and down mean elevators
- A zigzag line means stairs
- Two Braille r’s in a dashed line box mean the restrooms
- A water droplet means a water fountain
- Grid of small dots means “Floor Below”
How to Read the Map
The map to your right is made up of two main irregularly shaped rectangular spaces joined together. The space on the left is longer and narrower, with its left wall slightly jutting outward. The space on your right is shorter and wider.
Double lines identify the building’s exterior walls, and single lines identify interior walls. When a wall stops and starts again, it marks an entrance or exit.
Each main room has a Braille label inside.
The areas labeled “Galleries” consist of many galleries that occasionally change depending on the current exhibition. The internal walls for the galleries are not depicted tactiley or visually on this map.
Map
This map shows the White Box, three gallery areas, the Sculpture Terrace, elevators, staircases, restrooms, and water fountains.
Let’s find the five-pointed star, which signifies, “You Are Here.” Find the bottom edge of the legend and go to your right, past the arrow pointing north, until you reach the double lines of the building’s exterior walls. Moving into the building, you’ll be in the room labeled “White Box.” With your finger at the end of the word “White,” move up the map until you find the five-pointed star. You will use this as your starting point to explore the map.
Starting at the star, the elevators are directly below it and slightly to your right. The White Box is below the elevators.
Let’s go back to the star. Directly above it is the staircase down to Floor Three. Above that and to your left, along the exterior wall of the museum, is the staircase up to Floor 5.
From the star, moving to your right and up past the staircase that leads down to Floor 3 on your left, is one of the three main gallery areas. Moving up into the gallery area, find the label, “Galleries.” From here, move to your right until you reach the exterior wall. Follow this wall up until you reach a part of the wall that juts out to your right. Inside that space is a water fountain.
Now let’s explore the right side of the museum. Starting from the water fountain, follow the same exterior wall back down until the wall changes to a single line marking and an interior wall. Follow that interior wall down until it ends. You are now back in the general area where you started. The five-pointed star is to your left, and the rest of the museum is to your right.
Move down until you reach a horizontal interior wall. Below this wall are two restrooms, a men’s restroom, and an all-gender restroom with a water fountain in between. Straight up the map are an all-gender restroom and a water fountain. Moving to your right from in between the restrooms is a round staircase up to Floor 5. In the center of the staircase is an opening with the “Floor Below” texture.
Continuing to your right is the Sculpture Terrace. Above and below this area are the other two gallery areas.
Objects
1 object in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1989
Painted wood
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1990
Visual Description
A painted-wood structure hangs from the ceiling as a white, open lattice form that narrows dramatically as it descends. From the ceiling to its bottom edge, the work is eleven feet tall—nearly spanning the full height of the room itself. The structure is built from many small, repeating, open-cube modules with thin, square-edge bars uniformly painted matte white. The units are stacked and offset so the overall mass starts as a four-by-seven-cube rectangular volume at the top—a section affixed to the ceiling—and steps inward in an irregular, cascading taper until it reaches a single cube at the bottom.
Throughout the sculpture's length, small sections protrude outward like short, cantilevered ledges as the form resumes its downward contraction. The repeated squares create dense interior layers of crisscrossing lines, giving the top a heavier, more complex visual density that becomes less layered and more skeletal toward the bottom. There is a white rectangular museum platform on the floor underneath the structure.