Floor 6: Traces of History: QR Code 606
Overview
Interpretive Text
Objects
7 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Label Text
1964
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1991
The bleak palette used in this painting of an administrative building reflects the monotony such construction projects brought to the German landscape as the country was rebuilt after World War II. The young trees and new cars in the foreground hint at the possibility of starting over, but the brushstrokes that blur the building’s surface undermine its stability, suggesting the uncertain ground on which this fragile future stands.
Visual Description
A horizontally oriented oil on linen painting, about 3 feet high by 5 feet wide, depicts an urban streetscaperendered in cool blue-gray tones with a blurred effect. Spanning acrossthe full width of the painting, a multi-story residential building fills the upper two-thirds of the composition. Its facade is pale and hazy, with rows of small rectangular windows repeated across several floors and softened edges. Near the upper right, the roofline breaks into a slightly taller central volume beneath an even, pale gray sky.
Across the middle runs a dark, linear section marked by thick horizontal bands and a suggestion of windows or open spacebeneath, creating a strong contrast against the lighter building. A thin, streetlamp with a curved neck rises on the left side, its silhouette softened but still readable against the building'spale facade. The lower portion shows a lighter street level with smeared tonal transitions; at the lower right, several small, light-colored cars, painted with minimal detail. A dark, bushy mass sits near the bottom right foreground, adding texture against the otherwise smooth, streaked surfaces.
Label Text
1990–91
Lead, glass, steel, and ash
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, fractional purchase, 1988
Resting forlornly on the ground with an ash-filled angular glass form on its wing, this lead airplane seems to carry the weight and sorrows of the world. The sculpture refers to Melencolia I, a well-known engraving of the same title by German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). While its form suggests the promise of freedom and flight (like the fallen angel in Dürer’s work), Kiefer’s sculpture is heavy with technology’s dark side, including the violent role aircraft played in the bombing campaigns of World War II.
Visual Description
A large, low-slung sculptural object resembling a simplified military jet sits directly on the floor on several short, dark, blocky supports, its body finished in dull lead-gray with visible seams, wrinkles, and patchwork joins. The fuselage stretches long and narrow to a blunt, rounded nose, then widens into broad, thin wings that extend nearly straight out to either side, their edges uneven and slightly sagging. Beneath the wings hang two oversized cylindrical engine pods with open fronts; the interiors are crumpled and folded. At the rear rises a tall, triangular vertical tail fin with streaked, dripped surface marks, paired with a small horizontal tailplane. Set on top of the mid-to-rear fuselage is an angular, multi-sided canopy or cockpit form made of translucent, pale glass panels held in a copper-brown metal framework; small ring-like loops protrude along its top edge, and dark ash-like marks appear along the bottom inside. A few thin wires dangle beneath the central body near the supports.
Label Text
1959
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1988
Visual Description
An oil on canvas painting (7.6 x 5.6 ft) shows two abstract forms floating against a warm white background. On the top half, a soft-edged red oval features a darker, wine-red core, surrounded by a lighter crimson halo that feathers outward with misty, rubbed edges. Below, occupying much of the lower half of the painting, a dense black mass spreads outwards, built from sweeping brushstrokes and smeared paint that alternates between opaque black and textured, dry-brushed gray where the canvas shows through. The black area has ragged edges from the calligraphic sweeps of paint.
Label Text
1947, cast 1986
Bronze and steel cable
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
In ancient Greek mythology, Cronos, king of the Titans, swallowed his children—the future Olympian gods—after hearing a prophecy that they would one day overthrow him. The hanging bone-like forms in this sculpture recall Cronos’s devoured offspring before their reemergence. Noguchi may have found this tale of death and rebirth especially meaningful in the years immediately following World War II; he repeated the overall arch-like composition of Cronos in his unrealized 1952 design for a memorial to the dead of Hiroshima.
Visual Description
A vertical bronze sculpture, about 7 ft tall by 1.9 ft wide and 3 ft deep, sits above a low rectangular base and features a central arch with slightly curved forms threaded throughout. The top of the central arch creates an opening through which other forms pass. Around the upper half of this central arch, several shapes bend, wrap, and intersect between at different heights, one curling upward at the center of the sculpture. A shorter, thicker, curved piece protrudes across the front with a rounded, circular tip, and beneath it a rounded element curves upward. Near the lower third, an oval ring form encircles the space between the legs of the central arch. The bronze surface is dark brown with a weathered surface, with visible textures that catch highlights along edges. The sculpture sits on top of a flat, pale-gray rectangular platform with metal edging and four small corner fasteners near each edge.
Label Text
1968
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2003
In this painting—based on an aerial view he found in an architectural magazine—Richter brings forth the contours of Madrid in thick, loose strokes of white, black, and gray paint. Viewed closely, these marks appear to crumble into ashen piles of rubble; when the work was first shown, a critic described it as “a ruined landscape.” Richter, whose hometown of Dresden was leveled by Allied firebombing raids during World War II, later reflected: “When I look back on the Cityscapes now, they do seem to me to recall certain images of the destruction of Dresden during the war.”
Visual Description
This square painting, at about 9 feet by 9.5 feet, presents an aerial view of a city rendered entirely in grayscale. The composition is packed edge-to-edge with mid-rise buildings, flat rooftops, and shadowed courtyards, creating a labyrinth of rectangles, stepped terraces, and narrow gaps that read as streets and alleyways.
A broad corridor runs diagonally from the lower left toward the upper right, with irregular edges and dark, rounded marks resembling clustered tree canopies. Surrounding this diagonal route, buildings vary in height and façade pattern: some show stacked rows of window-like rectangles; others are simplified into chunky, light-toned blocks with deep charcoal shadows. Several structures have distinctive architectural elements—small penthouse-like boxes, parapet walls, and a domed roofs, and~~ ~~a larger complex with a central courtyard.
Brushwork is thick and painterly, with broad strokes and layered tones that emphasize light and shadow rather than fine architectural detail. Bright whites and pale grays highlight roof planes and sunlit areas, while dense blacks blocks depict building faces in shadow.
Label Text
1972
Silkscreen ink on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
Shortly after President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, Warhol began a series of silkscreen paintings of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong. Warhol was fascinated by how Mao’s portrait was reproduced everywhere in China at the time, from the walls of classrooms and homes to the pages of the Little Red Book, a collection of Mao’s quotations. By treating Mao like yet another of the Hollywood celebrities that filled his canvases during the 1960s, Warhol suggests a similarity between commercial advertising and state propaganda. In this version, the faint black ink on a white ground feels subdued and ghostly.
Visual Description
A tall, nearly 7 foot tall by 5 foot wide silkscreen print in black ink on linen presents a frontal portrait of an man, centered on a wide, pale gray-white field. The man’s features—heavy-lidded eyes, broad nose, and softly set mouth—are modeled with broken, grainy tonal patches that look rubbed, wiped, or imperfectly transferred, creating a distressed surface. His hair forms a rounded cap-like shape with darker shading along the left side of the head and lighter, washed-out areas toward the right, where the image fades and fragments. Subtle streaks, scuffs, and mottled textures run through the portrait. Below the chin, a high, buttoned collar and a shirt are traced with minimal marks, including a small circular button visible near the base of the collar. The overall palette remains strictly grayscale, with the deepest blacks concentrated in the eyes, collar, and parts of the left cheek, while the right side of the face and shoulder dissolve into faint, smoky traces.
Label Text
1964
In the weeks following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Warhol began collecting press coverage of the event and its aftermath, focusing on images of Jacqueline Kennedy, the president’s widow. Cropping close-ups of her face, Warhol created a series of silkscreen paintings that depict her reactions over time. In this triptych, we see her the morning after landing in Dallas (right panel), at the swearing in of Lyndon B. Johnson on Air Force One just hours after the assassination (left panel), and veiled at the president’s funeral (center).
Visual Description
Three adjacent artworks (each 16 x 20 in) form a series of cropped portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy in a rough, high-contrast pop-art or screenprint style. The right panel shows her face with a wide smile in black on a white ground, her head turned slightly left, with shoulder-length dark hair, heavy shadow across one eye, and a softer, more candid expression. The left panel shows herin side profile facing left, her pale beige face and neck set against a nearly black field, with thick dark hair sweeping across her forehead and covering her eyes; her nose, closed lips, and jawline are sharply silhouetted. The center panel presents a frontal or slightly angled portrait in vivid electric blue against black, her long dark hair framing her face, one eye partly obscured by shadow, and her expression neutraland unsmiling. Each canvas has visible texture and slightly worn, uneven edges.