Floor 6: Traces of History (exiting Objects of Memory)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Traces of History Gallery. The walls in this gallery are painted a deep charcoal gray, creating a contemplative atmosphere. The gallery lighting is somewhat dimmed and each piece is gently spotlit from lights on the ceiling.
You've entered the wide rectangular gallery from the back left corner, facing the long, far front wall. On the floor to your right is a low, freestanding sculpture by Anselm Kiefer that resembles a military plane. This piece is featured predominantly in this gallery and there is a low museum rail around it. Artworks are installed around the space and on the walls: a painting by Adolph Gottlieb, a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, two paintings by Gerhard Richter, and two prints by Andy Warhol.
On the left wall, near the front left corner, is an entrance to the 6th Floor City Gallery, which spans the length of the entire 6th floor.
The exit to the Remembrance Gallery is in the middle of the front wall. The QR code is at the threshold on the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
The artworks in this room engage with public memory—how societies remember or misremember their collective pasts, and how that understanding is reinforced or challenged in the present. Andy Warhol's screen printed paintings of former US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong invite us to consider how such iconic public figures enter public memory through repeated exposure. Gerhard Richter's blurred view of anonymous postwar architecture suggests the unreliability of apparently objective images. Anselm Kiefer's lead fighter plane calls to mind the aerial bombing campaigns of World War II. And Adolph Gottlieb and Isamu Noguchi's abstractions more indirectly refer to the destructive forces of the atomic age.
Objects
7 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork 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 three feet high by five feet wide, depicts an urban streetscape rendered in cool, blue-gray tones with a blurred effect. Spanning across the full width of the painting, a multi-story administrative 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—resembling an elevated train platform or walkway—with a suggestion of windows or open space beneath, 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's pale facade. The lower portion shows a lighter street level with smeared tonal transitions; at the lower right, several small, light-colored cars are painted with minimal detail. A dark, bushy mass sits near the bottom right foreground, adding texture against the otherwise smooth, streaked surfaces.
The painting is in a white wood frame.
Artwork 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 sculpture resembling a simplified military jet sits directly on the floor, close to the ground, on several short, dark, blocky supports. It is roughly the length of an average car, with its wingspan almost reaching the same length.
Its body is 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 dark interiors of these engine pods contain crumpled and folded forms that resemble strips of paper. 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 shape made of translucent, pale glass panels held in a copper-brown metal framework; small ring-like loops protrude along its top edge, and the interior contains a pile of dark, ash-like substance. A few thin wires dangle beneath the plane’s central body near the supports.
Artwork 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 (about seven feet tall by five feet wide) 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. The oval floats in the center of the top half of the painting and is surrounded by 6-10 inches of the warm white background on all sides.
Below the oval, occupying much of the lower half of the painting, a dense, black, roughly circular 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. This dense mass appears to float in the bottom half of the painting, as it is surrounded by around five inches of the warm white background on all sides except for the left side of the painting. On that side, a single, black brushstroke nearly touches the edge of the canvas.
The painting is in a light wood frame.
Artwork 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—taller than an average adult and about two feet wide and deep—features a central arch containing gently curved forms, each suspended from a thin steel cable threaded through their centers. The bronze surface is dark brown with a weathered surface, with visible textures that catch highlights along edges. The top of the central arch creates an opening through which other forms hang suspended from the cable.
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 with a rounded, circular tip on each end, 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. Only the top and bottom of the curved forms touch the inside of this larger central arch; the others dangle from the steel cable without touching the arch itself. The sculpture sits on top of a flat rectangular platform.
Artwork 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 nearly square painting, at about nine feet by nine-and-a-half 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. Another corridor runs diagonally from the upper left to the center of the painting, intersecting with the other corridor near the center. Surrounding these diagonal routes, 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, domed roofs, and a larger complex with a central courtyard.
The brushwork is thick, 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 black blocks depict building faces in shadow.
The painting is hung directly on the wall without a frame.
Artwork 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 seven-foot-tall by five-foot-wide silkscreen print in black ink on linen presents a frontal portrait of a man—Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong—centered on a wide, pale, gray-white field.
The man's features—heavy-lidded eyes, broad nose, and softly set mouth, and ear—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, eyebrows, neck, collar, ear, and parts of the left cheek, while the right side of the face and shoulder dissolve into faint, smoky traces. Faint diagonal lines run across the image in several areas.
The painting is in a white wood frame.
Artwork Label Text
1964
Acrylic paint, silkscreen ink, and spray paint on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1990
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 inches tall by 20 inches wide), arranged horizontally and spaced about one inch apart, form a series of cropped portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy in a rough, high-contrast screenprint style.
Starting on your left, the left panel shows her in 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 neutral and unsmiling.
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 under a hat, a heavy shadow across one eye, and a softer, more candid expression.
The paintings are arranged in a single horizontal row in one white wood frame.