Fisher Collection provokes thought and surprise

Seeing the Fisher Collection as a list of thumbnails or as maquettes in an exhibition model is one thing. Walking through it - responding to the scale, impact and temperament of the works in it - is something else again.

Today the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art unwraps the greatest gift package it has received in many years as it opens "Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection."

This inaugural sampling of the collection, which SFMOMA now owns in trust with the Fisher family, occupies two floors plus the museum's rooftop sculpture zones. We can sense the transformative effect the Fisher Collection will have on the institution throughout: "Calder to Warhol" provides foretastes not only of the trove's contents but of how SFMOMA may use them.

Almost any deployment of Doris and Donald Fisher's remarkable holdings would impress. Up to now, San Francisco has seen comparable concentrations of work by Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Chuck Close, Philip Guston and Frank Stella, among others, only in monographic shows.

Individual artworks still stand out wherever you look in "Calder to Warhol," but the show's arrangement - the work of chief curator Gary Garrels - has its own significant content. It can give you the feeling of seeing exposed the unconscious, as well as conscious, linkages behind the Fishers' acquisitions.

Mixing and matching

Step off the elevator on the fifth floor and a cluster of sculptures by Calder (1898-1976) confronts you - hanging from the ceiling, springing from the wall, teetering near floor level. Round a corner and you enter a room filled with paintings by Kelly, whose art would seem to have little connection with Calder's.

But Kelly paintings such as "Red Curves" (1996) and "Blue Panel" (1985) immediately dovetail with your recall of Calder's metallic blades and slivers: flat shapes evoking volumes.

The four panel "Blue Green Black Red" (1996) typifies Kelly's effort to make painted shape equivalent to the painted surface and to reconcile a painting's standing as one thing among many with its tacit exemption of itself from ambient reality.

Look beyond Kelly's work and you look into a space occupied by four Richard Serra sculptures. Serra acknowledges Kelly's influence on his thinking about sculpture, but we seldom see the connection made so handily and discernibly.

The squares of lead and steel that compose Serra's pieces, fixed in place by gravity, respond directly to floor works by Carl Andre, such as "Copper Zinc Plain" (1969), also on the fifth floor. But both sculptors breathed the air of formal and intellectual economy that Kelly's art began generating a decade earlier. Serra's plates function as units of mass and structure much the way Kelly's monochrome panels serve as quotients of pictorial abstraction.

No breathing room

Even at this point, though, a visitor will sense the flaw in the presentation of "Calder to Warhol": neither the Kellys, nor the Serras, nor the Gerhard Richters and Anselm Kiefers that follow have the breathing space they need.

The fourth floor installation suffers less from this problem. But the prevailing congestion inadvertently makes a case for the museum's expansion plans. It also expresses the curator's dilemma of whether to give priority to individual works' claims on space or to presenting the best face of the Fisher collection.

In some cases, the relatively tight hanging actually enhances the show's impact by offering revealing sightlines.

Stand at the north entrance to the fourth floor galleries and you can glimpse an early and a late Guston, a staggeringly good Lee Krasner abstraction, a Joan Mitchell triptych, and Stella painted metal reliefs from the '70s and '80s.

The 1956 Guston and the 1961 Krasner embody the New York School ethos of volcanic improvisation that had mostly burned itself out by 1960. The Stellas, the 1989 Mitchell and the 1978 Guston all betoken struggles to reignite that guttered sense of authentic engagement at very disparate cultural moments.

Full of surprises

More startling sequences lie ahead.

The slashing attack of Krasner's painting finds stiff echoes in Brice Marden's "6 (Course)" (1987-88), which immediately follows it, introducing a room in which we see Marden's linear compositions turn fluid, though not nearly as fluid as a Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) from 1983 - done at or over the precipice of his descent into senile dementia.

Richard Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park #67" (1973) shares the room with the Mardens and de Kooning. This unobvious combination sets you thinking about painters' various ways of giving structure to a canvas and guidance to a viewer's attention.

The Diebenkorn also makes one of the many startling conjunctions in the show's layout: you glance from it into a room full of paintings by Agnes Martin.

It had never occurred to me before to connect the works of these two abstract classicists. I still need time to sort out the sense it makes.

Such surprises - and very few disappointments - lie around every corner in "Calder to Warhol ... ," a show worthy of celebration not only by the museum but by the city.

E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page F - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle