Matisse and Diebenkorn at SFMOMA

Here's the café at the museum.

A lot of people like art, and I am no exception. 

We, me and my friend, went to see the Matisse with Diebenkorn Exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, California.

We went in the front door and up the stairs and to the elevators and up the to fifth floor where we got out of the elevator and went into the exhibit.  There were a lot of paintings by Diebenkorn and Matisse placed side by side, starting from the beginnings of their careers and going to the ends of their careers.

I like painting, so I looked at the surfaces of the paintings to see how much paint they used.  Sometimes they used a lot, and other times they used less, but they didn't do too much thick impasto stuff like Van Gogh.

I liked Matisse's stuff more than Diebenkorn's and felt like the museum was placing a local artist with Matisse to see if he could stand up to Matisse, be on the same stage with him.  I like Matisse more than Diebenkorn, but there were a few paintings of Richard's that were nice, particularly some of his later landscapey things and a painting of a woman that reminded me of Elmer Bischoff's paintings.  But if this is a traveling show, it'd be interesting to see it in a different museum not so near to where Diebenkorn lived.  I guess what I'm trying to say is this, "I never get out of town so I don't know how Diebenkorn is received in other parts of the world."

It took about 45 minutes for me to get to the end of all the paintings and drawings.  I particulary liked the drawings of Matisse's where he erased a lot, and I liked the paintings of Matisse's where you can see his adjustments to get the forms right.

I like Matisse's drawing style better than Diebenkorn's, his simplification of forms. 

The subject matter of these two painter guys was pretty prosaic - people, interiors, exteriors, still lifes, nature morte, abstractions.  There were no paintings of monsters or lions or tigers or fancy cars or airplanes or bicycles or dancing people or people in a bar drinking.   And there wasn't a single cat in the whole f#cking show that I could see.

I, Paulette, do a lot of plein air painting, so it's interesting to see the work of people who mostly paint inside of a building.  I like plein air because I don't have to think about anything, I just go outside and do it and breathe fresh air and stare at the outside world which is constantly changing and often beautiful.  So, it's interesting that these manly men find beauty in kind of boring subject matter, people sitting around, interiors.  But there are some landscapes.

Neither of them is female, so they should feel lucky just to be in the museum.