The Fisher Collection includes more than 1,100 works, by artists such as Alexander Calder, Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Anselm Kiefer, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol.

Huge. Chron article here.

Olivetti in your pocket? Edigio Bonfante, Poster, 1953. Lithograph mounted on canvas.

An official first welcome to our fantastic new crew of columnist-bloggers, who are already well underway this week with the posting, and for which I thank them. Your fall hosts on Open Space are:

MICHELLE TEA!, writer, poet, and founder of RADAR Productions, a literary non-profit; DUANE DETERVILLE!,  artist, writer and cofounder of the Sankofa Cultural Institute; the visual artist STEPHANIE SYJUCO!;   JOSEPH DEL PESCO!, independent curator, art journalist and web-media producer; and the poet CEDAR SIGO!

I a little overdo it with the all-caps & punctuation, it’s true. However, I’m quite delighted to be working with so extraordinary a company of contributors and am so so curious to see what they will do; I expect we have an interesting season ahead of us. As before, and as always, our columnists are writing in an EDITORIAL FREE ZONE, about all things ‘visual culture’ (a phrase Kevin Killian’s given me no small grief over) in the Bay Area and beyond. Welcome, onward, hi, hello, let’s go—

Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988.

Jeff Koons’s porcelain sculpture, always of great curiosity to the crowds when it’s up in the galleries, and one of my favorites, of Michael Jackson and Bubbles. You already know the news about the King of Pop. About the sculpture, more here. We’ll miss you, Michael. No 1980s living room would have been the same without you.

Helen Levitt, New York, 1959. 1959, printed 1991

It’s a sad spring in the world of photography: Helen Levitt passed away at the end of March—quietly, in her sleep, at the age of 95. New York has lost its great visionary poet, who photographed scenes from everyday life with unsurpassed wit and imagination. We feel the loss acutely here at SFMOMA, where her work has been admired, collected, and celebrated. In 1991, SFMOMA collaborated with the Met on Ms. Levitt’s first retrospective—a major event that brought renewed attention to her work after it had been neglected for decades. From a personal perspective, the news of Helen’s death left me stunned and bereft. Partly that’s because I’m writing a dissertation on her work, but mostly because she had become a treasured friend. I had the immeasurable pleasure of spending many months with Helen in New York City: I’d come around in the afternoon, bring her apple or cherry pie, and spend the evening transfixed by her opinions, anecdotes, jokes, and memories.

Helen Levitt, New York. 1942

Levitt started photographing in the mid 1930s, a young woman from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, sorting out the possibilities before her. Unlike Walker Evans (who became her friend and was among her few peers in accomplishment) Levitt didn’t emerge from social or educational privilege: no extended stay in Paris, no Ivy League education. She got her start with a marginal gig as an apprentice in a Bronx commercial portrait studio, working for a photographer who was amiable and capable but, as she put it, a bit goofy. So she set out to educate her eye. In line with her ambition and intelligence, she availed herself of an extraordinary classroom: New York City, then the incubator of a major photographic renaissance. Levitt took herself to the Film & Photo League to see what the politically engaged photographers were doing, to learn darkroom and enlarging techniques, and to get acquainted with the Soviet avant-garde films being endlessly discussed. She frequented museums to learn how painters compose. She gorged on cinema: Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, Dzigo Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Aerograd, among her favorites. The breakthrough came between 1935 and 1936, when Henri Cartier-Bresson breezed into New York, bringing his 35 millimeter Leica, his sophisticated French artistic sensibility (he had studied painting in André Lhote’s studio), and his ardor for surrealism. “In the beginning I didn’t know what I was doing,” Levitt once told me. “It was a period of floundering around—I saw Cartier-Bresson and it clicked.”

What clicked? First, it was the technical possibilities of the 35 millimeter camera, and then the sense of a new modern style—casual but graceful, relying on quick-footed movement to yield surprising juxtapositions. More than that, she got from Cartier-Bresson implicit permission to blithely undercut the assumption that photographs are objective documents, giving straightforward evidence: just the facts, ma’am. She saw that her medium, for all its persuasive powers of realism, is most fertile when divulging reservoirs of fantasy lurking within everyday life. As the poet Paul Eluard put it, “There is another world,/ but it is within this one.” This paradoxical insight constituted the backbone of surrealism. Levitt grasped the point wholeheartedly without ever joining the surrealist clique or kowtowing to their garbled male-biased theorizing. She wasn’t one to succumb to the self-importance that beset the Andre Breton types. Modest to a fault, she’d say “I’m no theorist” if pressed to explain how she produced her singular body of work. “Just look at the pictures” (and we surely will, for years to come).

Helen Levitt, New York, 1940. Gelatin silver print

The pictures reveal Levitt’s subtle and humorous feminism, remarkably forward-thinking for its time. Levitt claimed the freedom to conceive street photography as a pleasantly transgressive pursuit, one energized by vulgarity, playfulness, and ribald laughter. She disguised her transgressiveness in plain view by making child’s play her leitmotif. Children: aren’t they cute and sweet? Not in Levitt’s pictures, where they are as complicated and contradictory as adults, ingenious and foolish, capable of gentleness and crassness, displaying folly and dignity. William Blake would have appreciated Levitt’s scenes of children playing in city streets, for their recognition that Songs of Innocence and Experience are contrapuntal tunes.

People were Helen Levitt’s great subject, and she had an unparalleled affinity for those imperfectly socialized, unpredictable people called children. She was endlessly fascinated by their mixed-up silliness, vulnerability, rudeness, resilience, inventiveness, and immeasurable complexity. Levitt, who couldn’t resist a mischievous joke, enjoyed puncturing the expected image of her as the grande dame of photography who must just love little children. Dining at a restaurant last summer, she glanced over to a noisy gaggle of frolicsome youngsters disrupting the quiet and declared, with a perfect poker face, “I hate kids.”

Yet her photographs admire the self-forgetfulness children display when completely immersed in their private play worlds-so much so that her best pictures seem to transform children (and adults) into characters from Shakespeare. The boys in this photograph might be the unruly players from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, restaged in Spanish Harlem in the midst of the Great Depression, on the brink of World War II. Levitt would pooh-pooh the notion that her work merits comparison with such august company. But if you look carefully at her photographs, you’ll discern a deep and abiding sense that life is comedy mingled with tragedy, or sometimes just a comedy of errors. Levitt photographed the city streets as theatrical spaces because she knew all the world’s a stage.

Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery, New York

—Elizabeth Gand

DirectorCam: with champagne. SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra, in front of Barnett Newman's Zim Zum I (1969). Our operations manager Jim Weber, on walkie to the right.

Happy Mother’s Day! The rooftop sculpture garden is open at last, it’s a lovely spot, and this man definitely deserves a glass of champagne. This concludes our week-long experiment with DirectorCam. We’ll follow up in weeks and months to come, of course!  More soon. xxoo, SS

Ellsworth Kelly, with Stele I (1973), on our new rooftop garden

Ellsworth Kelly, on our rooftop sculpture garden for the first time, in front of his 1973 sculpture Stele I.

Many more pictures coming soon.

For example:

DirectorCam: Cabinet meeting

DirectorCam: In the Pavilion (with Deputy Head of Conservation, Michelle Barger)

DirectorCam: With the press

(You can follow updates to DirectorCam here. More to come!)

Launched late April, with Kevin Killian’s first post: our very first ‘cohort’ of extra-SFMOMA contributors. Our rotating columnists are writing in an editorial free zone, covering all things visual culture in the Bay Area. All local [most of] the time, they’re just getting started and have already taken on public art and redevelopment in the Mission; visiting filmmakers; the problems of exhibiting design objects in museums; and what Susan Boyle and local artist Matt Keegan have in common even though only one of them is ‘younger than Jesus’.

Please welcome (and admire!) our fabulous first group of writers:

Poet, novelist, playwright, critic KEVIN KILLIAN
Art historian JULIAN MYERS
Independent curator and writer ANURADHA VIKRAM
Designer & educator ERIC HEIMAN
Independent curator and recent CCA grad ADRIENNE SKYE ROBERTS

We’ll still be doing interviews, Collection Rotations, and one-on-ones, plus videos from the Tammy & Megan show, but I truly can’t wait to see what all our columnists will do. RSS it, kids. It’s news.