For Ansel Adams’s birthday: “Clouds, New Mexico” (1933)

(via SFMOMA)

Okay, just ONE more for Richter’s birthday (this is a personal favorite, so I just had to sneak it in before the end of the day).

Gerhard Richter’s Lesende (Reading) (1994) | painting | oil on linen

(via SFMOMA)

One more for Gerhard Richter’s birthday: Untitled (1973)

Photograph | chromogenic print

(via SFMOMA)

Today is the birthday of German visual artist Gerhard Richter!

Be it a rural landscape, a colorful gestural abstraction, or a black-and-white painting based on a family snapshot or image from the newspaper, a certain set of tensions consistently drives Richter’s work: belief versus skepticism, gesture versus erasure, planning versus chance, personal engagement versus objective neutrality. In Richter’s paintings one can identify many of the marks, methods, and forms that have driven the development of modern and contemporary art since the 1950s. But the often discordant way in which the artist brings them together on the canvas cools their rhetorical intensity. The restless quality of these works, in which different modes of painting collide, reflects Richter’s simultaneous hope and uncertainty that painting can faithfully assess contemporary reality.

Pictured here: Richter’s 1969 work, 9 Objekte (9 Objects)

(via SFMOMA)

In her quote, “There is no there there,” Gertrude Stein is referring to her home town of Oakland. This article investigates the meaning of the often misinterpreted quote: Inside Google Books: Gertrude Stein puts the “there” back in Oakland

Happy Birthday to the one and only Gertrude Stein, born on this day in 1874!

Along with her brother Leo, Gertrude Stein was among the first Americans to respond with enthusiasm to the artistic revolution in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. The weekly salons she held in her Paris apartment became a magnet for European and American artists and writers alike, and her support of Matisse, Braque, Gris, and Picasso was evident in her many acquisitions of their work. 

Pictured here: Picasso’s Gertrude Stein, 1905-6

(via The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Today marks composer Philip Glass’s 75th birthday! From our collection, here’s a poster from his opera, “La Belle et la Bete,” based on the film by Jean Cocteau.

(via SFMOMA)

(via SFMOMA)

We want to wish a HUGE happy birthday to Jackson Pollock, who was born 100 years ago today.

Jackson Pollock was one of the first American artists to achieve a worldwide reputation, and he became an icon of the abstract expressionist movement. He spent his childhood moving between farming communities in Arizona and Southern California. At 18, he moved to New York, where he studied art and painted for the Works Progress Administration. In 1939, Pollock entered psychoanalysis as treatment for his lifelong alcoholism, and his work of this period was heavily influenced by C.G. Jung’s theory of archetypal collective symbols.

During the late 1940s, Pollock developed a groundbreaking abstract painting technique. He laid his large canvases on the floor and moved around them; rather than brushing on his paint, he poured it directly from the can or flung it in drips and spatters with a brush or stick. The resulting “all-over” paintings were an unmediated trace of his physical actions; they also did away with the artistic conventions of illusionistic depth and distinct figure and ground. Within a few years, however, and perhaps in rebellion against his tremendous critical success, Pollock began to re-introduce symbolic figures into his paintings. His life was perpetually marked by self-destructive behavior; he was killed in a car crash at the age of 44.

Featured here: Pollock’s Guardians of the Secret (1943)