Ready for a dose of virtual art? Explore Mark Bradford’s large-scale (yet incredibly detailed) works with this great interactive website.

Happy 82nd birthday to Jasper Johns!

From our website: In the 1950s Jasper Johns developed a distinctive painting style that would help lead American art away from the then-dominant movement of Abstract Expressionism. The exact correspondence of figure and ground in his work challenged the traditional distinction between an object and its depiction. At the same time, variations on each theme dissolved the “natural” link between the symbol and its meaning. Johns thus questioned the basic underpinnings of our representational system, and specifically the mechanisms of fine art.

Pictured: Jasper Johns, Flag (1960-1969) 

Happy 80th birthday Robert Bechtle! 

Pictured: Bechtle’s Alameda Gran Torino (1974)

From our website: For more than 40 years Robert Bechtle has pursued a quiet realism, working from photographs of familiar subjects to depict precise moments in time. Despite their photographic origins, however, his canvases are resolutely and finally about painting. Underneath the smooth sheen of their surfaces lies a textured web of strokes and dabs, where abstract shapes meet edges to form an intricate, layered view of our environment.

Learn more here.

Gerhard Richter Painting opens tonight at the Roxie and runs through May 10! Want to win a pair of tickets to see the film? Create a Tumblr post explaining why and tag it w/ #sfmoma (so we can find it) for a chance to win ‘em!

Happy Birthday Keith Haring!

I don’t think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it. 

– Keith Haring

Image: Detail from Keith Haring’s Pop Shop, © Keith Haring artwork © Estate of Keith Haring . Photo: Charles Dolfi-Michels. Image courtesy Tate Modern.

Influenced by the Northern European painting tradition as well as by photography, television, and cinema, Luc Tuymans blends filmic techniques with a mastery of painting to explore issues of history, memory, and the mass media.

(via LUC TUYMANS AT SFMOMA)

Katharina Wulff, Die Verbindung (The Connection), 2008; oil on canvas

(via Kick Off Spring with These Three Art Shows | 7x7)

Happy birthday Willem de Kooning!

A central figure in the mid-century New York school of painting, Willem de Kooning was trained in Rotterdam in commercial arts. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1926 and worked initially as a house painter, and as an artist for the Works Progress Administration.

By the 1940s, de Kooning had developed an abstract style distinguished by thick, heavily worked surfaces and vigorous brushwork. He then shocked the art world in 1953 by returning to figuration at the moment of abstraction’s greatest success. His flattened depictions of women provide both a critique of Western standards of beauty and an exploration of male sexual fantasies and anxieties.

De Kooning’s later period focused mainly on abstracted landscapes. In the 1980s, in failing health, he developed an entirely different abstract style, using primary colors and open, ribbonlike forms.

Source: SFMOMA

Pictured here: de Kooning’s Woman, 1950

New gallery rotation on our 2nd floor features love three ways :)

Photo by @OkayOkay.