Collection Articles
Oct 29, 2020
In the hands of the carver who made this sculpture, dynamics of power are expressed through a coded confluence of imagery. Though diminutive in scale, it is a grand representation of a woman’s omnipotence.This possibly...
Oct 23, 2020
As we prepare to welcome the public back to the Legion of Honor, some of our masterpieces of European painting have also returned to the museum. Frequent visitors sometimes notice that their favorite painting isn’t hanging...
Oct 15, 2020
The Scream (1966), a diptych by Mike Henderson is now part of the permanent collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Visitors may remember Henderson’s work; his painting “Non-Violence” was on view in...
Oct 8, 2020
In recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, celebrated this year on Monday, October 12, we would like to share excerpts from a recent publication from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco celebrating Native artists from the...
Sep 29, 2020
Seth Kane Kwei (Ghanaian, 1922–1992) belonged to a royal clan of the Ga; he lived in the suburb of Teshie, near Accra, the capital of Ghana. In the 1950s, he was an apprentice to a carpenter and sometimes made traditional...
Sep 29, 2020
At the center of Richard Mayhew’s (American, b. 1924) Rhapsody, a flamboyant purple-and-blue copse of trees erupts in a vertical thrust, interrupting the horizontal rhythms of a smoldering orange sky and verdant...
Sep 29, 2020
Maria Martinez (American, San Ildefonso, 1887–1980) and her husband, Julian Martinez (American, San Ildefonso, 1879–1943), were a formidable team. Maria was an expert potter and could burnish clay to a brilliant shine....
Sep 29, 2020
Hiram Powers’s (American, 1805–1873) full-length nude Greek Slave was the most famous sculpture of the nineteenth century. The subject is a chained Greek woman who has been taken captive by Turkish Ottoman forces...
Sep 29, 2020
Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907–1954) was largely a self-taught artist who cultivated the image of herself as an artistic naïf. Never considering a career in art, she was pursuing studies in medical school in 1925 when she...
Aug 19, 2020
In 2019 the monumental bronze statue of Joan of Arc, which sits on a granite base outside the Legion of Honor’s main entrance, underwent a major conservation treatment. The sculpture is a work by Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington...