Collection Articles
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...
Jul 7, 2020
This magnificent bed was made for one of the most prominent political figures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, prince of Benevento and prince of Talleyrand (1754–...
Jul 6, 2020
The modestly sized oil-on-canvas Seawall (1957) is one of six paintings and hundreds of works on paper by Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Diebenkorn was...
May 27, 2020
Part of Virtual Bouquets to Art. Join Lauren for a live talk on Friday, June 5.
May 14, 2020
The costume and textile arts collections at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are incredibly broad in scope, spanning multiple continents, media, and time periods from the ancient to the contemporary.In the 1940s, the...