Christopher Wool, <i>Untitled</i>, 1989

Unknown, <i>Untitled [Stack of apples]</i>, 1911

Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin, <i>David’s wife Linda at age nine</i>, 1988

SFMOMA’s four-day long Countdown Celebration extravaganza starts THURSDAY May 30th and is FREE to all. Join us there, or follow my countdown series here.

Paul Graham, <i>Pittsburgh</i>, 2004

“We’ll look at five works for 10 minutes each,” I said after my group assembled in the Koret Visitor Education Center for SFMOMA’s version of Slow Art Day. “Please don’t read the placards. I prefer you not take notes. The works’ identity won’t be revealed until the follow-up discussion here in the center.” I was excited about the possibility of exploring the wonders of less distracted, even de-contextualized visual thinking.

First up was a 2004 photograph from Paul Graham’s Pittsburgh portion of his 2007 book A Shimmer of Possibility. “Feel free to get close to the image,” I said, observing the members of my group surrendering their attention. Slow looking is an exercise in trust, I realized.

Our second selection, Trisha Donnelly’s two-room multimedia installation (2013), is simply entitled New Work. It resists easy definition; I chose it specifically for its ineffability. About five minutes into our gaze I noticed my restlessness. Later someone described how viewing it made her feel pushed to the left side of the gallery. Some members felt repelled while others enjoyed the experience. One person said, “It made me self-conscious.”

Next was Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1992 Untitled (America #1), a floor-to-ceiling cord of 15-watt light bulbs. Installed differently each time it is shown, it’s a slow burn, with a fragile, nearly painful brilliance that forces active looking — staring at Untitled (America #1) physically hurts the eye. Our bodies mimicked our sight as we circled the work, which was placed in the center of the room. Other visitors happily joined us.

Slow Art Viewing with Emily Wilson, in front of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s <i>”Untitled” (America #1)</i>, 1992; Photo: Charlie Villyard, April 27, 2013

While guiding my participants toward the fourth selection I noticed a collective sigh of oh no, not that one. When briefly glimpsed, Glenn Ligon’s White #13 (1994) seems impenetrable, but a patient roam of its surface reveals letters and flickers of white struggling through luscious black paint stick. “I kept seeing the word God,” a member of my group later said. “Godfather,” echoed another. Someone else added, “I read A Brief Vacation.” Ligon lifted the text from “White,” an essay on race in the cinema by theorist Richard Dyer.

A pale, humungous, naked lady glowed within our last work, Jenny Saville’s 1999 canvas Hem. Squeezed into the top frame, the lady’s head wore what our group found to be a mysterious expression. Up close and personal, Hem‘s delectable, fleshy surface evokes frosting, peach ice cream, prosciutto, and milk chocolate. Paint? It’s food.

The Paul Graham selection prompted heated discussion. Can a photograph be viewed in the same way as a painting? Was it wrong to have isolated my selection from its adjacent series? I suggested that this photograph — the one most frequently reproduced from A Shimmer of Possibility — is analogous to a sentence extracted, for example, from Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past:

And on one of the longest walks we took from Combray, there was a spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly on an immense plateau closed at the horizon by jagged forests above which rose only the delicate tip of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, but so thin, so pink, that it seemed merely scratched on the sky by a fingernail which wanted to give this landscape, this exclusively natural picture, that little mark of art, that indication of human presence.

Not only is the structure of this winding sentence representative of the entirety of Proust’s circuitous narrative, its subject — the steeple of Saint-Hilaire — is metonymic, like Ligon’s word fragments and Saville’s foodie brushstrokes. The steeple stands in for and distinguishes the town of Combray.

Fragments of psychedelic light are the distinguishing, uncanny details of Graham’s photograph. They are revealed by allowing one’s eye to wander through the photographic landscape with the same rhapsody as with any staggering work of art in any medium.

Emily Jain Wilson grew up in the Bay Area and received a BA in English and an MFA in painting from the University of California at Berkeley. She has been an affiliate at the Headlands Center for the Visual Arts and recently showed her work at the Patricia Sweetow Gallery.

Brice Marden, <i>Ten Days, Suite J</i>, 1971

SFMOMA’s four-day long Countdown Celebration extravaganza starts THURSDAY May 30th and is FREE to all. Join us there, or follow my countdown series here.

To them he’s just another good-looking guy with all the money and all the luck. What they don’t realize is that people tend only to see the end results of hard work, not all the headaches and bullshit it takes for projects to actually get done.

At age 35, not only is he well-credentialed, but he is a multi-millionaire with a net worth of about $22 million. He has appeared in 72 films and in numerous television shows. Sure, growing up in LA didn’t hurt. Neither did having smart & creative parents that both went to Stanford. Most importantly it seems like he is someone who has the ability, a superpower really, not only recognize, but to act on an opportunity when he sees one. Anyone can recognize an opportunity, but to act in the right way at the right time, that is much rarer than one might think.

Article seen in the New York Metro paper, given out to subway riders.

But from what it looks like, if it’s possible for him to do something he does it. He’s been a student, a director, an actor, worked at McDonald’s, dropped out, gotten in, traveled the world and is constantly busy.

He’s even contributed to art projects such as The Thing Quarterly and Carter’s Erased James Franco and Maladies.

IMDB also says about him that he “may perhaps be one of the most academically accomplished actors (an “extreme scholar”) in Hollywood history: besides his BFA in English from UCLA, he has two MFA degrees – both in writing – from Columbia and Brooklyn College, and a third MFA, in film, from New York University. He is continuing further degree studies while also teaching a graduate class that takes students through the process of making a feature-length film.”

But back to the mural -  I am no expert on James Franco, but I know that defacing other peoples’ art is pathetic. Although the mural itself is essentially an ad for his new film This is the End, it is as crudely painted as any you’d find in an elementary school. But hey – given the choice of a brick wall or a mural, I’d always choose a mural – and if you don’t like it, paint one of your own!

The graffiti is in bad taste in Williamsburg, a place known for its snotty rich kids whose rent is paid by their parents. bars there are open until 4:30 am, allowing them to party all night while attending prestigious schools in Manhattan. To them maybe he doesn’t deserve the accolades he’s received or they feel it is somehow unfair that he is in films and they are not. That he is in art shows and they are not. That he is on T.V. and they are not. That he’s hella cute and they are not.

Instead of hating on James Franco so hard, maybe ask yourself what you are doing with your time.

Agnes E. Meyer diagram by Adam Machacek. Click image to enlarge. Click here to view interactive Haas Bequest diagram.

Visitors to our current presentation of the Haas collection find an exhibition that unfolds across three galleries, each loosely dealing with its own theme. It opens with a gallery of portraits, or perhaps better put, a selection of early twentieth-century artworks that show a range of views on the necessity of likeness in portraiture. The second gallery (not without a few portraits itself) concern lyricism, a notion Elise Haas believed united her collecting practice. And the third and final gallery pairs works on paper and bronze sculpture by three artists Mrs. Haas knew personally and collected in depth—Henri Matisse, Marino Marini, and Henry Moore—so as to explore ideas they shared about the interconnection of two- and three-dimensional art making.

<i>The Elise S. Haas Bequest: Modern Art from Matisse to Marini</i> at SFMOMA featuring Charles Sheeler’s <i>Untitled (La Négresse Blonde)</i>, 1945 (left), and Constantin Brancusi’s <i>La Négresse Blonde</i>, 1926 (right); Photo: Ian Reeves, 2013

The first gallery also introduces us to Agnes E. Meyer, Elise Haas’s maternal aunt by marriage. A mentor to Elise as a collector and patron of the arts, Agnes Meyer was a supporter and friend to many members of the Paris and New York avant-gardes. Among her art-world associates in the years around 1910 were Francis Picabia and Marius de Zayas (who worked with Meyer as an editor of the early Dada magazine 291), photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, painters Max Weber and John Marin, and Gertrude and Leo Stein. Of particular relevance to SFMOMA’s painting and sculpture collection is Meyer’s friendship with the Romanian-born artist Constantin Brancusi. The story goes that they were introduced by Steichen around 1912, and within a few years Meyer was among Brancusi’s earliest American advocates and collectors. Over their decades-long friendship, Meyer assembled a choice collection of five Brancusi sculptures, including La Negresse blonde (1926), which she and Elise Haas gifted to SFMOMA shortly after the artist’s death.

<i>291 throws back its forelock</i> by Marius de Zayas, March 1915 (left); “Mental Reactions,” a collaboration between Agnes Meyer and Marius de Zayas that appeared in the magazine they co-edited, <i>291</i>, in April 1915 (right)

Charles Sheeler, <i>Untitled (La Négresse Blonde)</i>, 1945

La Negresse blonde was the first work by Brancusi to enter SFMOMA’s collection and remains a foundational work within our sculpture holdings. In the current exhibition we show it alongside a photograph of the sculpture made by the American artist Charles Sheeler around 1945. The sculpture’s title refers both to Brancusi’s model, an African woman he met in Marseilles, France, and the shimmering yellow metal he used to evoke her striking presence. As one sees in the work, he reduced her features to lips, a chignon, and a zigzag form at the back of her neck. The similarly elemental three-part pedestal, comprising a cylinder, Greek cross, and limestone base, might be read as the figure’s body, shoulders, and neck or, it might simply be understood as a materially direct and eclectic platform for display.

Meyer’s enthusiasm for Brancusi’s work was infectious. As she wrote in 1953, “My friendship with Brancusi was later shared by my whole family and has lasted to this very day, because we all, including every one of the children, love the man’s quizzical, witty and profoundly honest temperament as well as his art.” Brancusi, in turn, thrived under the Meyers’ patronage and generosity. As a guest of the family in Mount Kisco in 1926, Brancusi carved a base for Bird in Space, supposedly working in the garden as the children looked on. Meyer likewise seems to have had the familiar habit of inviting guests to Brancusi’s Paris studio, as we learn in a letter informing Brancusi she would be paying him a visit with “a friend of Steichen and also of Mrs. Picabia” and promising to bring him “an old bottle of champagne that I found the other day,” a token for his hospitality.

Artists at Mt. Kisco, 1912; unidentified photographer. Abraham Walkowitz papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Description: Group of artists seated on the ground, among the trees.
Identification on verso (handwritten): Left to right – Paul Haviland, Abraham Walkowitz, Katharine N. Rhoades, Mrs. Alfred Stieglitz, Agnes Ernst (Mrs. Eugene Meyer), Alfred Stieglitz, J.B. Kerfoot, John, Marin. Property of Walkowitz family.
Published in: Archives of American Art Journal v. 6, no. 2, p. 15; v. 40, no. 3-4, p. 36

Charles Sheeler, Study of the Brancusi sculpture “Portrait of Mrs. Eugene Meyer.” © The Lane Collection. Photograph courtesy of the Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC.

Meyer was sometimes known as “The Sun Girl,” a nickname that played on her radiant personality, and as the twentieth century progressed she became increasingly popular subject for artists. In 1914 De Zayas’s drawing “Mrs. Eugene Meyer, Jr.,” appeared in Camera Work, and a decade later the composer Erik Satie dedicated a short piece of musique d’ameublement to her. In 1929, when Brancusi caught wind that a sculptor from a rival stylistic camp, Charles Despiau, had made a portrait of Agnes Meyer, he set out to make a sculpture of his own—an alternative representation that would show Agnes a truer depiction of herself than Despiau’s portrait bust. The resulting sculpture, a monumental work in black marble, was completed in 1930. Now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, the sculpture is as beguiling as it is evocative of its sitter. And like La Negresse blonde, it was also captured by Sheeler in photograph.

Agnes Meyer was also a pioneering journalist and accomplished translator. She translated letters by Vincent van Gogh for 291, but her most notable translations were of the work of Thomas Mann, with whom she corresponded extensively. “I turned toward [Mann’s] works with as much or as little reason as a plant turns toward the sun,” she once wrote. Visitors may notice that the Haas exhibition contains a lithographic portrait of Mann by Marino Marini. The portrait is unusual for a couple of reasons. First, Marini is best known as a sculptor, and not terribly well known as a printmaker. Second, his most recognizable work tends to use the horse, as opposed to a human figure, as its motif. But to me this relatively modest contour drawing has become one of the physical embodiments of the commitment to the arts shared by Meyer and Elise Haas. And in that way it holds a place alongside La Negresse blonde as an object that allows us to observe the networks and traditions in which Haas hoped to operate as a collector.

Marino Marini,<i> Portrait of Thomas Mann </i>, 1955

A few final notes on Mrs. Haas and Marini. Elise had an especially close relationship with the sculptor and great sensitivity to his powers of representation. She described her time visiting him in Italy as unforgettable and rewarding and collected multiple works on paper as well as his sculpture in the round. Asked if she felt Marini’s drawings made him a sort of painter, she replied, “Well, no, he’s not a painter, but all sculptors make drawings. . . . I really think that often I prefer a sculptor’s to a painter’s drawings, because first of all I love sculpture, and secondly, they have a certain solidity and strength that very often other drawings don’t.”

Marini’s bronze portrait of the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, which we show in this exhibition adjacent to the portrait of Mann, synthesizes several of Mrs. Haas’s interests—music, portraiture, and sculpture. Around the time Marini was awarded the prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, Elise purchased the work from the noted New York dealer Curt Valentin—in whose gallery Marini and Stravinsky first met. Haas presented the sculpture to SFMOMA in 1952, and it was the first work by Marini to enter the collection. Mrs. Haas and Marini remained friends decades after this purchase, and in the 1970s she proposed that he make a portrait head of her husband, Walter Haas, Sr. Due to difficulties arranging a sitting in Milan and the impracticality of working from photographs, the project was never realized. But the portrait of Stravinsky allows us to imagine what might have been.

Caitlin Haskell is SFMOMA assistant curator of painting and sculpture.

For more on Agnes Meyer see:

Sidney Geist, “Brancusi, the Meyers, and Portrait of Mrs. Eugene Meyer, Jr.” Studies in the History of Art. 6 (1974): 189-212; Douglas K. S. Hyland, “Agnes Ernst Meyer, Patron of American Modernism,” American Art Journal (Winter 1980): 64-81; Agnes E. Meyer, Out of These Roots (Boston: Brown and Company, 1953); Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender & Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).

Follow the Currents Within a Collection: An Alternative History of the Elise S. Haas Bequest series here.

Elise S. Haas diagram by Adam Machacek. Click image to enlarge. Click here to view interactive Haas Bequest diagram.

A little more than twenty years ago, devoted philanthropist and longtime advocate for the arts Elise S. Haas gave a remarkable group of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper to SFMOMA. Her vision and generosity are felt in many corners of the museum—SFMOMA’s  conservation studio bears her name, as does a senior curatorial post in painting and sculpture—but to most visitors her influence and largess are most visible on the museum’s second floor. Since 1991, anyone strolling these galleries has found works hand-selected by Mrs. Haas to survey the art of her time in Europe and the Americas—early and midcareer Picasso, iconic works by Matisse in almost every medium in which he was active, and lesser-known classics by Diego Rivera, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe. She also presented the museum with a substantial body of work by British artists Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore and provided us with our first holdings by sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Marino Marini and by Cubists Juan Gris and Henri Laurens.

Mrs. Haas’s bequest to SFMOMA includes much to celebrate, and the gift and the works it comprises have been focal points of many exhibitions and publications. Every five to ten years, for instance, the museum recognizes the importance of the gift by presenting it as an ensemble. Works like Matisse’s Femme au chapeau (1905) and Marini’s Cavallo (1947)—two of Haas’s favorite works, which research tells us were frequently installed together, with the horse’s neck outstretched toward the painting—have a natural affinity, or perhaps they acquired one over the years. Yet in presenting such well-known works—cornerstones of the Haas collection—one wonders if there is, in fact, new light to shed on them. Is there anything that hasn’t already been observed?

Installation view of Haas home with <i>Cavallo</i> and <i>Femme au chapeau</i>. Courtesy The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

My own attempt to address these objects from new angles brought me to the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, decades when Elise Haas was building the core of her collection. I became intrigued by the personal relationships that motivated or facilitated the entry of works into her care and ultimately into SFMOMA’s collection. All were supported by a constellation of individuals—artists, dealers, collectors, family members, mentors—who each had a special relationship to Mrs. Haas. In some cases their presences are overt, as with Sarah Stein; in others they are less perceptible, as in the models provided by Haas’s maternal aunts Aline M. Liebman and Agnes E. Meyer. Yet in each case something of these individuals is woven into the texture of the collection.

Haas had a tendency to demure when speaking about her collecting practice—“I do not call myself a collector but others do. . . . I just buy things I love.” But it doesn’t take an expert researcher to realize that, although she was an amateur in the literal sense, her art collecting was in no way a novice pursuit. A savvy networker and sophisticated broker with an exacting personality and a frank, forthright manner, Haas can appear both inspired and opportunistic within a single transaction. As a hub connecting a complex community of actors, Haas secured major works and ensured their placement at SFMOMA, all the while pursuing her own aesthetic sense and following what she referred to as “a purely personal attraction.”

<i>The Elise S. Haas Bequest: Modern Art from Matisse to Marini</i> at SFMOMA showing Marino Marini’s <i>Cavallo</i> (Horse) (1947) and Henri Matisse’s <i>Femme au chapeau</i> (Woman with a Hat) (1905); photo: Ian Reeves, 2013

Although the collection now on view celebrates the gifts of one patron, it hardly reflects the unalloyed aesthetic sensibility of a single visionary. As I’ve come to understand it, the collection is more accurately viewed as an expert synthesis of material from many sources discovered and assembled by Mrs. Haas over decades. With more than ten artists in the collection represented by only a single work, it’s fair to say that cohesiveness was not a guiding principle for Mrs. Haas. And as the exhibition subtitle implies, the works she collected spanned multiple decades of art making, from Matisse’s “fauve” period in the early twentieth century to the work of Marini and his contemporaries in the 1950s and after. Haas had an ability to uncover great works across these periods, and her efforts resulted in a gift that in many ways represents a palette of different twentieth-century styles.

Although fascinating to me, many of the details surrounding these constellations of supporting figures didn’t find their way into the current exhibition, and a great deal of research landed on the editing room floor. Over the next two weeks, between now and the exhibition’s close on June 2, some of these stories will appear in Open Space, highlighting specific aspects of the Haas collection’s formation and telling a story of community, of relationships with artists and dealers, and of role models within and beyond Haas’s family and San Francisco sphere.

Caitlin Haskell is SFMOMA assistant curator of painting and sculpture.

Follow the Currents Within a Collection: An Alternative History of the Elise S. Haas Bequest series here.

Haas Bequest diagram by Adam Machacek. Interactive version will open in a new window.

Caitlin Haskell is SFMOMA assistant curator of painting and sculpture.

Follow the Currents within a Collection: An Alternative History of the Elise S. Haas Bequest series here.

When SFMOMA and the National Gallery announced plans to organize a retrospective of Winogrand’s work—now on view at SFMOMA, until June 2—Biondi contacted the curators and offered to speak about what it was like to be one of Winogrand’s subjects. He and SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Photography Erin O’Toole spoke over the phone on April 10. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1954; Museum of Modern Art, New York, Robert and Joyce Menschel Fund; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Erin O’Toole: Why don’t we start with you telling me your full name, where you’re from, and any other pertinent background details you’d like to give, just to give a little introduction.

Nick Biondi: My full name is Nicholas Biondi. Nick Biondi. I was born in Manhattan, New York. Lived there for most of my life, and when I was seventeen I went and applied to the Golden Gloves. I was making headlines during that time because I was having first-round knockouts. Garry Winogrand was assigned to do a photographic study for Sports Illustrated and got in touch with me. . . . He really came around when I had a twelve-second first-round knockout. I still hold the record for that year. Garry came to the third fight, and I won that fight; he took pictures. And he went to school with me, to my high school, to take pictures. And he followed me home one night, and that’s the picture you see at dinner. I have a number of those pictures, and if you look at the picture at dinner, you can see my father scolding me.

O’Toole: Were you a bit of a troublemaker?

Biondi: No, it was just a father-son thing, nothing that I can recall. But look at Garry! Where was Garry? You would get the idea that we were so used to having dinner guests that he just blended right in. Not so! When Garry was taking pictures, if we didn’t see a flash, we were suspicious—what did we know about cameras? Look at my father and mother, how natural they look. Garry was only the second guest we had in twenty years! [laughs]

O’Toole: Do you feel that had a lot to do with him as a person, that he made you feel comfortable?

Biondi: One of the things that still amazes me about the encounter was that neither I nor any of the other participants in the photographs were even remotely self-conscious. Normally when there’s a guy with a camera focusing his attention on you, a person might become self-conscious. Self-consciousness didn’t exist for me then, and looking at the photographs it doesn’t show itself in the pictures. I wasn’t aware of Garry the Photographer’s presence. He was like a ghost, and we simply went about our daily tasks. It helped enormously that he didn’t use flash, but it also made us wonder if he actually had film in the camera! In my opinion this ghostliness was a major component of his talent.

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1954; Courtesy Black Dog Collection

O’Toole: Something else I wanted to ask you was about the pictures from [your] clubhouse.

Biondi: Garry became fascinated that a seventeen-year-old kid had a social club in Manhattan, consisting of fourteen teenagers—a place they could go to socialize with their dates to get off the street corners, where the police would not arrest them. Where they would pay their dues and the rent each month and continue the social structure for five years. Garry came from the co-ops of the Bronx, and our club house was a co-op in Manhattan.

O’Toole: There was going to be a victory party there after the fight, but then you didn’t win the fight, is that correct?

Biondi: Right.

O’Toole: So what happened?

Biondi: Well, I got knocked out in the third round. You gotta understand I’d had three first-round knockouts—I’d never made it back to the corner. So in the fourth fight, when I should have known something about pacing yourself, I didn’t. I was exhausted. The fight was in Brooklyn, and afterward we took the subway back to Manhattan. Garry took pictures on the way, and he came to the party at the club.

O’Toole: You said that Sports Illustrated had commissioned the story.

Biondi: That was my understanding. And then they didn’t use it.

O’Toole: Because you didn’t win?

Biondi: That’s my guess. Then they sold it to Pageant magazine, and Pageant printed it, in May of ’55.

O’Toole: So it became a different kind of story.

Biondi: Same writer, same photographer, but it became a human interest story, an amateur boxer. Sports Illustrated probably wanted someone who won the championship, but that was not to be. The experience was fantastic, though.

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1954; National Gallery of Art, Patron’s Permanent Fund; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

O’Toole: The gym was in your neighborhood?

Biondi: The gym was in the neighborhood; that’s how we did it then. The gym that I trained at was on Fifty-Fourth Street between First and Second Avenue in Manhattan and is still standing. I can tell you right off the bat, knowing a little bit about Garry, if I was having this kind of success in the Bronx or Queens or Brooklyn, he wouldn’t have taken the assignment. He was strictly a Manhattan guy.

O’Toole: Yep, even though he was from the Bronx.

Biondi: Even though he was from the Bronx, he was strictly Manhattan.

O’Toole: And why do you think that’s the case?

Biondi: Why was he strictly Manhattan? He just was a Manhattan guy. You know, he became one. But John Szarkowski  [director of the Department of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991 and a great champion of Winogrand’s work] called him a “city hick,” and I agree with that characterization 100 percent. Winogrand was fascinated with Manhattan.

O’Toole: How long did you continue to box?

Biondi: I started in November or December 1953, and the tournament for me lasted through January 30 of 1954. This is the period of time that Garry and I were together. There’s a picture in Pageant magazine on the front page where we’re running, me and a partner running in the park. Garry asked me, “Where do you run?” Run? Who ran? [laughs] My training didn’t encompass running. I would have been in better shape if it did! [laughs] So we said Central Park and decided to meet in Central Park. If you look at the picture in Pageant, we look surprised when we came upon him with his camera—he didn’t stage anything.

O’Toole: He just followed you around.

Biondi: Yeah. He said, “Run,” so I said, “I guess we’ll run around the reservoir once.” And he took the picture and he caught us, just caught a perfect picture. Then he went to high school with me. None of the kids in the drafting class that he took pictures of were self-conscious—it was amazing!

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1954; Museum of Modern Art, New York, Purchase and gift of Barbara Schwartz in memory of Eugene Schwartz; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

O’Toole: Was he just there with you the one day at school, or was he there for several days?

Biondi: One day at school, one day running, a couple of days at the club—all separate occasions. At the house one evening, and another time at the gym where I trained. He took lots of pictures at the gym. And then we became friends. Sometimes Coronet magazine or Collier’s would need some young teenager types, so I would get them for him and he would stage us for an assignment. Then I met Adrienne, his wife, and we went to the beach once with his kids. He did the boxing pictures that January, but I kept seeing him after that.

O’Toole: Tell me a little bit about his personality, or your impression of him as a person.

Biondi: C.H.H.I.

O’Toole: What does that mean?

Biondi: Character, Honesty, Honor, Integrity.

O’Toole: Is this your motto?

Biondi: Yes.

O’Toole: And you feel he fit that bill?

Biondi: Class A person. Nothing slimy or sleazy, nothing like that at all. Up-front and intelligent, creative. And I think when he was photographing it was like a gambler who’s into gambling, they just lose themselves. . . . There was a movie called The Leopard, by [Luchino] Visconti [based on the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa], and it says what we do in life from the minute we’re born is try to escape back into the womb. We do that by being involved in some occupation or pursuit and that’s when you’re the happiest—in pursuit of your dream.

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1954; National Gallery of Art, Patron’s Permanent Fund; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

O’Toole: Did you feel that way boxing?

Biondi: Boxing was a great thing, yes, but I don’t know why I did it. In fact, when I think back on it, if I’d won my fourth fight, there would have been tremendous pressure on me to continue. And believe me, boxing’s a lousy way to make a living. I mean, the training! [laughs] Just think, you get punched in the head every day. Forget the actual fights!

O’Toole: Not so good for your future prospects.

Biondi: [laughs] No, but you know, boxers were my idols as a kid.

O’Toole: Boxing was really big in those years, too, much bigger than it is now. Winogrand shot a lot of boxing and football, and he made some great photographs of Muhammad Ali later on.

Biondi: Right, I’m aware of that. I followed his career, of course, from a distance. I lost touch when he went to California and Texas. But when he was still in the city, I’d run into him. I’d tell him about my latest love affair and that kind of thing, and we’d commiserate. . . . I ran into him with a girl once, in front of his West Side apartment, and we went up to the apartment. He pulled out a lot of photographs to show me from years back and gave me a bunch of them. I think that was when I asked him, “Garry, what is the most creative thing you’ve ever done in your life?” And without missing a beat, he replied, “Having children.” I never forgot that because it offered the possibility for me to be just as creative as Garry! [laughs]

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1954; Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Erin O’Toole is assistant curator of photography at SFMOMA.

Kaye Donachie, <i>The Epiphany,</i> 2002; oil on canvas

24. In Sacramento, one of the girls who stood vigil outside a Los Angeles courtroom waiting for her “father to be released” in 1969 makes headlines again six years later. Charles Manson follower Lynette Fromme attempts to assassinate President Gerald Ford in a gesture that she claims is in defense of the Redwood Forest.
25. “I stood up and waved a gun (at Ford) for a reason,” Fromme says. “I was so relieved not to have to shoot it, but, in truth, I came to get life. Not just my life but clean air, healthy water and respect for creatures and creation.”
26. Does Fromme know that in Carbon Canyon Regional Park two hundred Redwood trees have been planted? A Redwood forest right there in Orange County!
27. Orange County is best known throughout the world as the home of the original Disneyland (built over what were once orange groves and, before that, desert). In 1975 the theme park celebrates its twentieth anniversary, and in this year, as in the year before and the one after, miles and miles of Super 8 footage are shot in Disneyland, home movies that will later find a larger retro-hungry audience in future YouTube posts. During this year, the park will see its first gang-related violence when three teens are shot. All escape without serious injury.
28. This is also the year that Mark Frechette, famous for his role in the 1970 film Zabriskie Point, dies in a prison yard when a barbell with 150 pounds on it falls on his neck. No foul play is suspected, though friends attest that the former actor was suffering severe depression.
29. At the premiere of Zabriskie Point, Frechette and his costar Daria Halprin expressed their disappointment: “Antonioni missed it completely,” Mark said. “What comes over on the screen is a revolutionary Disneyland. Antonioni has given us a lot of pretty pictures, but otherwise it’s a void—there’s no context, no feeling.” Daria added, “I’m sure Antonioni believed in what he was doing, but he just doesn’t understand people—he didn’t give the characters enough room to be human.”
30. Frechette’s story, especially his connections with the Fort Hill Commune, is one of many that will preoccupy painter Kaye Donachie. Headed by the charismatic Mel Lyman, Fort Hill was perhaps the first of such Manson-style personality cults short on dogma but strong on discipline and introspection. Frechette and two other members of the commune attempted to rob a bank in 1973, which was how he wound up in the prison in Norfolk, Massachusetts, where his life would end.
31. Some of the Manson Girls (Fromme included) will also find their way into Donachie’s paintings, bathed in yellow light and smiles.

Kaye Donachie, <i>EBB,</i> 2010; oil on canvas, 50.5 x 40.8 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>Black and enduring separation,</i> 2012; oil on canvas, 41 x 30 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>I am so multiple in nights,</i> 2005;
oil on canvas, 67 x 38.5 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>Your untold dreams I love to see,</i> 2005; oil on canvas, 59.5 x 41.9 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>And schemes of shadows were drifting by,</i> 2005; oil on canvas, 45.7 x 66 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>Hobo’s Lament,</i> 2005; oil on canvas, 46 x 62 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>Didn’t know what to leave behind,</i> 2005; oil on canvas, 66.8 x 76.8 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>But in your eyes I see a sunbeam,</i> 2005; oil on canvas, 50.8 x 58.4 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>Every mornin’ our love is reborn,</i> 2004; oil on canvas, 62.5 x 90 cm

Michelangelo Antonioni, <i>Zabriskie Point</i> (film still), 1970, with Mark Frechette (l) and Daria Halprin (r)

Detail shot of Sydney Cohen’s studio

Lately I’ve become obsessed with the paintings of Sydney Cohen, the Oakland-based artist who is also an adjunct painting/drawing professor at California College of the Arts. We met there last summer teaching painting in the Pre-College Program on the Oakland campus. She is warm and unpretentious, and we became fast friends commiserating about the joys and frustrations of teaching high school students and connecting on interesting assignments. One of hers I particularly liked: “Make a dark painting. Now make that painting’s dreams.”

I quickly noticed that while she was generous in talking to (and about) her students, Sydney often shied away from talking about her own work or professional artistic experiences. Researching her work online, I was amazed to find her work to be quite stunning. They were these small to medium-large brilliantly colorful layered abstractions of oblique lyrical structures and spaces, each one a mini-world of intuitive and playful decision making. Both highly worked and loosely executed, they reveled in a vivid liquidity of poured textures and buoyant shapes. But she didn’t exhibit them that often.

When I visited her paint-splattered studio, there must have been hundreds of paintings lying around and stacked in various states of finish. Hers is the kind of beautifully messy painterly abstraction that I enjoy so much but see little of these days, with many young abstract painters leaning toward a forced distance of restraint with barely there gestures of thin paint and labored conceptualized emptiness. Sydney’s painting refreshingly loped and careened wildly through a complex network of  bright shapes and unhesitating gestures, pouring on layer after layer of strange color combinations into burrowing organic forms.

Why so deflective? It was like she was working in secret. Or perhaps like a great actor fraught with stage fright, she’s just incredibly shy when it came to showing her work. Only a handful of people I know who knew her were aware of her paintings. My programming slot at Right Window Gallery in the Mission was approaching, so I asked Sydney if she would like to do a show. I was afraid she would say no, but she thankfully accepted. It’s up through May. To get to know her and her work better, I asked her some general questions and was delighted by the roundabout airiness of her answers.

Q: How would you describe your work?

A: Pillow forts to have sex in. All-you-can-eat ice cream. A preference for the most indirect path. My friend was telling me the other day about some greyhounds we saw at the dog park. She said their owner told her that they have special neuroses: either they stack dishes and things on top of the refrigerator when they’re left alone, or they take things down off the refrigerator and make stacks around the house. She couldn’t remember which.

Q: Is there an artist or artwork that particularly speaks to you?

A: Oh, so many. Michael Disfarmer, Japanese ceramics, woodcuts from ukiyo-e. We talked a little about Édouard Vuillard. I’m really into the drawings of Emma Strebel; I’ve gotten to see her draw since she was in middle school. She goes to NYU now. My aunt Bonnie makes paper from mushrooms. I really like shapes.

Q: What are some of your favorite color combinations?

A: Sometimes when I’m walking around, I feel like I drop into extra deep color vision, that my eyes are tuned right in to color. So much of the time we are not really seeing color. Our brains make composites of colors, deciding for us to not focus on color, more to just take in general impressions, so as to navigate in the world and not get hit by cars or walk into trees. One doesn’t need to be an artist to experience the sudden awareness of color, as if the world just got turned on or tuned in and that it feels like an altered state. It makes us realize it is not how we usually operate. Yet color is happening around us all the time.

I am loving gray and green at the end of the day, and I’m appreciating unusual combinations—orange and purple together, mixed blue and rust shadows. Some colors that I used to find so ugly can start to be really interesting. Oh my God, purple—I’m sorry I’ve been dissing you all these years.

Q: What might people not know about you?

A: I was an extra in a Bollywood film. I played a drug addict. It was a long time ago.

Q: Does anything else inform your work?

A: I really like the internet. I love being able to look something up and that links to something else I want to know about and that to something else. It is supposed to be rewiring our brains to go only shallow, but wide is another kind of deep.

Q: What advice do you give most to your students?

A: You are a bear lost in a forest, and there is an old woman with long gray braids baking pies for you, and your job is to keep following the smell of pie. That’s your job—learning how to keep turning toward what is most delicious to you.

Sydney’s show “Some Other Need” is viewable through May at 992 Valencia St. in the right window of A.T.A. This Sunday (5/19/13) , there is an opening from 4 to 7 p.m. Go see it!