Just about everyone has had their say about the passing of Lucian Freud and a mostly imagined controversy over his life and the amount of paint he used. I don’t have anything worthwhile to add to any of that.
I appreciated Freud’s art and his life’s commitment to it. His paintings and drawings are his gift to us all, the other stuff is just background noise.
Hopefully, everyone gets a chance to see the new film “Red Tails”, which tells the true story of African American World War II pilots – the Tuskegee Airmen. It opens on Friday January 20, 2012. But, just in case you don’t do movies, but are still fascinated by black “flight”, the Smithsonian has both an online and a traveling exhibit called “Black Wings”. 
“The historic flight of the Wright brothers in 1903 sparked a universal enthusiasm for flying. But as in most areas of life, formidable obstacles and discrimination faced black Americans who had dreams of flying… Black Wings tells the story of how one group of Americans overcame enormous obstacles to break into aviation.”
(Images: Aviatrix, Bessie Coleman in 1923, poster for “Red Tails”)
“Collected. Ritual explores the performative and process-oriented aspects of making art and examines ritual as an act of special and sometimes mythical significance. The works in this exhibition were chosen for the innovative ways in which the artists engaged with ritual—including through studio art-making and artistic practices that use symbolic actions. This exhibition, organized by Assistant Curator Naima J. Keith, explores the relationship and nexus between art and ritual through twenty-five works of art from the permanent collection spanning the last thirty years.“
Collected. Ritual – Until Mar 11, 2012
The Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, NYC
(Image: Betye Saar – “Window of Ancient Sirens”, 1979)
Just see this movie, make up your own mind and then see it again and come to a different conclusion and repeat. Give up on getting it right or choosing sides – it’s great or it’s horrible – take your side.
MoMA, New York City, offers us a retrospective of the work of Holland born artist de Kooning.
“Representing nearly every type of work de Kooning made, in both technique and subject matter, this retrospective includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints. Among these are the artist’s most famous, landmark paintings—among them Pink Angels (1945), Excavation (1950), and the celebrated third Woman series (1950–53)—plus in-depth presentations of all his most important series, ranging from his figurative paintings of the early 1940s to the breakthrough black-and-white compositions of 1948–49, and from the urban abstractions of the mid 1950s to the artist’s return to figuration in the 1960s, and the large gestural abstractions of the following decade. Also included is de Kooning’s famous yet largely unseen theatrical backdrop, the 17-foot-square Labyrinth (1946).”
de Kooning: A Retrospective * Until January 9, 2012
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
The busy and thriving Brooklyn Museum presents – Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, until January 29, 2012. 
The exhibition “brings together for the first time the work of sixty-eight painters, sculptors, and photographers who explored a new mode of modern realism in the years bounded by the aftermath of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression.”.
Some of the artists represented are:
Thomas Hart Benton, Imogen Cunningham, Charles Demuth, Aaron Douglas, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Luigi Lucioni, Gerald Murphy, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.
Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties
Brooklyn Museum, 5th Flr, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York
(Images: Winold Reiss, 1886–1953, Sari Price Patton, 1925 and George Copeland Ault, 1891–1948, Brooklyn Ice House, 1926)
Dan Hicks will be celebrating his 70th birthday Friday, April 6, 8:00pm
(SF Jazz 2012)
with a reunion of the Hot Licks band and promising special guest joining in. I love when the artist preforms for his/her on celebration.
On April 19th, Anoushka Shankar will be at the Herbst Theatre celebrating being exceptional.
There is so much more music happening every year, throughout the year with the SFJazz series. San Francisco is a fun place. If you are traveling to the Bay area between February and late June of next year and you love live music in great settings, check out SF Jazz
We’ve heard of Gertrude Stein and her marvelous group of artist friends, especially Picasso, but she also had siblings with the same urge to gather painters and their art. That family fascination is celebrated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art starting with the exhibit: The Steins Collect Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde 
“American expatriates in bohemian Paris when the 20th century was young, the Steins — writer Gertrude, her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael’s wife, Sarah — were among the first to recognize the talents of avant-garde painters like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Through their friendship and patronage, they helped spark an artistic revolution. This landmark exhibition draws on collections around the world to reunite the Steins’ unparalleled collections of modern art, bringing together, for the first time in a generation, dozens of works by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and many others. “
“The Steins Collect Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde”
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA
(Image: Pablo Picasso,” Head in Three-Quarter View”, 1907; gouache and watercolor on paper)
Yolande Moreau
There are actors who are able to lend their body and face to the character they are portraying. Yolande Moreau does just that for me in Séraphine a little gem of a movie about “Séraphine de Senlis” (Séraphine Louis).
Moreau is so compelling that I found myself understanding her many challenges as if they were my own, struggling to fit, what is called the normal world, into the abstraction of her mind.
For most people being fully understood and understanding others is difficult, for an artist it may be many times more difficult.
Once more, Séraphine is a beautiful small film.
The Whitney Museum in NYC has a new presentation exploring the work of real and surreal artists of the last century. 
“This exhibition, drawn entirely from the deep holdings of the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection, will focus on the tension and overlap between two strong currents in twentieth century art. Although the term “realism” has many facets, a basic connection to the observable world underlies all of them; the subversion of reality through the imagination and the subconscious lies at the heart of Surrealism. Yet there are convergences in these different and even oppositional approaches to experience, and they encourage new ways of looking at the art of the twenties, thirties, and forties in America.”
“Real/Surreal” until February, 2012
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, New York, NY
(Image: George Tooker, “The Subway”, 1950)
