Two Exhibitions Organized by Walker Art Center and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to Be on View at Museo Dolores Olmedo in Xochimilco, Mexico City, in 2008

In conjunction with the Walker Art Center exhibition

Frida Kahlo

, which draws from some 30 private and institutional collections in the United States, Mexico, France, and Japan, the Walker and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) have assembled two exhibitions for presentation in 2008 at the Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico City.

Robert Motherwell: Masterworks from the Walker Art Center Collection

February 23—May 25, 2008
Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) was the youngest member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painters. This survey exhibition features some 40 drawings, collages, prints, ink studies, and monumental paintings on canvas demonstrating how Motherwell’s life and artistic production were book-ended with experiences related to Mexican art and culture. The artist traveled to Mexico for the first time in 1941 where he spent the summer in Taxco with Roberto Matta. Through Matta, he met the influential artist Wolfgang Paalen, who was living in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City. In his almost daily conversations with Motherwell, Paalen expressed his intention to go beyond Surrealism. Through Paalen, Motherwell began to view automatism as an open-ended technique both independent from Surrealism and crucial to the new art that would later be called Abstract Expressionism. Works on view include Elegy Study (1953), Histoire d’un Peintre (Diary of a Painter) (1956), Iberia #17 (1958), Red Pencil Automatism Drawings #1– #6 (1959), Window in Sienna (1968), Blue Figure (1971), and Elegy to the Spanish Republic #167 (Spanish Earth Elegy) (1985).

American Modernism: Selections from the Collections of Walker Art Center and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

July 5—October 5, 2008
This exhibition provides a survey of American Art with masterpieces from the collections of the Walker Art Center and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). The exhibition comprises approximately 40 important paintings, prints, and drawings from both collections which best portray the ascendancy of American Art from the early years of the 20th century to its apogee in the 1950s. The concept of modernity is explored through the eyes of the nation’s artists with works falling within such art historical and thematic groupings as urban realism, portraiture, still life, the American scene, nature, and geometric abstraction. Works by artists such as Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Georgia O’Keeffe, Kay Sage, and Charles Sheeler will be on view.