FROM SURREAL TO PENN

Two photography exhibitions of unusual interest are coming to the Bay Area: “L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Friday to Feb. 16, and a major retrospective of the work of Irving Penn at the University Art Museum, UC Berkeley, Jan. 22 to March 16.

The Surrealist exhibition, which originated at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, contains some 200 works by Man Ray, Andre Breton, Brassai, Andre Kertesz and George Hugnet, as well as photographs by painters Max Ernst, Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali.

Photography is a particularly suitable medium in which to create the dream images so central to Surrealism, projected in its first publication, Breton’s Surrealist Revolution magazine (1924-29).

Man Ray, who sought to reveal “the shapes in one’s head,” used rayography, overdevelopment, over-enlargement and photograms to get the effects he wanted. “I do not photograph nature,” he said. “ I photograph my fantasy . . . an idea rather than an object and a dream rather than an idea.”

The medium also lent itself to the easy juxtaposition of dissimilar objects in situations alien to their “natural” context. Through technical processes such as double exposure, combination printing, photomontage and solarization, the normal frame of reference could be reshaped and an object’s meaning and definition expanded. George Hugnet’s photomontage “Untitled 1936,” for example, combines the image of a woman sprawled beneath that of the Eiffel Tower, (both in distorted scale) superimposed over the city of Paris.

“L’Amour Fou” was assembled via loans from Belgium, England, France and the United States by the Corcoran’s Associate Director Jane Livingston with Rosalind Krauss, professor of art history at Hunter College. Livingston and Krauss also co-authored the catalogue, published by Abbeville Press. After leaving San Francisco, the show will travel to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Hayward Gallery in London.

The Irving Penn retrospective, organized by John Szarkowsky, director of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of photography, will also contain some 200 prints in black-and-white and color.

These will give an overview of Penn’s work of the last four decades and feature portraiture, fashion, advertising, nude and ethnographic studies. Included is a selection of Penn’s early unpublished works.

At the the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Thursday through Feb. 16, is the retrospective exhibition of contemporary realist painter Wayne Thiebaud.

Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it presents a full range of the artist’s oeuvre in 72 paintings and 14 drawings. Represented in the exhibition are Thiebaud’s first mature still lifes--sensuous, textured paintings of cafeteria food displays in repetitive rows, which in the early 1960s delighted viewers and brought the artist nationwide attention.

Critics immediately linked the work to Pop art, one of the trends then occupying center stage. Thiebaud denied any identification with Pop: “I see myself as a traditional painter. I’m very much interested in the concept of realism.”

Still lifes from the early ‘60s to the present form the largest part of the artist’s work; complementing them are paintings and drawings of figures, landscapes (including dramatic San Francisco cityscapes of the mid-’70s) and recent work.

An illustrated catalogue with a comprehensive essay by curator Karen Tsujimoto accompanies the exhibition, which is sponsored in Newport Beach by a $100,000 gift from the Irvine Co.

The most complete museum exhibition to date of the work of Bay Area artist Elmer Bischoff is now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The survey covers 40 years in 35 paintings and 15 drawings, selected to represent the artist’s principal stylistic phases.

A native Californian, Bischoff was born in Berkeley in 1916. Following graduation from UC Berkeley, he served in the military and in 1946 joined the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts--the wellspring of the Abstract Expressionist movement on the West Coast.

His friendships there with painters Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell, David Park and Hassel Smith influenced his own attitudes toward art. When, like Diebenkorn, Park and several others, Bischoff adapted Abstract Expressionist painterly attitudes to figurative and landscape subjects, the style came to be known as the Bay Area Figurative School.

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art inaugurates a yearlong program of solo exhibitions by contemporary Southern California artists with an exhibition of recent work by Guy Williams, Saturday through Jan. 26.

This, the first in the series designed to feature the works of emerging and mid-career artists, presents seven large-scale paintings along with works on paper completed in 1985 by Williams, who five years ago moved to Santa Barbara and holds a professorship at UC Santa Barbara.

The artist, recognized for the cosmopolitan ease of his rhythmic abstractions and his mastery of color, adds to a long and rich history of modern geometric abstraction his own highly individual works whose visual vocabulary is stimulated by music, philosophy and literature.

Calling art a “long-haul proposition,” Williams considers the relative isolation of Santa Barbara an ideal environment for making art.

The show is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by Curator of Modern Art Diane Shamash, who organized the exhibition.

The National Watercolor Society is holding its 65th annual show at the Brea Civic Cultural Center, through Dec. 20. On view are 134 paintings in watercolor and other aquamedia selected from 1,012 submissions by artists from 48 states.

Luis Monreal, director of the Getty Conservation Institute, recently announced the appointment of Marta de la Torre as training program director for the institute.

De la Torre was born in Cuba and has been a U.S. citizen since 1968. She received a bachelor’s degree in design from George Washington University and did graduate work in art history at Georgia State University in Atlanta. A master’s degree in arts management from the American University in Washington led to a position as project coordinator and later as head of projects and administration for the Paris-based International Council of Museums (ICOM). While with ICOM she was responsible for the organization and implementation of training activities internationally.

She developed the first museum studies course in Egypt and developed feasibility studies for the creation of regional conservation training centers.