San Francisco Museums to Reorganize Collections

Officials at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are planning a major reshuffling of the museums’ art collections housed at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

The plan is to move Old Master paintings and other European artworks currently housed at the De Young museum to the Legion of Honor. Since 1972, the Legion of Honor has primarily been a museum of French art, and the reorganization would make it a showcase for masterworks from all European schools, Fine Arts Museums director Harry S. Parker said recently.

The move would simultaneously make the De Young a museum exclusively for American paintings, sculpture and decorative arts.

“One objective (of the reorganization) was to give a clarity to the role these two museums play,” said Parker. “Further, our European collection will look far more impressive when we’ve pruned it out and focused on works of the highest quality.”

Parker said about two dozen major paintings by such artists as Rembrandt, El Greco and Bouts and a representative collection of traditional European art will be housed at the Legion of Honor when the scheduled move is completed in early 1989.

“What we’ll lose, to some degree, by compressing the European works into a smaller space is the sense of complete, historic schools of painting, but the high points of the collection will read much stronger,” Parker said.

REAL OR MOVIE REEL?: Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will launch a three-month film series contrasting documentary and feature films about artists. “Fact and Fiction: Artists’ Lives on Film” kicks off with works about Rembrandt Harmensz Van Rijin. The 7 p.m. presentation presents a 1974 documentary produced by National Educational Television and director Alexander Korda’s 1936 film about the Dutch master starring Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. Future installments will profile Paul Gauguin (May 10), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (May 24) and Vincent van Gogh (May 31). Admission is $3.

RETREAT: Wyoming’s Ucross Residency Program, which provides selected artists and scholars with work space and living accommodations to concentrate on their work, is seeking applicants.

Ucross residents, who have included painters, sculptors, printmakers, poets and authors, stay at the rustic Ucross Foundation complex in Ucross, Wyo., for two weeks to two months. Two residency periods are scheduled annually, from January through May and August through December. Four residents can be accommodated at a time. No services or products are required from residents.

Residency applications, which must include work samples and a description of the work the applicant plans to do while at Ucross, may be obtained from Heather Plank, Ucross Foundation, Ucross Route Box 19, Ucross, Wyo., 82835. Information: (307) 737-2291.

STEP FORWARD: Volunteers are needed at the Palos Verdes Art Center to serve as gallery docents and receptionists. The jobs require a commitment of two half-days per month in weekday shifts from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. or 12:30 to 4 p.m. Saturday’s shift is from 1 to 4 p.m. Volunteers are also sought for other needs at the Rancho Palos Verdes center. Information: (213) 541-2479.

PEOPLE: Helen Levitt and Mary Ellen Mark have won the Friends of Photography’s 1987 Peer Awards in Creative Photography. Levitt, best known for her haunting New York street scenes from the ‘30s and ‘40s, received the nonprofit Bay Area organizations’s Distinguished Career in Photography award, which honors senior figures in photography. Mark’s poignant documentary photojournalism, depicting people of England, Northern Ireland and India, earned her a Photographer of the Year Award, presented to mid-career artists. The Friends of Photography’s Peer Awards, determined by a group of photographers and others knowledgeable about the field, provide each recipient with $1,000.