The North Makes Its Move : After L.A.’s Ascendance as a Cultural Center, San Francisco Opens Its $62-Million Museum

Let the games begin!

What games? Why, the North/South Art Museum Games.

Today the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) opens its new $62-million facility, one of the last in the building boom that has characterized the American museum world in the past 20 years. The official story is that SFMOMA had outgrown the cramped, inhospitable quarters it had occupied in the Civic Center since 1935.

The official story isn’t wrong, just incomplete. SFMOMA’s old home, after all, had been inadequate for decades. Why make the move now?

Because of Los Angeles. In 1985, when plans for San Francisco’s newest cultural edifice were hatched in earnest after years of dithering, L.A. had just captured the international art world’s institutional flag. The prospects for the Getty Center, the huge expansion of the L.A. County Museum of Art and, especially, the birth of a new Museum of Contemporary Art had conspired to turn San Francisco into California’s moribund also-ran.

San Francisco didn’t like that. Having always identified itself as the state’s culture capital, especially relative to its slatternly neighbor to the south, it was suddenly Nowheresville for art.

So, when SFMOMA’s determined board saw an opportunity, they seized it. The Yerba Buena redevelopment area south of Market Street, adjacent to the financial district, had for years been the site of urban renewal wars, but it was shaping up as a linchpin for tourism, the city’s principal industry. A new home for SFMOMA at Yerba Buena would fit right in.

All it would take was money. The museums’ trustees started writing checks--$65 million worth. Led by director John R. Lane they also raised another $25 million for good measure.

As the museum opens, San Francisco can now claim a first-rate building. Swiss designer Mario Botta has given SFMOMA almost everything it needed.

Composed of big, clear, massive geometric forms, his building steps back from its surprisingly inviting, human-scaled facade to somehow hide its 225,000-square-foot bulk. Inside, Botta has designed the ground floor on the model of an outdoor Italian piazza, where people are the focal point. The museum shop, restaurant, auditorium, restrooms, coat check and education rooms surround the broad lobby, which is devoid of art.

Art probably couldn’t survive in this grand entry space. Stripes are everywhere, in dramatic black-and-gray granite floors and columns and stained wood, while the eye is led up into a bright, white atrium to the huge skylight towering 145 feet above. A distinctly corporate and commercial look puts an unfortunate, late-20th-Century spin on the idea of a public piazza (you half expect eager salesclerks to rush up and spray you with perfume).

Still, Botta has made a museum that succeeds with two important functions: It’s an art-watching space, and it’s also a people-watching space. Galleries are organized around the central atrium, so you always know where you are as you move through the expansive building; you can relax and pay attention to the art. And the atrium is also a staging ground, where windows, gratings and balconies let you linger to ogle fellow visitors.

Botta understands both the solitary experience of contemplating art and the social experience of museum-going, and he’s maximized both here. This is a European-style building for the most European-style city in California.

The galleries are wonderful. Nicely proportioned, often gracefully sky-lit rooms are appropriate to the museum’s diverse collections, from photographs and works on paper to high-tech electronic arts and, of course, painting and sculpture.

SFMOMA is also positioning itself aggressively in the American museum world, proudly declaring its 50,000 square feet of continuous galleries for 20th-Century art to be second in size only to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. True enough, although L.A.’s MOCA boasts 80,000 square feet of galleries--albeit in two buildings, not one.

In 10 years SFMOMA’s collection has jumped from 10,000 to 15,000 objects. Now that it has space to breathe, we can really see the collection for the first time. How good is it? As a museum spanning the century, the answer must be: So-so.

There are extraordinary individual works, such as Matisse’s famous “Woman With a Hat” and a study for his pivotal “The Joy of Life.” There’s Jackson Pollock’s devastating “Guardians of the Secret” and Arthur Dove’s exotic “Silver Ball, Number 2.” And more.

Yet, it’s hard to do justice to a century that opens with the life-altering watershed of Analytical Cubism when all you’ve got is a mediocre little still-life by Georges Braque. And Cubism is but one of several gaping holes.

Looked at another way, however, things perk up considerably. This collection may not recap a standard history of Modern art, but it does lay out a quirky history of San Franciscans’ interactions with Modern art.

Given the Bay Area residence of Michael and Sarah Stein, brother and sister-in-law of Gertrude Stein, Matisse’s prominence makes sense. That in turn establishes a through-line in the collection for an interest in color--although not of the disturbing German Expressionist kind, which is almost absent from the holdings.

A wonderful wall of pictures by Mexican Modernists recalls Diego Rivera’s notable residence in the city in 1930. An excellent group of Abstract Expressionist paintings puts you in mind of the San Francisco Art Institute’s pivotal role in the 1940s. The near total absence of Minimalist art suggests a local diversion in the 1960s. Funk is well represented, and 1967 psychedelic rock posters by Victor Moscoso are happily displayed.

Chronologically, the galleries loosely lead you from Europe to New York to San Francisco. The welcome result is a collection whose character is distinct from that of any other museum, anywhere.

Sure, it’s disconcerting to stand in the middle of a long enfilade of rooms and see, at one end, the great Pollock and, at the other, the jokey ceramic self-portrait by local hero Robert Arneson. But concluding in the 1970s with mostly Bay Area art does underscore a unique perspective: California is the place from which SFMOMA looks at art, and the collection engagingly takes you there.

Lately, though, the museum has been focused on Europe and New York, and with mixed results. A top-floor show of recent acquisitions--a common, pump-priming display for new buildings, constructed on the faith that if you build it, gifts will come--is mostly a compendium of 1980s art-stars on the axis between Manhattan and Cologne: Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Imi Knoebel, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Richard Long, Brice Marden, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, etc.

Some works are very good (if most awkwardly installed). However, at the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, you’d never know that in the 1980s L.A.’s art institutions weren’t the only thing that became an international force. Its artists did, too.

So, the North/South Museum Games are off and running. Next move?

* The museum opens today with a public dedication. Through Jan. 28, interim hours are Tuesday-Friday and Sunday 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Closed Saturdays) Regular hours begin Jan 29: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, and open until 9 p.m. on Thursdays. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 3rd St., (415) 357-4000.