The New Fillmore

Triple Self Portrait by Theophilus Brown

A local gallery is presenting “Theophilus Brown: Nudes,” spotlighting one of the pioneers of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, which helped change the course of art history in the 1950s.

Brown, now 90, moved to the neighborhood in 2001. He still works daily in his nearby studio and recently joined a new drawing group.

“I paint three or four hours every day,” he says. “I like to work. I think it’s the secret to staying alive and interesting and as vital as you can be — and besides, there’s no telephone in the studio, so it’s peaceful.”

His exhibition at the Thomas Reynolds Gallery, at 2291 Pine Street, continues from January 16 to February 27, 2010.

Brown lives at the San Francisco Towers, the residence for seniors on Pine Street. “I’m glad I’m here,” he says. “It’s pretty posh. If you want to see friends, all you do is get on the elevator.”

He has found among his neighbors collectors of his work old and new. And a connection all the way back to the beginnings of the figurative movement: His fellow painter Richard Diebenkorn’s widow Phyllis also has an apartment at the Towers.

His health is good, although in the fall he had his second knee replaced. “Now I hope I’ll have a lot more energy,” he says. “I’m gonna get serious one of these days.”

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Gerald Ratto | “Fillmore Kids”

PHOTOGRAPHY | THOMAS REYNOLDS

When Gerald Ratto was a student at the California School of Fine Arts in the 1950s, he would hang out in the Fillmore with his camera and a bottle of brandy, which sometimes made it easier to make friends.

“I wasn’t documenting anything,” he says. “I was just photographing the people who lived there.”

Ratto went on to become an admired architectural photographer and hadn’t thought much about those Fillmore photos since 1952, when he made them, until a few months ago when he stopped by Tadich Grill for dinner. He struck up a conversation with two men sitting alongside him at the counter. It came up that he was a photographer.

“Ever take any pictures in the Fillmore?” one of them asked between bites of his sand dabs.

Ratto said he had, as a matter of fact. He was encouraged to show the photographs to Peter Fitzsimmons, head of the new Fillmore Heritage Center, who was organizing exhibitions exploring the neighborhood’s history.

“I figured maybe he’ll take two or three pictures,” Ratto recalls. “He took all 52!” Which meant Ratto had to get them all framed—a pricey proposition. But he did, and the entire Fillmore series hung, beautifully framed, in the center’s gallery for several weeks at the beginning of the year. It was the first time the images had been shown.

Along came B&W Magazine, which showcases photography, and spotlighted Ratto’s work. “Ratto’s Fillmore series captures a unique time and place in the history of San Francisco,” the magazine reported alongside a portfolio of his photographs in its August 2009 issue.

Gallerist Robert Tat, who specializes in photography, saw the work and invited Ratto to show the Fillmore series at his gallery. The exhibition opened downtown at the Robert Tat Gallery on November 5 and continues through January 30.

Into the gallery came a critic from The New York Times, who also visited the exhibition of Dan Dion’s rock photographs from the Fillmore Auditorium now hanging at the Fillmore Heritage Center. Her review on Sunday, December 6, was headlined “A Vanished San Francisco, Black, White and Colorful” and included two of Ratto’s Fillmore photographs, which, she wrote, “poignantly recall a vanished landscape.” But she dismissed the images as cliches and lambasted the program of the heritage center, sniffing: “Nostalgia for a bygone era ultimately isn’t very helpful to a neighborhood like the Fillmore.”

Ratto was mostly amused.

“They spelled my name right,” he says, “and published two nice pictures.”

But he was also annoyed.

“People didn’t have attitudes then,” he says. “The area was not dangerous. It was real. I don’t need some white liberal bitch to come in and explain it to me.”

All in all, it has been quite a year for Gerald Ratto, now 77, and his images of the Fillmore in 1952.

“It was that dinner at Tadich that started it all,” he says. “It just snowballed from there.”

PORTFOLIO: “Children of the Fillmore“

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Noted French artist Daniel Levigoureux made a visit to the neighborhood last month and quickly found his way to Alta Plaza Park, where he was captivated by these Scott Street Victorians.

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The often vandalized blue glass panels will remain on the bridge at Geary and Fillmore.

Despite an earlier recommendation that it be removed and relocated or put into storage, “Blue,” the public artwork on the bridge at Fillmore and Geary, will remain in place.

At a recent meeting, the citizens advisory council was told by officials from the Redevelopment Agency, which commissioned the artwork, that it would be too expensive to take it down. “It will cost at least $300,000 and perhaps as much as $500,000 to remove it,” the Redevelopment Agency’s Gaynelle Armstrong told the group. “And that doesn’t include storage.”

Instead, Armstrong said, it will cost about $20,000 to repair the glass panels and another $20,000 each year to maintain them. She noted the bridge may be changed as part of a new Geary transit plan.

The blue glass panels etched with words reflecting the area’s disparate ethnic groups have been repeatedly vandalized since the artwork was installed a decade ago. Some of the glass panels have already been replaced, some more than once.

“This thing is an eyesore,” said Barbara Meskunas, vice chair of the advisory council. “If we’re not going to take it down, it needs to be fixed.”

Rev. Arnold Townsend, who chairs the council, said the problems are caused by rowdy fans attending concerts next door at the Fillmore auditorium. “As long as it’s there, it’s going to be vandalized,” he said.

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