The New Fillmore

Ruth Bernhard | Classic Torso With Hands (1952)

LEGENDARY PHOTOGRAPHER Ruth Bernhard, who lived up a narrow stair in a Victorian flat on Clay Street from 1953 until she died in December 2006 at age 101, was released to “fly with the angels” — her term for death — at a memorial service March 31, 2007, at Calvary Presbyterian Church.

Bernhard was remembered by scores of friends, former students and admirers as far more than one of the greatest photographers of all time.

She was a magical person, “like the Dalai Lama with a camera, spreading enlightenment,” said Los Angeles gallerist Peter Fetterman. He brought words of praise from director Steven Spielberg, who said he and his wife have Bernhard’s photographs in their bedroom, “so we sleep with her every night.”

Noted photographer Michael Kenna, one of Bernhard’s proteges, recalled working with her in the darkroom just off her kitchen, where they would sometimes stop to search for sustenance and drink plum wine and strong coffee. “Then, slightly intoxicated, jittery from caffeine, we’d go into the darkroom to make magic,” he said.

Joining her photographic family at the memorial was her brother, Alexander, who came from London. “Ruth was very, very happy to live in San Francisco and loved this place,” he said.

A friend remembered having sushi with her on Fillmore — “she favored Ten-Ichi” — and discussing other great photographers, including Berneice Abbott, who also lived long. “She’s too mean to die,” he recalled Bernhard saying.

No one felt that way about Ruth Bernhard. Many said she had opened their eyes and changed their lives.

“She may have lived long,” said another friend, “but she died young.”

Filed under: Art & Design | Leave a Comment »

“Youth,” by Arthur Mathews, with Furniture Shop frame

ART | JEROME TARSHIS

From the 1890s to the early 1920s, the artists Arthur and Lucia Mathews were at the center of an artistic movement that sought to combine European tradition in art and design with the ideals of a new way of life that celebrated the natural splendors of Northern California.

After the earthquake and fire of 1906, the Mathewses made their artistic home on California Street.

Arthur’s studio at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art on Nob Hill had gone up in smoke, along with his job as director of the school he had run since 1890. Art collector John Zeile Jr. came to the rescue. He had lost his family home at 1717 California Street, between Van Ness and Franklin, when it was dynamited as part of the firebreak. (The site is now a part of the Whole Foods complex.)

Zeile teamed up with Arthur and Lucia Mathews and in its place built a handsome building designed by Arthur in the Arts and Crafts style. It included a painting studio for Arthur and a showroom and workshop called simply the Furniture Shop. It also housed a magazine, Philopolis, devoted to Arthur’s high-minded plans for rebuilding San Francisco, together with Philopolis Press, which published limited edition books. Upstairs was a studio for William Keith, then widely considered California’s greatest artist.

At a time when the Mathewses needed a new livelihood, many wealthy San Franciscans suddenly found themselves in want of new or renovated homes. The Furniture Shop brought Arthur and Lucia into an artistic collaboration, aided by John Zeile’s capital and contacts, that supplied the community with unusually well-made furniture and decorative objects.

In 1916, the city having been substantially rebuilt, Philopolis ceased publication. Around 1920 — the records are vague — the Furniture Shop closed. Although the Mathewses continued to be active as artists and as designers for the home, the high point of their influence had passed. Newer decorative styles, informed by ever more modern movements and simplified form, superseded their gentler classical vision.

The center panel of Arthur Mathews’ “Health and the Arts” mural.

MATHEWS MURALS STILL HANG NEARBY

Well-to-do Pacific Heights must have given Arthur and Lucia Mathews more than a few commissions, but when houses were later renovated or torn down, many objects were lost or sold, and the full record is unknown.

Still in place in the neighborhood is Health and the Arts, a group of three murals executed in 1912 for the former Stanford medical library, now the Health Sciences Library of California Pacific Medical Center, at Sacramento and Webster.

The first shows what Europeans would consider primitive medicine: a Native American healer holds out his hand over a woman patient. The second mural refers to classical Greece, depicting the god Apollo together with the nine muses representing the arts, plus Hygeia, the goddess of health. Set in an imagined Italian Renaissance city, the third mural depicts a proto-modern healer defending a woman falsely accused of witchcraft. Stopping well short of the 20th century, it suggests the turning point when early scientific medicine rejected superstition.

The centerpiece of the Mathews exhibition now on view at the Oakland Museum also comes from the neighborhood. It is the very first mural Arthur Mathews painted, in 1896, for the library of the Horace Hill mansion, on Lafayette Park at the northwest corner of Sacramento and Laguna, where the 2200 Sacramento tower now stands. A frieze three feet high and 108 feet long, it is clearly indebted to the style of Puvis de Chavannes, whose work Mathews admired in Paris. Titled The Arts of Peace, the mural depicts an idealized classical landscape, with mostly female figures representing agriculture, commerce, music and dance, presumably endorsing the California dream of an Arcadia in which getting and spending coexisted naturally with a love of the arts.

Some other Mathews murals remain in their original locations. Among them are the mural in the entry to the Mechanics Institute on Post Street, a pair of murals flanking the stage of the Curran Theater and a series of 12 panels tracing the history of California in the rotunda of the State Capitol in Sacramento.

Filed under: Art & Design | Leave a Comment »

ART | Jerome Tarshis

Fifty years ago a reader of the national news media might think North Beach was San Francisco’s only artistic bohemia. But even during the heyday of the beat poets, upper Fillmore offered not only upscale living but fertile ground for art and literature.

The artist Wallace Berman’s first apartment in San Francisco was at 2315 Jackson, between Webster and Fillmore. In those years the poets John Wieners and Philip Lamantia lived within a few blocks of Fillmore and Jackson, as did artists Bruce and Jean Conner.

A four-unit apartment building at 2322 Fillmore, between Clay and Washington, was an art-and-poetry scene in itself, its residents including Michael and Joanna McClure and such well-known painters as James Weeks, Sonia Gechtoff, Joan Brown, Wally Hedrick and Jay DeFeo.

The Batman Gallery, so named because its founder affected black clothing and looked not wholly unlike the comic book hero, was at 2222 Fillmore, between Sacramento and Clay. The King Ubu Gallery and its successor, the Six Gallery, among the most important avant-garde art showcases in the city, were at 3119 Fillmore, between Filbert and Pixley. Allen Ginsberg’s reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery in 1955 was a turning point in the history of American culture.

Hedrick and DeFeo were the last artists to leave 2322 Fillmore: in 1964 their rent went up from $65 to $300 a month. A furniture store now occupies the space where Ginsberg read “Howl,” and the space occupied by the Batman Gallery is now a Starbucks.

But for a few years, when the neighborhood offered low-rent islands amid the general affluence, Fillmore was home to some of America’s most innovative writers and artists.

Filed under: Art & Design | Leave a Comment »

Upon entering Addison Fine Arts at Jackson and Buchanan, one might reasonably wonder: What are paintings of this quality by artists of this caliber doing in a neighborhood gallery?

They are, in fact, part of gallerist Steven Platzman’s mission to enrich the cultural holdings of the city. He aims to do that by placing significant works of art in San Francisco collections, with the intention of seeing them ultimately donated to the Legion of Honor, the de Young or the Museum of Modern Art.

It is an audacious goal, but one that Platzman is realizing here in our own backyard — and his, since he lives above his gallery, which operates by appointment. He has sold paintings by Monet, Cezanne, Morandi and other blue-chip artists — including Boudin’s “Harbor at Trouville,” above — in the eight years he has been quietly operating in the neighborhood.

“I purposefully chose this location and consciously avoided the downtown gallery district,” he says. “I wanted people to understand that I was doing something very different. I sell and advise people in the purchase of significant things — museum objects, if you will.”

It is also convenient that many buyers for his high-end offerings are in Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights and Sea Cliff.

To visit the gallery, call 776-3206.

Filed under: Art & Design | Leave a Comment »

Michael Schwab is one of the leading graphic artists of our time, in part because of his award-winning logos and posters for Apple, the Golden Gate National Parks and many others. Now his work is coming to the neighborhood: He created the poster and street banners for the 2006 Fillmore Jazz Festival.

“I love San Francisco, I love jazz and I love posters,” Schwab says. “It all came together.”

Music fuels Schwab’s art. He especially likes jazz greats Miles Davis, Bill Evans and Chet Baker. As he stands in his studio in San Anselmo talking about his work, Louis Armstrong is singing “Stars Fell on Alabama” in the background.

The Fillmore poster depicts a bass player in profile — which is appropriate, since the bass lays the foundation for many jazz bands. But in fact, there is also a more personal element to his Fillmore image. Schwab is himself a musician — “a garage band guitarist,” he says, since his youth. He has long been interested in playing bass, and his wife gave him a stand-up bass as a 25th wedding anniversary gift shortly before he took on the Fillmore job. It stands in the corner of his studio, and it became the model for the Fillmore Jazz Festival poster.

“I took on this project because it gave me an excuse to do a portrait of a bass player,” he says. “Now I hope to become one.”

Schwab’s work is in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, SFMOMA and the Achenbach Foundation at the Legion of Honor.

Filed under: Art & Design | Leave a Comment »