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Judging by Appearance: Master Drawings from the Collection of Joseph and Deborah Goldyne
2/14/2006 Exhibition Features Works by Rembrandt, Pissarro, Degas and Matisse Legion of Honor
4 March - 4 June 2006
San Francisco--Over the course of nearly four decades, Joseph and Deborah Goldyne have developed one of the largest and most diverse collections of master drawings in the United States. The Legion of Honor’s exhibition of 100 of these works marks the first-ever public showing of selections from the Goldynes’ collection. The pieces in this comprehensive overview range from old masters such as Guercino, Rembrandt, Van Dyck and Piranesi to 19th-century artists such as Turner, Corot, Millet, Pissarro and Degas. The 20th-century selections include works by Matisse, Morandi, Mondrian, Gorky and Ruscha. Five of the pieces in the exhibition, including Matisse’s The Violinist at the Window, are gifts from the Goldynes to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
The Goldyne Collection
One remarkable aspect of the Goldynes’ collection is its chronological breadth; it is rare for a single collection to include older masterworks as well as contemporary pieces. “There are a number of fine collections in the Bay Area, especially in the field of contemporary art, but there is nothing quite like the Goldyne collection in terms of range, quality, and diversity,” says Robert Flynn Johnson, Curator-in-Charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts and the curator of this exhibition. “The Goldynes’ collection includes both illustrious and more obscure names from art history, but the one thing that unites them all is quality. The informed intelligence and intellectual curiosity of the collectors have brought such beautiful, but diverse, drawings together into a single collection.” Highlights of the exhibition include: Edgar Degas’s Laura Bellelli Gustav Klimt’s Woman on knees in flowing gown
Arshile Gorky’s Drawing for Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia
Ed Ruscha’s Automatic
Camille Pissarro’s The Road to Ennery, near Pointoise The collection is also significant because the couple’s choices are informed by Joseph Goldyne’s work as a renowned artist in his own right. Goldyne, who lives with his wife in Sonoma, earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of California, Berkeley and an MD from the University of California, San Francisco before turning his passion for art into a career. He holds a master’s degree from Harvard University in art history, and his work spans a variety of media, from monoprints to oil paintings. He has served on the Fine Arts Museums’ acquisitions committee since the mid-1970s, not long after his first solo exhibition at San Francisco’s Quay Gallery in 1973. Goldyne’s work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. and the New York Public Library. “Since childhood, drawings have always made me very happy, that is, as long as they were good drawings,” says Goldyne. “I would suggest that a way to suspect that a drawing is succesful is that it evoked an ‘ooh’ or ‘ahh’ or even perhaps a ‘wow’ when it was first seen. If alone when it is ‘discovered,’ such a work makes you wish someone were there with whom to share your enthusiasm.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by a lecture series in May, and the release of a full-color catalogue coauthored by Joseph Goldyne, a published author of art history texts, and Robert Flynn Johnson.
About the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco comprises the de Young and its sister museum, the Legion of Honor, making it the largest public arts institution in the city and one of the largest art museums in the United States.
The Legion of Honor is located in San Francisco's Lincoln Park (34th Avenue and Clement Street). Its collections span 4,000 years and include major holdings in Rodin sculpture; paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Watteau, de la Tour, Vigée Le Brun, Cézanne, Monet, and Picasso, among other Dutch, Italian, German, English, and French masters; a 15th-century Spanish ceiling, European decorative arts, tapestries, and over 70,000 prints and drawings.
Founded in 1895 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the de Young museum has been an integral part of the cultural fabric of the city and a cherished destination for millions of residents and visitors to the region for over 100 years. On October 15, 2005, the de Young reopened in a state-of-the-art new building and attracted more than 50,000 visitors during its opening weekend. Designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and Fong & Chan Architects in San Francisco, the new de Young provides San Francisco with a landmark art museum to showcase the museum’s significant collections of American art from the 17th through the 20th centuries, art from Central and South America, and from the Pacific and Africa, as well as an important and diverse collection of textiles.
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