Revisiting the de Young

I'm back (and will catch up on email by Wednesday). One of the things that bloggers can do that dead-tree critics can't do as easily is re-visit a recently opened museum. So with that in mind, here are some thoughts on the de Young Museum, which I first wrote about last June.

The good:

• Is there a better place in America to see Richard Diebenkorn? Right now the museum has seven RD paintings and three RD Crown Point-produced prints on view. (Plus one Jess painting, 'signed' with a snarky 'RD.') They span the artist's entire career. The de Young's Ocean Park #116 may be the best painting in the series.  
• MoMA's retrospective of local-to-them artist Elizabeth Murray showed that major art museums can be narrowly regionalist -- and be damn proud of it. At the de Young Mel Ramos, Jess, Sam Francis, Wayne Thiebaud, Frank Lobdell, David Park, Mark Rothko, Chiura Obata, and Diebenkorn all look fantastic. Joan Brown and Mark di Suvero less so. (From the overdue retrospectives file: Mel Ramos.)
• The de Young's re-jiggering of its contemporary art gallery is a success. Its new Cornelia Parker, Anti-Mass, anchors a half-room-sized installation about artists responding to oppression. Nearby is the de Young's wonderful Salcedo non-chair and Christopher Brown's painting The Darkness of Grey.
• Last year I liked the way some 20th-century paintings were mixed into the de Young's American paintings galleries, which mostly featured works from the three preceeding centuries. But even as I liked them I wondered if they'd feel gimmicky after a while. They don't. They look better than ever. Examples include Jasper Johns' Bread in a gallery of mostly 19thC trompe l'oeil, a Sandow Birk painting of a traditional Western landscape -- with a prison sneakily hidden in plain view in the background, and Charles Sheeler's Williamsburg Kitchen surrounded by paintings of colonial America donated by Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III (The Sheeler was also donated by Rockefellers, the family that restored Colonial Williamsburg.)

The bad:

• Too many paintings galleries are too crowded. If one painting came off of every long wall, that'd help a lot.
• The modern painting galleries are not aided by having massive di Suveros or David Smiths in the middle. Too cluttery.
• I like the Richter whatever-it-is when the de Young's lobby is empty. For some reason it loses some oomph (that's the technical art critic term) when the space fills up.
• Needs. More. Benches.

Later today: The de Young's biggest, most embarassing, ongoing failure.

Related: SF Chron art critic Kenneth Baker on Cornelia Parker. Lee Rosenbaum recently wrote about the NYT's re-re-re-re-re-visiting of the Morgan. The Diebenkorn string at Flickr is a fun surf.