Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia

February 6, 2016 – May 15, 2016
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Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia is the first major international presentation of Pierre Bonnard’s work to be mounted on the West Coast in half a century. The exhibition will feature approximately 75 works that span the artist’s complete career, from his early Nabi masterpieces, through his experimental photography, to the late interior scenes for which he is best known.

The exhibition celebrates Bonnard (French, 1867–1947) as one of the defining figures of modernism in the transitional period between Impressionism and abstraction. Several themes from Bonnard’s career will emerge, including the artist’s great decorative commissions where the natural world merges with the bright colors and light of the South of France, where windows link interior and exterior spaces, and where intimate scenes disclose unexpected phantasmagorical effects.

Sublime Beauty: Raphael's "Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn"

January 9, 2016 – April 10, 2016
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This focused exhibition features one of Raphael’s most beguiling and enigmatic paintings. The masterpiece, presented in the United States for the first time, will be lent by the Galleria Borghese in Rome, where it was first recorded in the collection in 1682.

Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn (ca. 1505–1506) features an unidentified blond-haired sitter and epitomizes the beauty of Raphael’s female portraits during his Florentine period. The exhibition will explore the possible identity of this subject, as well as the painting’s distinct iconography, including the unicorn she holds in her lap. Scholars believe that the painting was commissioned to celebrate a wedding, and the unicorn, a conventional symbol of chastity, may offer clues to her familial lineage.

The exhibition further highlights the stylistic relationships between this masterpiece and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Leonardo’s canonical work, painted in Florence in the early years of the 16th century, had a great impact on the younger Raphael, who also practiced in the city during this period. Raphael’s sophisticated adaptation of Leonardo’s innovations in portrait compositions resulted in Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn, a painting that hints at the Mona Lisa with its half-length format, its sitter with hands folded in her lap, and its setting before a distant landscape. Visitors will be able to explore Raphael’s painting in detail and get a glimpse into its intriguing history.

J. M. W. Turner: Painting Set Free

June 20, 2015 – September 20, 2015
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Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was one of the greatest British artists of the nineteenth century. His paintings are revered for their spectacular effects of light and color, and have influenced generations of artists. His late work, created between 1835 and 1850, articu­lated a radical vision that was heedless of public reaction, and explored such themes as the rise and fall of civilizations, the natural and industrial worlds, and religious and cultural mythology.
Bringing together more than sixty oil paintings and watercolors from a host of international lenders, J. M. W. Turner: Painting Set Free is the first major exhibition devoted to Turner’s achievements during his final period of productivity, when some of his most iconic works were created. Challenging myths, assumptions, and interpretations that have grown around his later work, this show reveals a painter distinguished by the broad scope of his knowledge and imagination, as well as his experimental techniques, processes, and use of materials. It will also provide the unique opportunity for San Francisco audiences to experience firsthand some of the masterpieces featured this year in Mike Leigh’s critically acclaimed film Mr. Turner (Sony Classics, 2014).