Virtually explore the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with Smarthistory as your guide
Some background
videos + essays
Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting
Gordon Matta-Clark’s interventions explored modernist architecture and urban decay.
In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing by de Kooning
When an artist erases another artist's drawing, is it still a drawing, and whose? This work challenges the art definitions and contexts of its time.
Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 57
In a series that occupied most of his career, Motherwell addresses the violence of the Spanish Civil War.
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain
This is one of the most important objects of twentieth-century Euro-American visual culture. But… is it art?
Roy Lichtenstein, Rouen Cathedral Set V
How do you make a nineteenth-century masterpiece ask twentieth-century questions?
Jackie Winsor, #1 Rope
Women’s labor and the passage of time are evoked in this sculpture constructed of organic materials.
Frida Kahlo, Frieda and Diego Rivera
Diego is sturdy, solid, unmoving. Frida looks out, quizzically, and with her hand on his, seems to be breaking free.
Anselm Kiefer, Shulamite
In this canvas, Kiefer transformed architecture meant to honor Nazi heros into a memorial for their victims.
