The present is female. Indeed, women are at the forefront of several upcoming shows at major San Francisco museums, with works spanning various movements and media. In October, the institutions comprising the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco — the Legion of Honor and the de Young — debut “Mary Cassatt at Work” and “Retrospective Tamara de Lempicka.” Meanwhile, in the expansive SFMOMA show “Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture” among the women artists and athletes featured are those with local ties.

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), "Little Girl in a Blue Armchair," 1877–1878. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

“Mary Cassatt at Work,” the painter and printmaker’s first North American retrospective in a quarter-century, arrives from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “It was originally meant to be a single-venue exhibition,” says Emily A. Beeny, Chief Curator of the Legion of Honor. “There was an opportunity to travel it and I, of course, leapt at the opportunity.” The two presentations do differ, however. For starters, Philadelphia was organized thematically while San Francisco is more chronological.

Cassatt was born into a wealthy family in Pennsylvania and ultimately settled in Paris. Known for her carefully staged studio portrayals of women and children, Beeny notes that Cassatt was not a mother herself. “It deserves acknowledging that the kind of professional ambition that Cassatt harbored was in her time, alas, incompatible with family life for a woman of her social class,” Beeny says. Yet her depictions likely resonated with mothers who “maybe had never felt seen by other works of art in their capacity as parents,” she adds.

Encompassing paintings, prints, and pastels, the San Francisco show commences with Cassatt’s entrance into Impressionism in the late 1870s. Inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, she also experimented with printmaking and developed the technique of color etching. Cassatt’s trial proofs for her first color print, “The Bath,” are especially compelling. “It’s almost as though you’re looking over her shoulder, in her studio, as she feels her way to the set of effects that she wants to achieve,” Beeny observes. “It feels significant that she preserved all of these states. She regards the journey as perhaps as important as the destination.”

The Legion highlights works from its own collection along with those in local private collections—another distinction from Philadelphia. Also tailor-made for San Francisco audiences is the “Finished/Unfinished” section that explores Cassatt’s experimentations and revisions. “We’re a city of people who are bringing into being new stuff,” Beeny says. “And that’s very much what Cassatt was up to.”

Tamara de Lempicka working on "Portrait of Tadeusz de Łempicki," ca. 1929. © The Regents of the University of California, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

While Cassatt captured women in the 19th century, Lempicka did so during the Art Deco era. The de Young retrospective stems from its 2021 acquisition of a drawing of the artist’s daughter, Kizette, says Furio Rinaldi, Curator-in-Charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the FAMSF, who co-curated the show with Gioia Mori. “We were the first museum in the U.S. to actively seek and purchase a work by Lempicka,” Rinaldi continues. “That generated the idea of doing a larger exhibition, which also had never been done in the United States.”

In the wake of the Russian Revolution, Polish-born Lempicka escaped to Paris, where she landed in 1919 “as a woman artist trying to carve her space in the male-dominated environment of the salons,” Rinaldi says. She successfully did so, only to flee again in 1939, before World War II, to the United States.

Tamara de Lempicka (1894 - 1980) “Brilliance (Bacchante),” ca. 1932. Oil on panel, 14 1/4 x 10 5/8 in. (36.195 x 27 cm). Rowland Weinstein, courtesy of Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco.

© 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NYThe de Young show relies on lenders from all over the world. Eight paintings were part of a Lempicka exhibition that traveled between New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in the 1940s. Fun fact: Rinaldi’s research found that upon Lempicka’s arrival in San Francisco, Helen de Young Cameron, daughter of M.H. de Young, hosted a dinner party for the artist, who was a baroness through her marriage to Baron Raoul Kuffner.

The chronological retrospective, which concludes with works made in the 1950s, reveals diverse influences, from French Neoclassicism to the Russian avant-garde. The period from roughly 1925 to 1935 was characterized by glamorous portraits of socialites and aristocrats, as well as a focus on fashion. Her famous painting “Young Girl with Gloves” depicts a woman in a malachite-colored dress.

“The exhibition aims to provide a rounded and three-dimensional understanding of her amazing artistry,” Rinaldi says. “She’s among the first women artists addressing the genre of the female nude in a consistent way. This is a genre that had been historically the domain of the male artists, for the entertainment and pleasure of the male gaze, and Lempicka changes that completely.”

Part of SFMOMA's "Get in the Game: Sports, Arts, Culture," Savanah Leaf's "run 002," 2024 (video still of Willem Dafoe). © Savanah Leaf. Photo by Ryan Marie. Image courtesy SFMOMA

Across town, SFMOMA also spotlights game changers — literally. “Get in the Game: Sports, Arts, Culture” showcases 200-plus sports-related artworks and design objects through five themes: Mind and Body, Winning and Losing, A Fan’s Life, Breaking Records and Rules, and Field of Play.

According to Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, SFMOMA’s Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design — who organized the exhibition with Seph Rodney and Katy Siegel — SFMOMA director Christopher Bedford put forth the idea for “Get in the Game” when he joined the museum two years ago. “We knew early on it would be all aspects of sports, not a particular sport,” Dunlop Fletcher recalls. “And it would be many different disciplines—photography, film, sculpture, design, paintings, and even interactive works.”

The Mind and Body section includes 14 tintypes from Berkeley-based Tabitha Soren’s series on baseball players. “My work is about visualizing psychological states,” she says. “The tintypes in ‘Net Impact’ show the players contorting their bodies which, over time, leads to them reaching the limits of their physicality. The metal photographs are about what it looks like to try to touch greatness.” Also on display are bone spurs that Soren collected over the 14 years that she followed the 2003 draft class — what she considers “relics of the sacrifices these Americans, in this case, professional baseball players, make in the quest for glory.”

Numerous artists in the show were once athletes, which may surprise viewers, Dunlop Fletcher says. Take U.K.-born and Bay Area-raised Savanah Leaf, a 2012 Olympian who won a BAFTA last year. Look for two videos by Leaf, including a work that she described on Instagram as “a self-portrait exploring the physicality of the Black female form.”In August, SFMOMA began unveiling six companion presentations. A commission by San Francisco-based Jenifer K. Wofford, part of the museum’s “Bay Area Walls” series, is on view as of October 12. The mural, organized by curator Tanya Zimbardo, is inspired by Filipina American diver Victoria Manalo Draves, who was a native San Franciscan and Olympic champion.

The exhibition’s variety — from iconic cultural moments to gear and gaming — holds broad appeal. “If you want to come in, play the foosball table and just have some fun, that’s fine,” says Dunlop Fletcher of Maurizio Cattelan’s interactive “Stadium.” “If you want to read the labels and learn more, that’s there for you, too. That aspect of being very flexible in how one approaches the experience should be felt.”

"Mary Cassatt at Work" opens at the Legion of Honor on October 5

"Tamara De Lempicka" opens at the de Young museum on October 12

"Get in the Game: Sports, Arts, Culture" opens at SFMOMA on October 19

Main image:
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) "Woman Bathing," 1890–1891. Drypoint and soft-ground etching, plate 14 5/16x 10 in. (36.4 x 25.4 cm). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Endowment Fund and William H. Noble Bequest Fund, 1980.1.8. Photograph by Randy Dodson, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco