Schnitzer Baldessari prints at Legion of Honor

By PAUL HAIST

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The Legion of Honor Museum—part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will open an exhibit this month of John Baldessari prints from the collections of Portlander Jordan Schnitzer and the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation.

“John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective” will open to the public on July 11 and remain on exhibit through Nov. 8.

The exhibit in the 8,500-square-foot gallery will include 125 works spanning four decades of Baldessari’s career.

An American conceptual artist who has been called one of the most influential artists to emerge since the 1960s, Baldessari began his career as a painter and eventually broadened his palette to include a variety of media.

Baldessari has produced work including photo-text paintings, installations and video. His work often points to the irony in contemporary art theory and practices or reduces it to absurdity.

He told Artnet’s Nicole Davis in a 2004 interview, “My mission for my own art I think was to break the certain no-no’s and taboos for galleries. One: that you never saw photographs in art galleries, they were always in photo galleries. So, I wanted to do that…photography as a tool that an artist can use. Then, I was very much interested in using language as a tool for art and just information, rather than something visual. Both of those battles have been won.”

His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe. His prints have been published by firms such as Brooke Alexander Editions, Cirrus Editions, Gemini G.E.L. and Crown Point Press.

Schnitzer’s collection of more than 5,000 prints by various artists is reportedly one of the most comprehensive collections of its kind in the country and includes works by other major figures including Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Bruce Nauman.

A Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco statement noted that Schnitzer’s Baldessari collection is “a nearly complete archive of Baldessari’s printed work.”

The exhibition complements the publication of “The Prints of John Baldessari: A Catalogue Raisonne 1971–2007” by Sharon Coplan Hurowitz and Wendy Weitman (Hudson Hills Press LLC, April 2009), and the exhibition “John Baldessari: Pure Beauty,” which opens at London’s Tate Modern in October.

Baldessari was born in 1931 in California where he lives and works today. At June’s 53rd International Venice Biennale, Baldessari was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.

The San Francisco opening will be preceded on July 9 by a private reception with Schnitzer, the artist, FAMSF Museums Director John Buchanan and the museum trustees.