The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

 On April 8, 2015, Doris and Donald Fisher’s inimitable collection of twentieth-century art will go on view at the Grand Palais in Paris. The exhibition marks the beginning of a small international tour that will include another stop at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, France. When the exhibition concludes, the Fisher Collection will return to its new permanent home -- the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

In 2010, SFMOMA announced an unprecedented partnership to house and display the art collection of Donald Fisher, the founder of the Gap, and his wife, Doris. Comprising over 1,100 works by 185 American and European artists, the Fishers’ collection is one of the greatest private collections of modern and contemporary art in the world. Their holdings span a variety of pivotal modern movements, include Pop art, Minimalism, Abstraction, Conceptualism, Photorealism, and Color-field painting. While the Fisher Collection is abroad, SFMOMA will continue to work on its monumental, $365-million expansion. Designed in partnership with the Oslo- and New York City-based architecture firm Snøhetta, SFMOMA’s expansion will nearly triple the museum’s exhibition space. The Fisher Collection will go on view alongside works from SFMOMA’s own holdings when the museum reopens in 2016.

Curated by Gary Garrels, SFMOMA’s Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, American Icons: Masterworks from SFMOMA and the Fisher Collection offers a sneak peek of the quality and depth of the combined holdings from SFMOMA and the Fisher Collection that will be displayed in the museum’s forthcoming space. Highlights from the exhibition, which features approximately fifty works by fourteen artists, include Chuck Close’s Robert, a portrait of his close friend and fellow artist, Robert Rauschenberg (1996-7); Untitled (to dear durable Sol, from Stephen, Sonja, and Dan) (1969), an early illuminated work by Dan Flavin; To Susan Buckwalter (1964) an early, important wall-mounted work by Donald Judd; Ellsworth Kelly’s Cité (1951), which was executed while the artist was living in Paris; and Andy Warhol’s Liz #6 [Early Colored Liz] (1963), a groundbreaking example of Warhol’s adoption of silkscreen as his medium and celebrity as his subject in the early 1960s.

In addition to the American Icons exhibition, SFMOMA has teamed up with a number of Bay Area museums, including the Oakland Museum of California, the CCA Wattis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Crocker Art Museum, and the Bakersfield Museum of Art, to mount a number of exhibitions while the museum is closed, ensuring that its collection remains accessible to the public while construction is underway.

American Icons: Masterworks from SFMOMA and the Fisher Collection will be on view at the Grand Palais from April 8-June 22, 2015, and at the Musée Granet from July 11-October 18, 2015.