Andy Warhol at SFMOMA

As is nearly always the case with big blockbuster museum shows, I walked in to SFMOMA's Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again feeling not super duper enthused -- another paean to a white guy, mainly, plus I'm really not a huge Andy person, myself -- and walked out having discovered many things to like quite a lot. Mostly, it's the phenomenon I've talked about so many times before: seeing work from a famous artist that I've never seen before, or at least not seen often -- so much easier to appreciate what we haven't seen reproduced umpteen million times already. And I was also really struck anew by Warhol's very much up-my-alley use of color. The Flower paintings hung on top of Cow Wallpaper were my favorite, in that regard and others, so I'm leading off with those here. I also really enjoyed the levity of Silver Clouds -- the room full of helium balloons that I've heard tell of many times but never seen, or even heard of its being exhibited this century, before. My other favorite piece was the one all the way down at the very bottom of this post, one of his very first commissioned portraits, Ethel Scull 36 Times -- that's the one I'd hang up in my house if I could.