The story
When it opened in 1935, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was the first museum on the West Coast given over to modern and contemporary work, decades ahead of most American cities. For its first sixty years it lived in rented upper floors of a civic building before getting a home of its own.
That home, a brick building with a broad striped cylinder of a skylight by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, opened in 1995, then nearly tripled in size in 2016 when the Norwegian firm Snohetta wrapped a rippling white tower around the back. The expansion was built partly to house the collection of Doris and Donald Fisher, the founders of the Gap, one of the great private holdings of postwar art.
Among the older highlights is Matisse's 'Woman with a Hat' from 1905, the picture whose wild colour helped get its painters branded the 'wild beasts', the Fauves, when it was first shown in Paris. The living wall of greenery on the third-floor terrace, thousands of growing plants, is the kind of thing the doubled building made room for.
