A SOARING WELL OF LIGHT

By ROBERT HUGHES

The best new museum building America has seen in years opened last week in San Francisco, amid relentless social fanfare: the city's much awaited-and badly needed-Museum of Modern Art. Since 1935, Bay Area art lovers have had to content themselves with the old SFMOMA, a makeshift affair housed in the Beaux Arts-style War Veterans' Memorial Building and so cramped that the permanent collection had to be taken down whenever a temporary show went up. In 1990 designs for a new building were made public. It would cost $60 million, all in private money, and the architect was an Italian-Swiss little known in America: Mario Botta.

Botta, 51, deserves all praise for coming up with a design that isn't disfigured by post-Modernist hokiness, as is the 1991 Seattle Art Museum, designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. No smirking little "references" to grand architecture done in pasteboard; no one-shot ironies or graphic-design quips. Botta's brick masses occupy their site with authority and dignity, and their striations save the windowless walls from dullness. It might have looked like an art bunker, but Botta avoided this by splitting the mass symmetrically with a protruding skylight: a big cylinder sliced off at a steep angle and faced in bands of dark and white granite.

It's a serious building-a bit pretentious here and there, but with a sure grasp of primary form, sympathetic display spaces and refined detailing. It sets a benchmark for public architecture in San Francisco, a city that has been notoriously ill served by architects over the past quarter-century.

But still, there are quibbles. Why a whole ground floor without any place to hang a picture or put a sculpture? Of course, museums think they have to sell tons of souvenirs, T shirts, replicas and cultural-tourist boutique stuff; it's like the religious-kitsch racket in Lourdes or Jerusalem. The entrance foyer duly gives onto the shop and a meeting room and a children's art studio and a conference theater; the architect calls the foyer an internal piazza, but its main use is probably for giving parties-just as, in New York City, the giant glass hangar containing the Met's Temple of Dendur has devolved into the only post-Ptolemaic discotheque in the world.

The entrance floor aims to give the visitor a coup de theatre, and it does. After a low entranceway the space soars, thanks to a circular well that rises clear through the building and finishes in the slanting oculus 130 ft. above. It transmits enough light down through the building for Botta to use a dramatic chiaroscuro of materials without sinking the interior in gloom-a striped floor of black and gray granite, for example.

The galleries are the best part of the museum, as they ought to be. Botta has done them with impeccable taste and has resisted the temptation to make them depend on artificial light. Because the blocks of the museum mass are stepped back, each floor gets its share of filtered daylight through the roof, and the detailing of these skylights recalls the great prototype of Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, still the most beautiful art-display building erected in postwar America. Botta worked for a time in Kahn's firm in the U.S., and the influence shows. Nothing is out of scale, and the adjustment of ceiling heights conforms to the gallery contents-more intimate for the photography and drawing galleries, taller and airier for paintings.

Now that SFMOMA's collection is out on view, its shortcomings as a conspectus of modernism become apparent, though it contains some fine things: for instance, a great fauve Matisse, the 1905 Woman with the Hat, and one of the most beautiful of all early Pollocks, the 1943 Guardians of the Secret. It has good groups of pictures by Clyfford Still and Philip Guston, but strangely enough it is relatively weak where it should be rock solid-in San Francisco art. Most of the top Bay Area names are represented-Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, David Park, Manuel Neri, William Wiley and so on-but not always with works of the first quality. The uninitiated visitor would hardly guess how strong a creative center San Francisco has been over the past half-century, or how much of its value lies in its distinctive character.

Perhaps in the future SFMOMA will show us not only Bay Area art but also, in real depth, art from the Pacific Rim-particularly Japan and Australia-which other American museums currently ignore. That would be of more interest than the standard international McMenu of post-McModernism, represented here by such delicacies as a garish Jeff Koons and some enormous, effete Sigmar Polkes. A museum of SFMOMA's potential importance, in a city with its own rich art traditions, should have the best of the vin du pays. One hopes so, now that it need no longer be kept in the cellar.