SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced today that an exhibition of postwar American masterworks from the integrated SFMOMA and Doris and Donald Fisher collections will travel to two museums in France while SFMOMA is temporarily closed for its major expansion. The exhibition, American Icons: Masterworks from SFMOMA and the Fisher Collection (Icônes Américaines: Chefs-d’oeuvre du SFMOMA et de la collection Fisher), features approximately 60 paintings and sculptures by 15 leading American artists, including landmark works that will join the SFMOMA collection as a result of the unprecedented partnership that the museum forged with Doris and Donald Fisher, founders of the Gap. Curated by Gary Garrels, SFMOMA senior curator of painting and sculpture, American Icons offers a preview of the quality and depth of the combined holdings from SFMOMA and the Fisher Collection that the museum will present upon its reopening in 2016. American Icons will be on view at the Grand Palais in Paris from April 8 to June 22, 2015 and at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence from July 9 to October 18, 2015.

Highlights of American Icons include:

• Chuck Close - Robert (1996–97), a jubilant portrait of Robert Rauschenberg, the artist’s close friend and contemporary, this large-scale painting is rendered in Close’s iconic, abstracted grid technique.

• Dan Flavin - Combining two types of fluorescent light, Flavin’s signature material, untitled (to dear durable Sol, from Stephen, Sonja, and Dan) (1969) is an early and elegant corner piece that brilliantly illuminates and transforms the architecture around it.

• Donald Judd - Perhaps Judd’s most recognizable early wall-mounted work, To Susan Buckwalter (1964), is widely considered the artist’s first “progression” and was among his earliest pieces constructed by industrial fabricators.

• Ellsworth Kelly - Painted while Kelly was living in Paris, Cité (1951) is one of Kelly’s most celebrated and recognizable works, and represents his earliest experiments with chance methods.

• Roy Lichtenstein - Live Ammo (Tzing!) (1962), with its minimal color palette, flat paint application, and field of red Benday dots, is among the artist’s earliest forays into the comic book-derived idiom for which he is famous.

• Agnes Martin - An atmospheric early painting by Martin, Falling Blue (1963) exemplifies the delicate balance between wavering hand-painted surfaces and crisply ordered grids which underlies her entire body of work.

• Andy Warhol - Liz #6 [Early Colored Liz] (1963). This portrait of actress Elizabeth Taylor is an early and groundbreaking example of Warhol’s adoption of silkscreen as his medium and celebrity as his subject in the early 1960s.

Bringing seminal American works to a French audience, American Icons extends SFMOMA’s history of partnership with French institutions. Examples include the critically-acclaimed retrospective Garry Winogrand opening this fall at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris; a major survey of William Kentridge that also traveled to the Jeu de Paume in 2010; the groundbreaking 2011 exhibition The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde presented at the Grand Palais; and the celebrated Marc Chagall retrospective, organized by the Grand Palais and the Musée National Marc Chagall, Nice, that traveled to San Francisco in 2003.

“We are thrilled to collaborate with the Grand Palais and the Musée Granet in presenting this incredible selection of American artists that provides a preview of the quality and depth of postwar art that will be on view when we open our expanded building in 2016,” says SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra. “It also provides a focused look at a selection of exciting, iconic works by leading artists.”

A comprehensive catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition, including an introductory essay by Garrels and substantial entries discussing each artist and the works in the exhibition.