"Color into Line" Pastel Exhibition VIP Excursion

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco  are proud to present Color into Line: Pastels from the Renaissance to the Present, a celebration of the artistry of pastel through rarely seen holdings from the Museums’ Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, as well as prominent local collections from Northern California. Through eighty masterworks, the exhibition traces the technical evolution of pastel, from its introduction in 16th-century Europe to works created as recently as 2020. Highlighting the creative process behind the works, the exhibition emphasizes pastel’s versatility over five centuries of human creativity, through drawings by Rosalba Carriera, Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, Diego Rivera, Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, John Altoon, Rupert García, and Joan Mitchell.

The members of the Red Rock Pastel Society are offered the unique opportunity to tour this exhibition with its curator Furio RInaldi, Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

“In a singular combination, pastels convey the immediacy of a drawing, the appearance of a painting, and the matte finish of a fresco,” states Furio Rinaldi. “Color into Line  shows some of  the greatest hits from our collection while unearthing hidden gems from our neighboring institutions, like the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, and SFMOMA, revealing to audiences the incredible richness of our local graphic holdings.”