In major move, 2 big-name galleries to open across from SFMOMA

In a major move, prominent modern art dealers Larry Gagosian and John Berggruen are opening galleries side by side in old brick buildings across the street from the new Howard Street entrance to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gagosian, an international name in modern and contemporary art, confirmed by phone that he has leased the storefront of Crown Point Press. Berggruen will take over a vacant space on the corner of Howard and Hawthorne, and will close his flagship on Grant Avenue, where his gallery has anchored the downtown art district for 45 years. The news comes at a time when the longtime art map of San Francisco is undergoing significant changes, with this month’s opening of the Minnesota Street Project gallery space in the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood, and the May reopening of the expanded and renovated San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “This makes sense with the new museum opening and with the emerging collector base in Silicon Valley,” said Gagosian, who will open Gagosian Gallery San Francisco on May 18, with a show of works on paper and sculpture by the likes of Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, Jasper Johns and Pablo Picasso. Gagosian said he had been casually shopping the San Francisco real estate market, but when 4,000 square feet on the ground floor of a building across from SFMOMA became available, he jumped at it. When Crown Point Press, a specialist in etchings, purchased the building in the late 1980s, the ground floor space was its own gallery. [...] the space was the dining room and kitchen for the upscale restaurant Hawthorne Lane, which closed in 2010. The gallery space was designed by Kulapat Yantrasast, who also is designing the expansion of the Asian Art Museum.