At the west end of the new de Young Museum, there is a large, rather graceless restaurant/cafeteria...
...that extends out to an outdoor snack area which is currently covered in plastic.
The west end of the building is impressive...
...though the monster chrome sculpture flanking it is certainly aggressively ugly.
A lovely, small Henry Moore statue flanks one end of "The Sculpture Garden"...
...which also has a series of upside-down apple sculptures...
...that look designed for seating...
...though there is signage everywhere telling people not to touch the art.
The other end of The Sculpture Garden is anchored by another Claes Oldenberg pop art sculpture, which were amusing when he was doing them in the 1960s, but strike me as increasingly trite with each iteration.
The coolest piece in the backyard, next to the Henry Moore, is an environmental sculpture by James Turell that was commissioned for the opening of the museum.
The museum website has the following information:
"The sculpture will be sited in a grass-covered hill in the Osher Sculpture Garden. Viewers will walk through a short tunnel cut into the hill, and then enter into a cylindrical space carved out of the hill."
"The retaining walls of this cylindrical space will be white concrete..."
"...and the floor will be red stone."
"At the center of this cylindrical space will be a rough-hewn, black basalt stupa form."
"Entering the round stupa through a door, viewers will sit on a stone bench that runs around the circumference of the skyspace and view the sky through an oculus cut in the roof of the chamber."
"Viewers’ perceptions of the sky color will be subtly altered by an L.E.D. lighting system inside the chamber, and by changing light and weather conditions outside the chamber."
Though I didn't see any "subtly altered L.E.D. lighting system" at work, the installation was quite magical.
It felt like a great place to chant, to make out with a lover, to meditate, or do any number of pleasurable things.
To end the tour, we bought a couple of beers at the cafe...
...and took them outside where David could draw the surrounding trees...
...in his glorious journal.
If you have ever visited the big art museums in New York City or Chicago, then you are probably aware that the collections at San Francisco art museums are, for lack of a better word, provincial.
Probably the only exception is the Asian Art Museum in the Civic Center with its world-class base collection assembled over the decades by minions of the late Chicago real estate magnate, Avery Brundage.
The de Young Museum and its sister institution, the Legion of Honor, are set up on the New York Metropolitan Museum model, with a little bit of everything from all over the world thrown into the mix.
"There sure is a lot of junk in this collection," I said to my friend David Barnard.
"There's a lot of junk in most museum collections," was his sensible reply.
Having just returned from a long trip to Spain and England, David knew what he was talking about.
"Those huge rooms in the Prado in Madrid with one large Rubens painting after another of fat, pink women are pretty awful."
Having seen those rooms for myself years ago on the way to the great Hieronymous Bosch paintings in the Prado, I could see his point.
Most of our favorite pieces in the new de Young were proudly provincial...
...featuring local artists such as Diebenkorn, Thiebaud, and Jess...
...who had three paintings on display, including the 1954 "Boy Party."
At first the painting looked quite innocuous, but on closer inspection it was a quite graphic depiction...
...of a man-on-man orgy.
In the American ceramics section, there is a characteristically rude, funny Robert Arneson.
A recent donation to the museum was a huge collection of Oceanic art (New Guinea, etc.) and the lighting and display was extraordinary.
It was also quite frightening. "Do you ever get creeped out in here?" I asked a security guard, and he replied, "Only at night."
The Oceanic area shades into the Africa section, rather like going from Fantasyland to Frontierland at Disneyland.
A wonderful piece was this new wall sculpture...
...made out of the aluminum from beer bottle caps.
It was a nice counterpoint to another huge Aboriginal painting down the stairs...
...that was also just a few years old.
My favorite piece in the museum was thousands of years old, an Olmec head from Veracruz, Mexico.
Not only was it well lit, but its placement in front of the park and museum vista was just about perfect.
The publicity about the new de Young museum building was that it was going to interact with the natural world around it...
...through vistas and design elements...
...and they weren't kidding.
The stairway to the basement level...
...where there is a huge space for traveling exhibits...
...descends along a rock and fern garden...
...that is filled with light.
The two-story Museum gift shop also starts off in the basement level...
...and has stairs that take you to the ground level where there is more stuff to purchase.
The building doesn't seem to have any round surfaces but is instead designed out of odd angles that are never quite ninety degrees.
The rooms holding the permanent collection are for the most part large and airy and there is no feeling of claustrophobia or vertigo which is what I usually feel at the Museum of Modern Art downtown.
The main challenge posed by the building...
...is that there is no way the art collection can compete with the glimpses of Golden Gate Park...
...that are cunningly framed by windows here and there.
In one section of the top floor, there is actually a place to sit...
...and look at the sculpture garden and the Golden Gate Park bandshell.
However, it just makes one want to go outside.
Paul Reidinger, the restaurant reviewer for the "San Francisco Bay Guardian" wrote a funny, grumpy piece about the museum some months ago with the following opening paragraph:
"Was it wise to visit the new de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park while experiencing slight hunger pangs? Could such circumstances have led to a de-mellowing of one's judgment, the core of which is that the building is not just inconceivably ugly on the outside but is, within, a soul-chillling cross between an airport lounge and a jail, a hell of angularities and hard surfaces devoid of human reference, except for the names of rich donors etched high on practically every wall?"
That judgment seems a bit harsh to me, but it's not a bad description for the central lobby...
...which is dominated by a steep stairway...
...and a huge Gerhard Richter painting consisting of what looks like blurry film sprockets but which may be a reflection of the copper sheathing on the exterior of the museum.
This awful space is dedicated to the major fundraiser for the building, Diane B. Wilsey (Dede) and her late husband, Alfred Wilsey. They were both subjects of the recent memoir by Al's son and Dede's stepson, Sean Wilsey, called "Oh The Glory of It All" which I cannot recommend highly enough (click here for a review I did on this blog). The irony is that Dede is not only immortalized by this big, sterile room but by her stepson's depiction of her as one of the great, maliciously evil characters of all time. Karma works in interesting ways.
