story and photos by Kayte Deioma
Even on a rainy day, one of the things that the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco have in common is that they both have an interesting view of the city, as well as a distinctive view on art. A ticket to either museum is good to visit both museums on the same day.
The Views Outside
The Legion of Honor has commanded its impressive view from Lincoln Park since Alma de Brettville Spreckles gave it to the people of San Francisco in 1924 in honor of the Californians who lost their lives in WWI. A few steps to the north of the parking lot, a path looks out from the park to reveal a striking panorama of Mt. Tamalpais and the Golden Gate Bridge. To the west, Cypress trees frame a foggy view of the Pacific Ocean, like a Chinese painting hung over the city’s oldest municipal golf course.
The de Young got a new soaring view over
Golden Gate Park when the funnel-shaped 8-story tower was built as part of the new building that opened in 2005. The glassed-in Observation Floor gives you a 360 degree view over the park to the ocean. The tops of downtown skyscrapers can be seen over the neighborhoods to the east and the distinctive orange tips of the Golden Gate peak out above the lush green rise of the Presidio to the north. To the southeast, you can see the construction progress on the new California Academy of Sciences building, scheduled to be completed in 2008.
The View Inside the Legion of Honor
The classic colonnade of the Legion of Honor is an appropriate entrance to the Fine Art Museums’ collection of European art from ancient times through the 20th century. Here you will find Greek, Etruscan and Roman artifacts and their Egyptian predecessors. The Dutch and Flemish Masters of the 17th century give way to the neoclassical works of the 18th century and the early impressionists in the 19th century culminating in the requisite Picasso, Monet and Dali in the 20th century. Other highlights include Medieval French tapestries, 17th century decorative arts, and 18th to 20th century porcelain.
The Legion has one of the most impressive collections of Rodin sculptures in the world, with over 80 pieces on display. The Thinker greets you in the courtyard before you even enter the museum. There are three large galleries and two additional alcoves dedicated to Rodin’s work. Other museums may have more of his large scale bronze pieces, but here you can see the development of the artist through his use of stone, plaster and bronze and the detail of tiny figures to larger than life stone portraits. Some of the more famous works on display are The Kiss, The Three Shades and The Prodigal Son as well as a small-scale modčle of the Burghers of Calais.
The View Inside the de Young
The Legion of Honor covers Europe; the rest of the world is at the de Young. It takes a bit of getting used to transitioning from American classics like John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt to the tribal arts of Africa to pre-Hispanic crafts and Mesoamerican architectural icons. Once you wrap your mind around the culture contrast, it becomes an adventure in artistic diversity.
There’s a certain sense of playfulness to be found in three-thousand-year-old Olmec crawling baby sculptures, two-thousand-year-old pre-Columbian mating dogs and Flora Mace and Joey Kirkpatrick’s giant blown glass Fruit Still Life from 1997.
There is also an air of social commentary in such diverse pieces as Mildred Howard’s vinyl and plaster exposé on racism in the early music industry,Switchin’ in the Kitchen, William Gropper’s portrayal of politicians as monstrous green creatures in his painting, Senate Hearing, or Cornelia Parker’s moving Anti-Mass, a 3-D explosion of suspended debris constructed of the burned remains of a Southern Black Baptist church destroyed by arsonists.
A Culinary View
The cafes at both the Legion of Honor and de Young are both operated by Bon Apetit Management Company – no relation to the magazine. The Legion of Honor Café is located downstairs and has a quieter, more intimate atmosphere. At the de Young, the Café is on the main level with an outdoor terrace. The glassed-in interior is painted in the same shade of green as the surrounding evergreens, providing a harmonious transition between the inside and outside view.
Since they share the same executive chef, the menus at both restaurants are similar, featuring primarily unique variations on sandwiches – like Thai ginger beef – and organic salads. All dishes are created with local ingredients, and although you place your order at the counter, the food is prepared fresh on demand. You can eat at the café without paying the museum admission if you’re not visiting the museum.
The Legion of Honor is included in the Go San Francisco Card . Once you get your Legion of Honor ticket with the card, you can also get in free the same day to the de Young.
Legion of Honor
Lincoln Park
34th Avenue & Clement Street
San Francisco, CA 94121
(415) 863-3330
www.thinker.org
de Young
Golden Gate Park
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
San Francisco, CA 94118
Cross streets are John F. Kennedy Drive and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
(415) 863-3330
www.thinker.org
It’s rare to find a venue that can hold the attention of the younger kids in the family and the teenagers at the same time. The Zeum in San Francisco does this brilliantly and mom and dad can get in on the act too. Billed as a multimedia arts and technology museum, Zeum gets everyone’s creative juices flowing with opportunities to learn about video production and animation by creating your own productions from 
scratch using all the professional tools of the trade.
The rest of the Main Gallery has the components of a live Video Production on one side of the room and basic elements of animation on the other side. To produce a short video you can pick your own starting point. Some people like to get right to the heart of the 
matter by typing a script into the teleprompter, so they know what kind of costumes to look for when they head to wardrobe. Others like to start in the wardrobe department to see what characters they can create and then write them a suitable storyline. There are costumes for young children up to adults, so the whole family can get involved. If you’d like to make a horror film, you can settle into the mask-making department and create your own masks.
No film is complete without its musical soundtrack. You can compose yours in the Sound Lab. You don’t have to be working on a video project to use the Sound Lab. You can also use it to compose a song to perform, or to take home with you.
at the Tech Table; otherwise the staff technician will do that for you. For a small donation, your video production will be saved onto a DVD for you to take home.
simple animations by moving objects around on a white table and taking photos of them with a camera mounted above or in front of the table. Another station is stocked with plastic dinosaurs and other creatures that you can use to create an animation. All of these animation
projects follow the same principle of using a series of still photographs of objects in different positions to create the impression of motion.
You could spend all day and never leave the primary production areas downstairs, but there’s more to do upstairs. The stairway circles around the Roundabout, where you’ll find the MetaField Maze, a virtual board game projected on the floor. You use your weight to tip the virtual play board and move a marble of light around the maze without letting it fall into a black hole. Tip: It helps to read the directions.
from Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to pop favorites. Again you can don costumes, choose your digital background and take your music video home with you.
manipulation, was closed on our visit, but a Build a ‘Bot Workshop was going on in the classroom next door. Artist and robot inventor Simone Davalos demonstrated how to build a robot that would mix syrup and carbonated water to make soda. Kids and adults were fascinated with her demonstration of computer programming using the process of making a peanut butter sandwich to illustrate how to give a robot instructions.
The 100-year-old Zeum Carousel, built in 1906 spent time in Seattle, New Mexico and 15 years in Long Beach, CA before returning to San Francisco in 1998. Its giraffes, camels, goats and horses have all been meticulously restored and look like new. One ticket will get you two rides on the merry-go-round.
A visit to the Norton Simon begins before you even enter the building. The walkway from the parking lot traverses a garden of larger-than-life Rodin sculptures. The centerpiece of these sculptures is the Burghers of Calais, a sculpture of six men in ragged clothing with nooses around their necks. It was commissioned by the city of Calais to commemorate the brave act of these men in hostaging themselves to the King of England in order to gain freedom for their town in 1347. Before creating the final sculpture of the six men, August Rodin created studies of each individual nude and then clothed. Some of these full-size studies surround the Burghers of Calais in the front garden.
Inside, the Museum is divided into two levels. The main level or upper level houses European and American paintings and sculptures from the 14th century to the 20th century. Downstairs is Norton Simon’s extensive collection of South and Southeast Asian Art, which consists primarily of sculptures and architectural elements from India, Thailand, Cambodia, Tibet and other parts of Southeast Asia with just a few works on paper. The temporary exhibit hall is also downstairs.
The beauty of the Norton Simon is that you can see virtually every important European artist from the Old Masters to the Impressionists and post-Impressionists all within a few steps of each other. Earlier works on display include Raphael’s Madonna and Child with Book (c.1502-3), Francisco de Zurburan’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633) and Rembrandt van Rijn’s Portrait of a Boy, Presumed to Be the Artist’s Son, Titus (c. 1645-50).
In the popular Impressionists exhibit, you can see Matisse, Renoir, Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne and Degas side by side, with multiple examples of each. Vincent van Gogh’s Mulberry Tree is one of the more famous works in the collection, along with the Degas‘ sculpture, Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen (1878-81). The museum has one of the largest collections of works by Edgar Degas, with over 100 paintings, drawings, statues and bronze modčles that the artist used as studies for his dancer figures.
Pablo Picasso, another of the collector’s favorites, dominates the 20th century wing. The museum has 45 of the artist’s sketches, paintings and sculptures. Not all of them are on display at the same time, but the selected works show the diversity of styles Picasso used before developing his signature Cubism. Woman with a Book (1932), one of Picasso’s most recognizable Cubist pieces is presented next to his straightforward pre-cubist oil-and-chalk-on-canvas Bust of a Woman (1923).
There is a Garden Café and Sculpture Garden at the back of the Main Level. Most of the massive sculptures around the pond are by French artist, Aristide Maillol, including the figure of a woman apparently washing her hair in a river. Unfortunately, they positioned the woman with her hair facing the pond; it’s not in the best position to be viewed from the path.
While the paintings and sculptures on the main level have brought the Norton Simon its greatest renown, the lower level also holds abundant treasures. Norton Simon was fascinated by Indian and other South and Southeast Asian antiquities. His collection ranges from the pious to the playful to the erotic as depicted in copper miniatures, cast bronze figures and carved stone statues and architectural features. Gods and goddesses, celestial dancers and amorous couples are the predominant themes. A separate Asian Sculpture Garden is accessible from the Asian galleries on the Lower Level.
If you have time, take in an orientation film or two in the 300-seat theater. The Art of Norton Simon is a 30 minute film about Norton Simon and his passion for Art. Sister Wendy at the Norton Simon Museum is a delightful tour by the black-robed art scholar, Sister Wendy, of some of the museum’s most famous pieces. The hour-long program created for PBS has been broken into three 20-minute segments for viewing at the museum.
time, so you may not find every painting in the brochure or the videos on the wall when you visit. The paintings are organized by period and by country of origin. The galleries on the main level are all single corridors, so you can go down one side and come back the other and see everything. A self-guided audio tour is available to guide you through the highlights of the exhibit. You dial in the number next to a painting to listen to commentary about it, so you can make the tour as long or short as you like, depending on which pieces you want to hear more about.