Pelican Cafe Essays and Blogs - The de Young Museum


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The de Young Museum

By Paul Lyons

3/29/2007 9:57:58 AM | Number of Comments: 0 | Add Comments +

Three days a week I get to bike to work at TheSpider on Fourth and Geary. TheSpider is a small, agile, extremely cutting-edge web development shop that does all kinds of web sites – e-commerce, banking, non-profit, medical labs, mom and pop stores. Anyway, the ride is simply fantastic as I have the opportunity to ride a lot of it through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Past beautiful trees, gardens, songbirds and man-made lakes I ride until near the end I go the wrong way down a one-way street and by a big brown boxy building that looks like the central warehouse and control center for UPS. It is often around 9 AM and usually there are people waiting outside for the place to open. At first I thought it strange that I never saw any of those easy-to-locate brown UPS trucks going in and out of the park but then I figured that since it was a new building, they probably have a hidden underground loading dock which then comes out a mysterious tunnel within a few feet of an onramp to Interstate 101. There is a big twisting brown tower with a single row of glass windows. This tower looks like a watchtower. If in the future they want to turn the place into a prison, it would not be a problem. All they would have to do is install some machine guns up there and put in barbed-wire fences. The whole exterior is some sort of brown metal mesh. You can easily see through this brown metal mesh to various stairways that run up and down the outside the building. It gives the place a bit of an unfinished appearance but then it is only about sending and receiving packages and perhaps in the future for torturing “drug dealers, criminals and terrorists.” The de Young Museum. An architectural eyesore.

I do not know who designed the de Young Museum. He or she is not doing my kitchen. I am sure that the explanation of many of the design decisions went something like this.

client: But the way you have the main sign on the exterior of the building is hardly readable… I mean. I cannot even see the name de Young. It really blends into the brown so much…

architect: But that is simply to draw the viewer into the museum. Hardly being able to read the sign on the front of the building makes it more interesting.

client: But what about just like normal people who then will ask: “do you know where the de Young” is?

architect: But that is a good thing. You see art should bring people in a city together. So people will be talking about their favorite works of art and how well Jennifer is doing on her soccer team and then they will say: “Oh yeah, the de Young. It is that charming, brown boxy building with the freaky watchtower with that spooky guy leering down at you right over there. It has no sign on the front but you can’t miss it.

client: But don’t you think the brown looks a bit drab. I mean San Francisco is a very vibrant city. Perhaps we could move a bit more towards a rainbow type them.

architect: The brown is modern yet primitive. The textures on the outside will bring people closer to the building. I know from a distance the structure looks like a warehouse in Kansas, but when you are within five feet you can finally see that the outside is full of very subtle patterns and shades.

client: But I don’t think people will spend much time looking at the building from five feet away. I mean most will simply walk straight into the place.

architect: But it will be a great building that will provoke a lot of discussions. Even unqualified critics on the Internet will be writing about it!

So the past weekend we went to the museum. The de Young does have great art programs for kids and now that our kids are older, we no longer join the Zoo but the Art Museum. We were drawn in by the great free classes. My son, Kai and I rode out bikes there. It was an easy-sell to my son because when you are members you can stay for just an hour and leave and not feel like you just wasted a bunch of money on admission. We were going to look for a while until our heads were full and then leave and bike around the park some more. Art museums usually satiate me in about thirty minutes and this time was no different.

We started in the Art of the Americas section and were soon impressed. The display of Mayan art was fantastic. I am not really a big fan of this stuff after having just returned from Guatemala were we went to ruins and even the National Archeological Museum in Guatemala City, but the de Young’s Mayan exhibit is first-rate. Of all the Mayan exhibits I have seen, the de Young lights the pieces the best. One sees the appropriate shadows on the carvings and amazing details and textures. The images on the pottery literal came to life. We did see a few pieces we thought were fakes and surely some that had been touched up in recent times.

We wandered past some other interesting pieces from the Aztecs then the Incas of Peru and finally into a room with modern sculptures in the Dorothy and George Saxe Collection of Contemporary Craft. Some nice pieces. Some humorous. As always, some garbage.

Upstairs we went and looked at the Western art. Impressionistic landscapes are not the de Young’s forte though on their web site I did see a pretty interesting collection of American paintings. We went into a room full of portraits. This sent us out the door. Too much. Serious faces in frilly serious clothes. Lets get out of this place. It’s the weekend for crying out loud!

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