Previewing the de Young

I'm back in DC after a weeklong trip to San Francisco and Los Angeles. I'll be back on a normal posting schedule this week, including a bunch of SF/LA posts...

Last week I took a walk-through of the new Herzog & de Meuron-designed de Young Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. It's the centerpiece of FAMSF's $202M capital campaign, and it is awfully good. The inside of the building is shaped like a bloated X-chromosome. H & de M have 'invited' the park into the negative space of the 'X' by planting eucalyptus trees and ferns. From many places in the museum, you're reminded you're in Golden Gate Park, which is pretty durn cool.

I love the new Walker, but it's clear that H & de M had a ton more money to play with here. In the African & Oceanic Art galleries many of the exhibition cases are made from the same wood, a kind of eucalyptus. The building's most obvious signature feature is a nine-story-tall tower. I grew up in Ess Eff before moving away at 18. I've never seen a better view of the city than the one from the top of the tower. 

Architecture critics will, however, have something to say about the exposed heating/cooling vents in the gallery floors. I found them distracting.

When I walked through last week, most of the paintings galleries were installed and the rest of the collections were at various stages of installation. (The building was done.) Fans of California painting will love what they see. The de Young has fantastic examples of work by all my/your Bay Area faves, including a never-before-seen 1954 Jess painting called Boy Party. (Uh-huh.) You'd expect fabulous Theibaud, Diebenkorn and Park, and it's here. So too a marvelous Mark Rothko from 1949 (slide show No. 8), which may have been painted when he was teaching at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. (If you saw the Rothko 1949 show at Pace last year, this painting wasn't in it, but it would have been the best painting there.)

In a few spots de Young curator Timothy Anglin Burgard has mixed modern canvases with earlier American paintings. Burgard hasn't done it so much as to be statement-making, so each of his selections retains its oomph. My favorite was a Charles Sheeler that hangs next to several paintings given to FAMSF by John D. Rockefeller III. It reminded me of the Sheeler still in the Rockefeller's house in Colonial Williamsburg.

The sculpture garden is still a construction site and only some of the permanent commissions are in. (The Richter looks great, the Goldsworthy flirts with hokey, the Turrell looks like an unfinished Turrell, and the Kiki Smith should be pretty dreamy.)

Related: The de Young website has a ton of photos. All over. It's impossible to link to any one javascript pop-up window, so go click and enjoy. Anna L. Conti has been to the de Young more than I have. And here, here, and here.