A Visit to the de Young Museum, San Francisco

Visiting the de Young to see its collection of American art felt something of a duty rather than a pleasure. The on-line catalogue features Boatmen on the Missouri by George Caleb Bingham and this led to a sense of foreboding. I anticipated endless depictions of worthy pioneers with noble mien, humourless faces and improbably spotless linen. ‘One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without dissolving into tears of .... laughter', wrote Oscar Wilde. As a somewhat cynical European, one has a similar contrarian reaction to pioneering ramrod-backed American worthiness. To see Gregory Peck playing Abraham Lincoln evokes a contrarian response. One simply wants to kick the dear fellow up his highly dignified posterior.

In the event, sour faced cynicism was dispelled even before entering the museum. The scene outside was uplifting and joyful. The neat lines of stumpy pollarded trees and palms, the sanded court and cluster of friendly commercial artists selling their paintings round the fountain all brought to mind Paris. But then the French capital does not enjoy virtually year-round Californian sun and the works on sale here were of a far higher order than the mass produced depictions of Sacré-Cœur one encounters in Montmartre.

The copper clad structure of the museum is pretty standard for a modern gallery and is not desperately exciting; although the twisting 144 foot tall tower adds some visual interest. It is bland and as such harmonizes well with the surrounding Golden Gate Park. Once the copper has oxidized it should attain greater anonymity. On the whole I prefer the exterior of the de Young to that of the nearby Legion of Honor, the latter reminding me not a little of a mausoleum.

Inside, the de Young is beautiful, well lit and airy. It feels immensely spacious and the exhibits have a lot of room to breathe – sometimes too much. One is first confronted with an almost hallucinogenic mural by Gerhard Richter, Strontium (2005). Measuring some 30 square feet, it calls to mind an op art work by Bridget Riley, except it is far larger than anything Riley produced and is based on a photograph of strontium titanate. The notes on the wall are silly, but marginally less so than the typical absurdly pretentious twaddle provided by way of ‘explanation’ at Tate Modern in London:

Strontium reflects Richter’s interest in the dialectic of opposites and his longstanding artistic and philosophical investigation into the relation between the window and the mirror of representation. Using his signature blurring of images, Richter manipulates existing photographs of strontium titanate and thereby underscores the impermanence of these atomic structures. By organizing the photographs into a monumentally scaled mural, he calls attention to the aggregate experience of the discrete yet undetectable instants that make up our experience of reality.

Well, at least it isn’t described as “profound investigation of the nature of reality itself”. Dialectic of opposites or not, the piece is imposing and more than moderately interesting.

The museum is certainly not at all parochial in feel. After Richter’s mural, we managed to drag our attention sufficiently away from contemplating Strontium's 'undetectable instants' to take in an exhibition of the late Stephen De Staebler’s sculptures. Calling to mind amongst other things, Pharaonic art and the work of Alberto Giacometti, the pieces transcend their place of origin and are far more than merely examples of the California Clay Movement. Standing Woman and Standing Man, for example, evokes the inhumanly vast statues of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, except that the subject is the all-too-human and the scale far more congenial.

While the exhibition of works by De Staebler’s certainly merited the space accorded it, that of Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s silver prints probably didn’t.  Once one had admired the technique, tedium set in quite quickly.  There are only so many pictures of grotesquely masked figures one can take.  True, there is no compulsion to look at all of them, but by giving so much space to such stuff is tantamount to an endorsement by the museum.

Other works on the first floor were more interesting.  We especially liked Cornelia Parker’s Anti Mass (2005) – an installation in which carbonized fragments of an African American Baptist church are suspended to form a cube. This is a powerful piece and, for once, the explanation was not too daft.  It is not quite as dramatic as Parker’s Cold, Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) but slightly more moving given the provenance of its materials (the church was destroyed in a racially-motivated arson attack).

In the same room the collection of mirrored works by Josiah McElheny are pretty enough; however, they are a tad less satisfactory than the far larger reflective sculptures of Anish Kapoor if only because of the scale.

We disagreed slightly over Al Farrow’s The Spine and Tooth of Santo Guerro (2007).  This is a scale model of a European cathedral cum reliquary constructed from decommissioned gun parts and featuring a human spine in the nave.  Whilst admiring the craftsmanship, I felt the thing to be gimmicky and a little facile. Christianity may have been responsible for much war and bloodshed in previous eras, but it would be hard to blame it for the horrors of the mechanized killing of the last century.  

We were so captivated by the first floor that we gave ourselves insufficient time for the main purpose of our visit and had to make a whistle-stop tour of the American Art Department.  There were indeed pictures that justified my forebodings.  Thomas Hovenden’s Last Moments of John Brown (1882-4) is well composed and technically accomplished but of a piece with, say, George W. Joy's General Gordon's Last Stand in its heroic worthiness and gushing sentimentality.  

One painting we found particularly pleasing and not a little surprising was Albert Bierstadt’s Roman Fish Market. Arch of Octavius (1858).  Bierstadt is normally associated with highly romantic, Turner-like depictions of America’s majestic scenery.  This work is different.  A genre painting, it depicts a naïve American couple exploring ancient Rome with the assistance of a bright red copy of Murray's Handbook of Rome and Its Environs while completely oblivious of the squalor of modern Roman life going on around them.  There is a gentle satirical humour in the work reminiscent of Henry James that I had not expected.

Towards the end of our visit, an extraordinarily enthusiastic guard insisted that we visit the tower to take in the view, which was indeed more than moderately ‘awesome’, to use a word one hears quite a lot in this neck of the woods.   We ended with a meal in the museum’s excellent albeit not inexpensive restaurant.  Having had my expectations regarding American earnestness somewhat confounded by Bierstadt’s painting, I was delighted to notice that a number of fellow diners were completely disregarding the smoking ban and puffing away in the Barbro Osher Sculpture Garden.   Only as we were leaving did I notice they were speaking French.