This fall, which was spent in the San Francisco area, my favorite museum the-
Legion of Honor -founded in 1924 in this Golden Gate city -celebrated its centennial focusing on remarkable women contributions to the arts.
The Legion of Honor is a component of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco after it merged with the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in 1972
In this post, experiences of exhibits I visited this month, in both museums, are outlined.
Legion of Honor
This amazing San Francisco's Art Museum which formally is known as the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, sits atop an hill at the northwest corner of San Francisco in Lincoln Park, which was dedicated to President Abraham Lincoln in 1909,
Once the site of City Cemetery, the area was converted to Lincoln Park Golf Course in the early 1900s. and in 1924, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, a memorial museum dedicated to California's wartime dead, was completed at the summit of the park's highest hill.
Thus the land was recycled from a city-owned Golden Gate Cemetery (established in 1868) for the dead, into a cultural inspiring venue, for the living.
However the overt morbid reminder of the site, is reflected, now a days, by the the Jewish Holocaust Memorial, neighboring the museum.
It was created in 1984 by artist George Segal out of white painted bronze, showing ten figures sprawled, recalling post-war photographs of the camps.
The memorial has been shamefully vandalized several times. by the graffitiing of swastikas and splashing of red paint.
The Legion of Honor, structure was a gift to the city by the formidable socialite and "great grandmother of San Francisco" as she was called Alma de Bretteville Spreckels,
In 1915, Alma fell in love with the French Pavilion at San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
That pavilion was a replica of the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris (originally called the Hôtel de Salm), one of the distinguished 18th-c landmarks on the left bank of the Seine.
Alma persuaded her husband, sugar magnate Adolph B. Spreckels, to recapture the beauty of the pavilion as a
new art museum
In 1884, Adolph B. Spreckels shot Michael H. de Young, co-founder of the San Francisco Chronicle, because of an article suggesting Spreckel's sugar company defrauded its shareholders. Spreckels pleaded temporary insanity to the charge of attempted murder and was acquitted
Thus, while these 2 men's names, and death brawl legacy, are seared onto the city's finest Fine Arts museums' cultural frame, the 2 exceptional women painters at display on the museums' walls, mentioned in this post, convey the opposite message.
One highlights, women's tenderness and motherhood, and the other women's elegance and sexuality.
On Saturday Nov 9th, the weekend centennial festivities, which David and I attended were opened to the public at large, and featured live concerts, free guided walk through the museum's wonderful galleries, including a visit to the special Mary Cassatt, exhibit, as well as honorable acknowledgments, and spirited speeches, including one of US representative -Nancy Pelosi , and a delicious Cake Picnic,
Nancy Pelosi addressing the public at the museum's external yard
Sugar Rush
About 600 cakes artistically decorated, were donated by volunteers from the community, who shared/ tasted the spectacular backed goods, among themselves, first, prior to opening the picnic ground, adjacent to the museum, to the public at large.
The scenery after the cakes were ravaged, was beyond words to describe..
After sample- tasting too many cakes for my own good.. the comfort in viewing
Marie Cassatt's "sweet artistic dessert", was truly soothing.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844-1926)
The Pennsylvania, born painter and print-maker.of an upper-middle-class family, lived much of her adult life in France.
She never married nor bore children, however, often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.
whom she exhibited with the Impressionists.
it was from her well traveled ,educated and well-read, mother , Katherine Kelso Johnston, and her alone, that Mary Cassatt inherited her artistic ability, according to Mary's lifelong friend Louisine Havemeyer
The Independent New Women of the 1900, behind the Reins
Although Cassatt did not explicitly make political statements about women's rights in her work, her artistic portrayal of women was consistently done with dignity and the suggestion of a deeper, meaningful inner life ,and the mother and child painted depictions highlights this relationship, with warmth and attention.
The fascinating life of a modern women painter - Art Deco Icon
Tamara Rosa Lempicka (1894-1980)
Another unique accomplished woman painter, an Art Deco Icon
The first major US survey of the Art Deco's enigmatic Polish (Jewish) painter Tamara de Lempicka which her work I tremendously enjoyed, also opened this fall , as part of the centennial celebration, at the de Young Museum,
This 20th-c artist created a unique painting style, often called “stylized cubism,” which appears to combine the monumentality of 16th-c Mannerism, the mechanical feel of Italian Futurism, and the exaggeration of contemporary fashion magazines
Lempicka is perhaps best known for depicting the ideal woman of the 1920s: elegant, independent, modern, and sexually liberated.
She introduced gender-fluid imagery into her portraits,
Artist’s only daughter Maria Krystyna "Kizette",, (born 1916)
Die Dame Fashion Magazine
Her subjects are predominantly well-built, bob-haired women wearing glamorous gowns that cling to their bodies, driving speeding cars, or lounging sensually against a background of skyscrapers.
This lifestyle magazine which began in 1911 and ended in 1943. and on which Limpcka's images illustrated several of the cover, was the first illustrated magazine in Germany, that catered to the interests of modern women, and was considered the "best journal of its kind in the world market" after the First World War.
La belle Rafaëla (1927)
Though hard-working and very productive, Tamara was a consumer of parties, Alcohol, drug and sexual affairs with both sexes. One woman frequently depicted in de Lempicka’s paintings, for example La belle Rafaëla (1927), was a sex worker with whom reportedly Tamara shared a passionate affair.
Painting her first aristocratic husband Tadeusz Lempicki (married 1916)
He worked for the Czar, was targeted in the Russian Revolution, and jailed. Tamara rescued him by offering sexual favors to Communist party officials., then fled to Paris.
De Lempicka’s acquaintance with the Italian writer and political leader Gabriele d’Annunzio, however, may have led to her divorce of her husband in 1929
"The Baroness with a Brush".
In 1928, she became the mistress of Baron Raoul Kuffner, a Hungarian-Jewish nobleman , an wealthy art collector from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire,
Married in 1934 they had an open marriage on both sides.
Tamara was also romantically involved (1923) with poet Ira Perrot for many years in Paris. Perrot was a frequent subject in Lempicka's paintings, drawings, and poems, and is considered her most enduring love.
Alarmed by the threat posed by Nazism, for the second time, she started a new life as a refugee, leaving Paris for the U.S. in February 1939, eventually settling in Beverly Hills. Her second husband died in 1961
She constantly reinvented herself to survive physically and economically. As a bisexual, female Jewish artist she was challenging the early and mid-20th status quo.
Refugees
she painted celebrity portraits, as well as still lifes and, some abstract paintings. and religious subjects.
Though she remained a favorite of the Hollywood social scene, known for her lavish parties. her work was out of fashion after World War II,
Critics lambasted the themes of her work -a rich women painting the poor and sentimental religious scenes.
She made a comeback with the rediscovery of Art Deco. in the mid-1970s, which after
she moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1973, where she died at age 86..
De Young Museum inside the Golden Gate Park
I highly recommend not to miss those delightful exhibits
Comments