San Francisco’s de Young Museum Shakes COVID’s Clutches

The stellar collection, in commodious galleries, welcomes the city’s art-starved.

I love the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Its collection of American art isn’t big, but it’s one perfect gem after another. It covers all the thematic and style trends with paintings that aren’t all famous but are even better than famous. There’re expressive of their point in time but just offbeat enough to be enigmatic and seductive. Visitors will see artists they might not know who, nonetheless, did rock-star work.

The de Young displays African, Mesoamerican, and Pacific Islander art and a first-class textile collection as well. The museum building, now 15 years old, is high style, eminently functional, and a miracle of philanthropy.

I spent most of Friday there. Aside from American art, I focused on three temporary exhibitions, one on Frida Kahlo, who’s not a very good artist, another on Calder and Picasso, and this one has no content, and an unnerving, superb show on new art and artificial intelligence. I left adoring the de Young not a whit less. As Osgood tells Daphne at the end of Some Like It Hot, “well, nobody’s perfect.” By all means, readers in the Bay Area should go, go often, and support the museum. It’s great.

A family reunion got me to San Francisco. With museums there finally opening, it’s an even better time to go. California’s airhead governor, once San Francisco’s airhead mayor, doesn’t know the difference between a museum that has HVAC and crowd control, and a pickup bar with neither. So museums were shut for an entire year. Museum shops opened months ago, but in the galleries themselves, well, someone in the Wuhan lab might turbo-sneeze, and you know those aerosolized droplets and how far and fast they go.

There’s no documented case of COVID transmission in a museum, but we’re in a mass hysteria. What can you do?

The California Museum Association says its members lost $5 billion last year during months of kamikaze lockdowns. Government is now our master, allied with Bay Area Big Tech, which makes billions from lockdowns and suppresses those who won’t dance to the COVID Goose Step. Public-health zilches, attention-starved and headline-greedy, are delighted to be both cudgel and trap.

Speaking of Fauci, he eyes Cuomo’s Emmy with cold envy. Yes, Son of Mario, the nursing-home redux of Son of Sam, told Bensonhurst’s most famous quack that he could have it for safekeeping if he doesn’t beat the coming manslaughter rap. Rikers Island has this thing about metal implements. Dr. Peewee Caesar wants more, though. He wants Oscar, Nobel, and what about those Ruby Slippers? He’s got to keep the panic hot.

But it’s ending. After paying homage to voodoo science for a year, Californians are out and about. I saw many enjoying the de Young’s art and its lovely parks, ignoring the useless, anti-scientific though crystals-certified and psychic-approved six-feet rule.

The namesake de Young owned the San Francisco Chronicle. He funded a big arts space in Golden Gate Park in 1894 as part of San Francisco’s mini world’s fair that year. This space evolved over time into a museum and eventually landed in city hands.

The city’s museum system is, no surprise, weird. There are three municipal museums. The de Young and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park together are called the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. They share a director and central administration. The Legion of Honor shows the system’s European art collection, which is very nice. The Asian Art Museum is also owned by the city but exists separately.

The de Young and the Legion of Honor are governed by trustees appointed by the city’s board of supervisors, but they’re not hacks. Rather, they’re standard, rich art types. An independent, non-for-profit exists to raise money. A foundation controls the museum endowment.

The city pays about 20 percent of the de Young’s bills, so raise money it must. The system’s budget is, according to its 2019 annual report, $67 million. The endowment’s not big.

Fifty percent of its budget is covered by fundraising and memberships. That’s a huge burden.

The 1989 earthquake hit the de Young hard. It wasn’t wrecked, but everyone knew that, over time, it would be uninhabitable. This meant a new building. A 1996 bond issue to build a new museum with public money barely missed the two-thirds vote requirement. For all the freakiness in San Francisco, many of its voters are willing to tap the brakes when it comes to spending. A 1998 vote approved money to build a parking garage underneath the museum but again rejected money to build the museum itself, again by a whisker under two-thirds.

There’s a force in San Francisco that’s stronger and  more relentless than a mere earthquake, and that’s Diane “Dede” Wilsey, longtime chairwoman of the de Young board. The daughter of a chemical magnate, she is to the manor born, graced the cover of Town and Country at her debut in 1961, married a shipping magnate first and then a milk magnate.

Money sticks to all those . . . magnates. Very, very rich and a renowned beauty, she’s a philanthropist as passionate, driven, and persuasive as an evangelical preacher. On Election Night in 1998, with the dismal tally just released, Wilsey went on TV and said, “We’re going to build the new museum ourselves.” She later said the bad vote was a gift. “We’re free,” she said. “We can build whatever museum we want.”

Wilsey raised $200 million in private money to build the new de Young. The day it opened, she turned the keys over to the city. That’s civic-mindedness. Wilsey is a perfectionist, she has good taste, and she’s a good leader. Working with Harry Parker, then the museum’s director, and a legion of stakeholders, she made sure the money she raised was spent well.

The building, designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, opened in 2005. De Young placed his original art building in Golden Gate Park after visiting the Met and liking its location in Central Park. The new de Young is still there, more or less in the footprint of the old, quake-rattled building. It’s first-class and not the kind of building that government can produce. It’s a work of art.

Its skin, thousands of copper panels, is at home with the hundreds of redwoods, eucalyptus trees, and Canary palms surrounding it. Some of the panels are pierced, some etched, and some dimpled, so light both penetrates the surface and dances on it. They’re gradually darkening into a mix of forest green and rust — it’s an urban forest look.

The lobby is neither too big nor too small but still grand enough to host a Cirque du Soleil number at the de Young’s opening. The lobby leads without endless ado to the art in the galleries. The galleries flow gently, melodically from room to room through nice variations in size and height and lots of park views. The art is disparate, after all, so transitions from American to African art, for example, need a mediating space. Little atriums and indoor plantings do the trick.

The de Young’s 144-foot tower, a twisted, inverted ziggurat, is handsome and visible in many parts of the city. What does a museum do with a tower? In San Francisco, nothing happens by acclamation. In the 1990s, it wasn’t only tree huggers who opposed building the new museum in the park, though there’s always those. Some of the “no” votes came people who felt that the museum belonged in the city center. Tucking it in the park seemed elitist. In response, the tower as symbol means to unite the museum with the entire city. The museum’s classrooms and studio space for kids are there. The de Young is in a park where land’s meant for open space. It’s two stories except for the iconic tower, where it grabs space by going up.

The de Young’s American collection is comprehensive. A chunk of it came from John D. Rockefeller III and his wife, Blanchette, in a singular bit of philanthropy. They had a stellar, though not big, trove of American painting from Copley to the Ash Can School. In the early 1970s, as they aged, they sought a home for their art where it would make a big impact. Though New Yorkers, they skipped places east of the Mississippi. The de Young already had some good things, so a nucleus was there.

The de Young had purchased Frederic Church’s imposing, technicolor Rainy Season in the Tropics in 1970. This showed interest in the field, capacity, and commitment. Nearby, Stanford University had good American-art scholars. In 1976, the de Young hosted the Rockefeller collection as its bicentennial show, done with the Whitney. The Rockefellers liked it, and they liked the way they were stewarded. When John D. III and Blanchette died, their art went to the de Young.

When I visited last week, I didn’t like the first gallery in the American wing. It’s a mix of art that makes no sense. There’s a Thomas Doughty landscape from 1829 (nice, early Hudson River fare), an ancient Native petroglyph from Arizona, and a scary Spanish colonial crucifix with Jesus looking very poorly indeed, among other American and Mexican objects.

It feels like a dinner party where a medieval monk, Pancho Villa, Willie Loman, and Mamie Eisenhower are seated together. Not a lotta laughs, much less sparkle. I think the point is diversity, but it’s aesthetically awkward and the theme — a wholistic look at North American art — isn’t continued and developed. I’m not ideologically opposed to this. I’ve just never seen it well done.

The ensuing galleries are so graciously proportioned and lit, and the art so nicely arranged, that it’s best to savor the visual treats without thinking too much. You’re learning by osmosis via the very best.

A gallery of trompe l’oeil painting, anchored by Harnett’s After the Hunt and Alexander Pope’s The Wild Swan, is spooky and riveting, the ambiance set by aubergine-colored walls and Beth Lipman’s 2010 big sculpture, Candlesticks, Books, Flowers, and Fruit, black glass and smack in the middle. Art and space together are pitch-perfect.

In another gallery, Thomas Anshutz’s Ironworkers’ Noontime, from 1880, is a one-hit wonder and small, though from illustrations we expect it to be huge. The scene of strutting, half-naked laborers sparked the Ashcan movement a generation later, and body-builder photography decades after that. Boatmen on the Missouri and Country Politicians, by George Caleb Bingham, are there, too. Visiting the de Young is like gliding through the history of American aesthetics. Winslow Homer’s The Bright Side, from 1865, is both a jewel and a heavyweight. In the 1980s, the little thing launched the first serious study of the African-American subject in art. Dennis Miller Bunker, who died far too young, painted A Bohemian in 1885. It’s a darkly charismatic thing.

The balance between the iconic, like Bingham and Homer, and the unexpected and idiosyncratic, like Bunker, helps make the experience so enriching. A look of nonchalance comes from the design of the rooms, to be sure, but the curator has a nice touch. The arrangement of art is confident and coherent.

A spacious gallery on American landscapes is one of the most satisfying spaces showing the art of our country, anywhere. It’s anchored by Church’s splashy Rainy Season in the Tropics, from 1866, and overall, it’s a succinct, succulent primer on Hudson River School painting, with good things by John Kensett, Fitz Henry Lane, Durand, and others. Bierstadt’s View of Donner Lake, from 1870, is there. Bierstadt’s operatic landscapes are hard to take. They’re aesthetically corpulent and louche. His smaller, darker paintings are affecting.

On either side of the Church is an opening leading to a gallery with big windows and comfortable seating that overlooks the de Young’s garden. In the next gallery is Rockwell Kent’s big Afternoon on the Sea, from 1907 It’s one of my favorite paintings, again, anywhere.

After seeing so much good art, and so many park views, lush but with a buzz from happy people, I’ve never felt anything less than contentment.

The American galleries aren’t without a few cringemaking, nails-on-chalkboard moments. It’s the labels, and it’s slavery. The noise starts with Copley’s William Vassall and His Son Leonard, from 1771. Vassall (1715–1800) was one of Boston’s richest men when Copley painted his portrait. A loyalist, he and his family fled for England when the Patriot cause looked like it would win. The new regime confiscated his Boston holdings, but Vassall still died in London with a fortune that included a plantation in Jamaica with 131 slaves. He’s a meanie.

Maybe so, but we learn nothing about Copley, or the portrait, which is a nice, somber Boston-period Copley, and I think they’ve got the wrong Vassall and make a spurious point. The enslaver libertine, or the only Vassall who lived the high life, is his nephew, John, who inherited slaves and plantations from his father and built the fanciest house on the biggest estate in Cambridge on what was then called Tory Row. He was a Loyalist. After the Powder Alarm, he moved to Halifax and then London, as did William Vassall and his family. Uncle William might have owned slaves, but he was a run-of-the-mill rich guy and lived modestly. Nephew John’s house, ironically, was used by George Washington as his headquarters during the Revolution. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow later lived there.

He was also “known for his luxurious and profligate lifestyle.” Good to see the museum’s pushing sumptuary laws. You wouldn’t know it from the painting, in which Vassall wears plain, basic Boston brown. He’s reaching into his waistcoat pocket. Maybe he’s got some Ladurée macarons there. “Luxurious” enough?

A Paul Revere sugar caster is about slavery on sugar plantations. Charles Wilson Peale owned a slave, the label for his self-portrait tells us. We learn more about the slave than Peale. In 1850, Rembrandt Peale painted a portrait of George Washington — you know, the guy who was “an active enslaver for 57 years,” as if he spent his time trapping bystanders with an elephant net when he wasn’t winning a revolution or running a new country.

A portrait of William Ellery Channing by Sully is about what a racist Channing was. Even The Peaceable Kingdom, by Edward Hicks, takes a hit. The Peaceable Kingdom, of all things, the Mr. Rogers of art! William Penn’s treaty with the Lenni Lenape tribe is a supporting player in the picture, with Penn tucked in the background. That treaty led to stolen Native land. Sound the alarm, call out the dogs, load the cannons with granola grapeshot.

I know this is San Francisco, but do these people realize how crazy this is? These pictures are works of art, not résumés. Aside from the slavery rants, there are very few didactic labels for anything. As a matter of basic curatorial competence, if you’re going to do didactic labels, you have to be consistent. Either do them for all the art, or don’t do them for anything. Why focus on a few, and on one issue?

And if we’re pettifogging and preening, we have to do it in the African and the Mesoamerican galleries, too. And if Vassall is so disreputable, sell the painting. Just spare us the “gotcha” sanctimony.

A gallery with Gilded Age painting has the loveliest touch. The museum asked kids from local schools to compose poems to accompany the art, and they’re good poems. “She’s helpless without my blue, silky shield,” a seventh-grader writes of The Blue Veil, an 1898 painting by Edmund Tarbell. “The two of us become one as I cling to her forever / I give her clarity in moments of confusion / I hide her beauty and preserve her innocence / I am not only her veil but her friend.” I read all of them. A fifth-grader with a Jamesian taste for the pregnant gesture tackles Mary Cassatt’s 1889 portrait of her mother — “Her hand crushes the handkerchief / as she grows ashen / pale with secrets buried in her mind.” What a good idea.

Wilsey retired as chairwoman of the museum system’s board a few years ago. Jason Moment, a young hedge-fund manager, is the new chairman. He led the board’s audit committee. Wilsey is still involved, and that’s good. She’s given the place tens of millions. Her connections are limitless. She can get anyone on the phone.

Wilsey was said to rule like an autocrat and to stack the board with toadies, but that means she knew what was going on and found trustees who’d toady to her asks for multi-million-dollar checks. Neither has been known to kill anyone. While there were a few scandals, they’re tiny ones. Wilsey might have been too enthusiastic, and too meddlesome, but today’s museum scandals are too horrific to be believed. Museum brass nearly everywhere fell in lockdown love, happy to Zoom in their slippers while keeping the public out. And Wilsey would die before raiding the art vault to pay the bills.

When Harry Parker retired right after the new de Young opened, John Buchanan came as director. He’d been director at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon for years. I liked him a lot. He did big, crowd-pleasing shows on Dale Chihuly, Fabergé and Tiffany, Yves St. Laurent, and King Tut, some, like Chihuly, very good, others, like Tut, brazenly mercenary and not so good. A dapper dresser, he had a clothing allowance guaranteed in his contract.

Buchanan died, alas, in 2012. Colin Bailey, chief curator at the Frick, succeeded him, leaving after two years to go to the Morgan Library. Then came Max Hollein from the Stadel in Frankfurt, who, after two years, went to the Met. On the way east, he might have waved to Tom Campbell, who left the Met as director and now runs the de Young and the Legion of Honor. Three of what we call “accents” in a row — an Austrian and two Brits. I think the place wants an international profile, but three directors in nine years isn’t good.

On my next visit to San Francisco, I’ll write about the de Young’s African and Mesoamerican galleries and its costume and textiles collection. I’ll definitely write about the Legion of Honor, too. In Saturday’s story, I’ll focus on the Kahlo, artificial intelligence, and Calder and Picasso shows.