Jonathan Cohen's photos with the keyword: de Young Museum

"Can you keep a secret? Will you hold your hand among the flames? Honey, you're a shipwreck With your heart of stone. Can I get a witness To the bruises and the wasted tears? You could dry a river With your heart of stone, With your heart of stone."

The de Young, a fine arts museum located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. It is named for its founder, early San Francisco newspaperman M. H. de Young. The de Young showcases American art from the 17th through the 21st centuries, international contemporary art, textiles, and costumes, and art from the Americas, the Pacific and Africa. The museum opened in 1895 as an outgrowth of the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894 (a fair modeled on the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of the previous year). It was housed in an Egyptian revival structure which had been the Fine Arts Building at the fair. The building was badly damaged in the Earthquake of 1906, closing the building for a year and a half for repairs. Before long, the museum’s steady development called for a new space to better serve its growing audiences. Michael de Young responded by planning the building that would serve as the core of the de Young facility through the 20th century. Louis Christian Mullgardt, the coordinator for architecture for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, designed the Spanish-Plateresque-style building. The new structure was completed in 1919 and formally transferred by de Young to the city’s park commissioners. In 1921, de Young added a central section, together with a tower that would become the museum’s signature feature, and the museum began to assume the basic configuration that it retained until 2001. Michael de Young’s great efforts were honored with the changing of the museum’s name to the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. Another addition, a west wing, was completed in 1925, the year de Young died. In 1929 the original Egyptian-style building was declared unsafe and demolished. By 1949, the elaborate cast concrete ornamentation of the original de Young was determined to be a hazard and removed because the salt air from the Pacific had rusted the supporting steel. As part of the agreement that created the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 1972, the de Young’s collection of European art was sent to the Legion of Honor. In compensation, the de Young received the right to display the bulk of the organization’s anthropological holdings. These include significant pre-Hispanic works from Teotihuacan and Peru, as well as indigenous tribal art from sub-Saharan Africa. The building was severely damaged by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It in turn was demolished and replaced by a new building in 2005. The only remaining original elements of the old de Young are the vases and sphinxes located near the Pool of Enchantment. The palm trees in front of the building are also original to the site. The current building was completed by architects Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron and Fong + Chan. To help withstand future earthquakes, the building can move up to three feet (91 centimeters) due to a system of ball-bearing sliding plates and viscous fluid dampers that absorb kinetic energy and convert it to heat. The entire exterior is clad in 163,118 sq ft (15,154.2 m2) of copper, which is expected to eventually oxidize and take on a greenish tone and a distinct texture to echo the nearby eucalyptus trees. In order to further harmonize with the surroundings, shapes were cut into the top to reveal gardens and courtyards where 48 trees had been planted, the giant tree-ferns that form a backdrop for the museum entrance are particularly dramatic. 5.12 acres (20,700 square meters) of new landscaping were planted as well, with 344 transplanted trees and 69 historic boulders. The building is clad with variably perforated and dimpled copper plates, whose patina will slowly change through exposure to the elements.

Gustave Doré created this three-ton bronze vase, for French winemakers, who exhibited it at the 1878 Paris World’s Fair. It represents an allegory of the annual wine vintage, taking the shape of a colossal wine vessel decorated with figures associated with the rites of Bacchus (the Roman god of wine). The revelers include cupids, satyrs, and bacchantes, who protect the grape vines from pests. The foundry shipped this bronze version of the vase to Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and then to San Francisco for the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition. (This exuberant work must have resonated with the fair’s theme, "California: Cornucopia of the World.") According to an article in an 1893 issue of World’s Fair, "The total visual effect of ‘Poem of the Vine’ is one of lush, rich enjoyment … like a bottle of wine itself, to be tasted in sips, yet enjoyed as a complete experience." M. H. de Young purchased the vase at the fair’s end and later donated it to the de Young Museum. In 1906 the San Francisco earthquake tipped over the vase but apparently caused little damage.

Arthur Putnam (1873-1930) was an American sculptor who was recognized for his bronze sculptures of wild animals. As a child growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, Putnam enjoyed drawing animals and modeling them in clay. In 1899 Putnam married and moved permanently to San Francisco where he worked primarily as a sculptor of architectural ornaments. Regarded as an artistic genius in San Francisco, Putnam was also well-known both statewide and nationally during his lifetime. He won a Gold Medal at the 1915 San Francisco world's fair, officially known as the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and his works were also exhibited in New York, Chicago, Paris, and Rome. Putnam lived a tragic life and in spite of his short productive career, his output of tabletop bronzes and monumental works is still impressive. He was first and foremost an animalist and his bronzes were masculine and impressionistic, rather than tightly realistic, with their details indicated rather than painstakingly rendered. He often sculpted recumbent figures, men or animals in slumbering repose, rather than in action, giving them a dreamy quality that was typical of the Art Nouveau era. While Putnam’s oeuvre included bronzes of women, children and small animals, it was the species of big cats that seemed to fascinate him the most and their combination of menace and mystery made them his most common subject. This pair of concrete sphinxes replaces the original black granite sculptures commissioned from Arthur Putnam for the entrance to the Egyptian revival Fine Arts Building of the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894. He modeled the body of the sphinx after a lifelike cat, but gave the mythological creatures a woman’s face, a face that he modeled on that of his old friend Alice Klauber, the San Diego artist. The building’s Egyptian Revival architecture reflected a fascination with ancient Egypt, inspired by archeological discoveries such as the 1858 excavation of the Great Sphinx at Giza. The architecture also reinforced the perception of a continuous link between the cultural accomplishments of ancient Egyptian civilization and those of Europe and America. At the fair’s end, this building served as the first incarnation of the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. Sometime between 1905 and 1912, the granite sphinxes were removed and new concrete sphinxes based on Putnam’s initial plaster maquettes were placed at the site. The Egyptian Revival building itself was badly damaged in the Earthquake of 1906 and was eventually demolished in 1929 and replaced by a succession of new museum structures. During the construction in 2005 of the new de Young, the museum’s conservators repositioned the statues on new bases and restored them to their original appearance based on documentary photographs.

The Music Concourse, a landscaped basin between the California Academy of Sciences and the de Young Museum, is a vital civic and cultural space within Golden Gate Park, hosting free concerts on Sundays during the summer and serving as a respite and picnic spot year-round for visitors to nearby cultural facilities. At its centre is a fountain, dedicated in 1924, made possible with a $10,000 gift from Corrine Rideout. The statue in the fountain’s centre depicts the unlikely scene of a saber-toothed tiger wrestling a serpant. Corrine Rideout was the widow of banker Norman Rideout. Mr. Rideout came from Maine to Oroville, California and opened a bank. He successfully opened five more in the central valley of California. After his death in 1907 his widow sold them to A.P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of Italy later to become the Bank of America. The cast stone pool was designed by architect Herbert A. Schmidt. The statue is by M. Earl Cummings. The original intention was for the statue to be of bronze, but the budget did not allow for this.

Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson Hearst (1842-1919) was an American philanthropist, feminist and suffragist. She was the mother of the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. In the 1880s, she became a major benefactor and director of the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association and the first president of the Century Club of California. She was a major benefactor of the University of California, Berkeley and its first woman Regent, serving on the board from 1897 until her death. Also in 1897, she contributed to the establishment of the National Congress of Mothers, which evolved eventually into the National Parent-Teacher Association. In 1900, she co-founded the National Cathedral School in Washington, DC. A public elementary school near the National Cathedral School bears her name. In 1901, Phoebe Hearst founded the University of California Lowie Museum of Anthropology, renamed Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in 1992, in celebration of the museum’s ninth decade. The original collection was founded with about 230,000 objects representing cultures and civilizations throughout history. Hearst was raised a member of the Cumberland Presbyterian faith. In 1898 she converted to the Bahá’í Faith, and helped play a key role in the spread of the religion in the United States. This This cast stone fountain, a tribute her memory, stands on the south side of the music concourse in front of the California Academy of Sciences. The photograph shows the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in the background.