San Francisco- Day 4

I think we've zig-zagged across most of the city now.  We've been relying mostly on the public transportation and doing a whole lot of walking.  We rode the bus everywhere today.  On one bus there was a ninety-four year old woman who gave us a pretty great laugh.  She was hitting on the bus driver and telling all sorts of wild stories about her life.  Apparently she is like Alaska, everyone knows what it is but nobody wants to go there.  She definitely made our ride more interesting.


We went to Golden Gate park and The de Young museum.  They have a nice permanent collection.  There are a lot of American works including many colonial pieces and many from the Hudson River school.  There were a lot of landscapes, which aren't my favorite.  The hard thing about living so far away from great museums is that I have to visit them all in a few hours.  It's difficult to absorb that much work in a short amount of time.  I'd prefer to be able to see parts of the collections over extended periods of time so that I could digest them more easily.  S'est la vie.

The main reason for visiting the de Young was to see the Pablo Picasso exhibit they are currently hosting.  It contains just over 100 of the artist's personal collection, usually housed in the Musée National Picasso.  It was a great exhibit comprised of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints drawn from every phase of the artist’s career.  I enjoyed seeing the wide range of artistic movements and styles that Picasso went through during his prolific career.  There were pieces from his blue period, rose period, expressionist, cubist, proto-Surrealist, Surrealist,  and Neoclassical.  Seeing them all together gives you a real respect for Picasso's scorn of fixed ideologies.  Picasso's ability to assimilate new ideas, political influences

I wish the exhibit had been curated slightly differently.  It seemed to jump around too much. The works weren't really placed together thematically or chronologically.  I almost think placing them chronologically would have been the most interesting so it would show his progression through different styles and also demonstrate how he sometimes revisited previous periods and worked in multiple pictorial modes. 

The work in the exhibit is filled with paintings I have seen frequently.  I couldn't help but hear lines from my kid's Picasso book, Painting with Picasso (Mini Masters), in my head since many of the pictures were in the exhibit.


The exhibit is definitely worth seeing.  I always enjoy Picasso and seeing them in the flesh is always so much better.