Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Start with the copper. If you are standing in Golden Gate Park, look at the long, low walls of the de Young. The metal is punched with thousands of small holes and pressed with gentle dimples. Light passes through it the way light passes through leaves. On a foggy morning the surface looks almost brown. On a clear afternoon it glows a soft, dull gold. And every year, slowly, it turns a little greener.

That colour change is deliberate. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are really two museums under one name. One is the de Young, here in Golden Gate Park. The other is the Legion of Honor, a few kilometres west, on a cliff in Lincoln Park. They have very different personalities. Together they hold one of the largest public art collections on the West Coast of the United States.

The de Young story begins with a fair. In 1894, San Francisco hosted the California Midwinter International Exposition here in the park. A newspaper publisher named Michael de Young championed the event. When the fair ended, one of its buildings stayed on as a museum. Over the following decades the museum grew, moved into new buildings, and took its founder's name. The open plaza in front of you, the Music Concourse, still follows the shape of that old fairground.

Now, a surprise most visitors miss. The building you see is quite young. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake shook the Bay Area hard. It damaged the old de Young badly, and the city decided to rebuild rather than repair. The Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron designed the new museum. It opened in 2005. Many locals disliked it at first. They called it a rusting ship. Today, as the copper softens to green, many of those same people defend it.

The pattern in the copper has a source. The architects took photographs of sunlight falling through the tree canopy of the park. They turned those images into a grid of holes and bumps, then pressed the grid into the metal. So the walls carry a kind of abstract portrait of the trees around you. Walk close and run your eye along a single panel. You will see the dots grow larger and smaller, like light moving through branches.

Before you go inside, look down at the entrance courtyard. A crack runs across the paving stones. It is not damage. It is an artwork by the British artist Andy Goldsworthy, called Drawn Stone. The line splits the ground and then splits several large stone blocks, which now serve as benches. In a city that lives with earthquakes, a crack in the ground at the door of a rebuilt museum is a quiet, pointed joke.

Inside, the de Young focuses on art of the Americas, along with art from Africa, Oceania, and a large collection of textiles. The American galleries move from colonial portraits to modern painting. The rooms for Africa and Oceania hold masks, carved figures, and ceremonial objects. The textile holdings are so large that only a small part can be shown at once. That means the displays change, and a repeat visit often shows you something new.

At the northeast corner, a twisted tower rises above the trees. This is the Hamon Observation Tower. An elevator takes you to a glass room at the top. From there you can see across the park to the Pacific, and over the rooftops toward downtown. On a clear day the view reaches the Golden Gate Bridge. On a foggy day, you watch the grey move in from the ocean, street by street.

Now travel west in your mind, toward the ocean, to the sister museum. The Legion of Honor stands at the edge of Lincoln Park, high above the entrance to the bay. It looks nothing like the de Young. It is white, formal, and classical, with columns and a grand courtyard. It is a smaller-scale copy of the Palace of the Legion of Honour in Paris, a building from the eighteenth century beside the River Seine.

The Legion was a gift from Alma and Adolph Spreckels, a wealthy San Francisco couple. Alma loved French art and French culture. The museum opened in 1924, and it was dedicated to Californians who died in the First World War. So this is both an art museum and a memorial. Its collection centres on European painting and sculpture, ancient art from the Mediterranean world, and a very large collection of prints and drawings on paper.

In the Legion's courtyard, a famous figure waits. It is a cast of The Thinker by Auguste Rodin, the French sculptor of the late nineteenth century. Rodin's works were a passion for Alma Spreckels, and the museum holds many of them. Look at the courtyard floor and you will also notice a glass pyramid. It brings daylight down to galleries below ground, which were added during a later renovation. Visitors often compare it to the pyramid at the Louvre in Paris.

Walk out from the Legion and the setting does half the work. Cypress trees bend in the sea wind. Foghorns sound from the strait on grey days. The Golden Gate Bridge appears between the branches. Nearby, near the parking area, stands a Holocaust memorial by the American sculptor George Segal. It shows plaster-white figures behind a barbed wire fence. It is a sombre, powerful contrast to the polished galleries a short walk away.

So, two museums, two moods. One is copper and modern, open to the trees. The other is white stone and old Europe, facing the sea. Wherever you are standing now, take a moment before you move on. If you are at the de Young, look back at the copper and notice its colour today. If you are at the Legion, listen for the wind and the foghorns. Both buildings are still changing, a little, every season.