Art Attack

This morning we got up early for once (we are just about still capable of doing this!) in preparation to hit up the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, which is free entry between 9-10am on Wednesdays. Having told Jeff this was our gameplan the previous evening, he was quite sceptical we would be up in time and thus genuinely surprised when we appeared in the kitchen to make some breakfast before 9 o clock. Having had some patients cancel on him that morning, he actually decided to join us on our jaunt to Golden Gate Park so off we went!

It was another beautiful sunny day, albeit with a slightly chilly breeze. The Japanese Tea Garden, the oldest such public garden in the United States, was very pretty with pools of water, water features, trees, plants, winding paths and various bridges. Personally, I didn't think it was worth paying to get in to but it was very nice, there was no doubt about that.

Post-Japanese Tea Garden, we headed next door to the de Young museum which was to be our next port of call. In standard fashion though, we ended up sitting in the de Young museum cafe with Jeff drinking coffee and discussing life (the topics this time were music, clubs and British houses). Once Jeff left,
we made our way into the actual museum.

One of the reasons we had wanted to visit the de Young was to see the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition and we were not disappointed! The exhibition was basically a collection of some of his clothes combined with famous photos and information about who had worn them, how he had designed the costumes for certain things e.g. a Madonna tour, or a Pedro Almodovar film. Some of the clothes were on models, the sort of which you would find in a shop, but each one had an individual projector projecting facial features onto the models face so that it appeared to be alive. This completely confused me to begin with until Kitty explained the whole projector set up. Some of them were not just changing their facial expressions but talking too. It was kind of creepy but the clothes were so fabulous it didn't matter.

The exhibition as a whole was brilliant. The attention to detail of the layout, the lighting and the various music as we walked through matched the detail in each of the various garments on display. At one point there was a moving catwalk complete with rotating models, spotlights and music. There is no way to do justice to the clothes in words either, each outfit really was a work of art. We took quite a few pictures of this I'm sure you'll be pleased to know!

After the Gaultier, the rest of the museum was nowhere near as exciting. The de Young is huge and seemed to go on forever but there were a lot of interesting things to see. We particularly liked the photography, and there was a room which contained not only a model cathedral built entirely out of gun parts and bullets but also a piece of work made entirely from pieces of wood which came from a burned out church in Alabama.

After mooching around the de Young for another couple of hours, we were beginning to lose concentration and decided it was time for lunch. Before we ate, we made a quick visit to the observation tower, which has spectacular views out over the city and the bay.

Our city pass entitled us to get into the Legion of Honour museum for free if we visit on the same day as the de Young (which we also got into for free) so after lunch we hopped on a couple of buses and made our way over to the other side of town to the Legion of Honour.

The Legion of Honour building itself amused us for a good half an hour as we took pictures of ourselves hiding behind pillars. Standard. The art inside was different to that in the de Young, mostly portraits, general paintings and marble sculptures, and all European.

We lasted about an hour and a half before we admitted defeat; there is only so much information about art a brain can take in all in one day!

So, we caught the bus home and made an excellent risotto, which Jeff also thoroughly enjoyed.