It’s a Scramble: 4 More Days to See Faberge Eggs

Tim Forkes came all the way from Milwaukee to see the Faberge eggs. Margie Bylsma came from Cyprus. Charles Westgate came from Boston and Ilene Beber from Palos Verdes.

None of them minded waiting outside in a brisk wind Wednesday for at least half an hour to get a final peek at “Faberge: The Imperial Eggs,” a show that closes Sunday.

Forkes, Bylsma, Westgate and Beber are among the more than 200,000 visitors (205,000 at the close of business Wednesday) who have trekked to see the eggs since the exhibit opened Oct. 22. Mardi Snow, spokeswoman for the San Diego Museum of Art, said the Faberge showing is, by far, the most successful in the history of the gallery, averaging crowds of up to 2,500 a day.

For prices cheaper than a movie--$5 per adult, with one child free when accompanied by a grown-up--the lines have been long, even when the weather has occasionally been dreadful and despite some sniping from critics questioning whether the eggs are truly art.

But those interviewed on Wednesday were generally thrilled with the display.

Jeannine Manson of Rancho Santa Fe said: “I’m impressed with the display. I think it’s excellent. But I would like to see much better crowd control once you’re in here. Someone should be directing the flow inside, especially to help with the elderly. A lot of them just get elbowed out, and I don’t think that’s fair. It actually means more to them than it does to some of the younger people.”

Most of those interviewed Wednesday acknowledged that they’re no connoisseurs of art. Many had seen the bad reviews and said, “Who cares?” They felt more, not less, determined to gawk at the eggs.

As Betty Wunschel from Long Beach put it, “Most critics don’t know what they’re talking about. We start listening to them, we’re really in trouble.”

Most said they bought tickets far in advance through Ticketmaster outlets. The tickets assigned them a designated hour to show up, and the waits, according to those polled Wednesday, were never more than 30 minutes.

Spokeswoman Snow said chances for seeing the exhibit in its four remaining days are not good. As of now, Saturday and Sunday are sold out, and few tickets remain for today and Friday.

Museum officials have declined to say either how much the exhibit cost or how much it has made. City administration sources note, however, that, despite the crowds, the eggs have yet to reach the break-even point and probably won’t.

Snow said thousands of San Diego eeCounty students have seen the eggs free. She said the only real problems came when the showing first opened. Waits were longer then, and the expensive security for the 27 eggs may, at times, have been too good.

“We have had no security problems, knock on wood,” Snow said. “But, at first, the cases were wired so tight that, when people pressed against the glass, the alarms sometimes went off. So, we’ve turned down the calibrations a few notches. Uh-oh. Do you have to say we turned down the notches?”

The museum would love to extend the exhibit, but no luck, she said. It travels intact from San Diego to the Kremlin, where it opens a three-month run at the end of this month.

Many in Wednesday’s crowd cited glasnost as the reason they were eager to ogle the eggs. They spoke in hushed tones of recent events in Romania and Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and said the eggs gave them a chance, albeit small, of “sharing a piece of history.”

Tim Forkes, a music writer from Milwaukee, said he didn’t know what a Faberge egg was until a recent episode of TV’s “Mr. Belvedere.” He said most people wanted to see the exhibit because they have glasnost “on the brain.”

“Mr. Belvedere’s grandson sold Mr. Belvedere’s Faberge egg for $15, and that’s the first time I’d heard of them,” Forkes said. “My brother lives here, so when I heard this showing was at the art museum, I decided to give it a whirl while visiting my brother. I got here at 10:15 (a.m.), bought my tickets and waited in line 10 minutes before the 1 o’clock show.

“It’s a little too crowded inside here, but I’ve gotten a pretty good look at them, and people are pretty courteous for the most part, more than they would be in Chicago or Milwaukee. I’m awed by the detail and the craftsmanship of the work. But it’s hard to believe so few people could spend so much money on stuff like this. No wonder it made people mad.”

About that time, a woman peering in at the Trans-Siberian Railway Egg, her fingers pressed against the glass of the case, said, “I wonder if you could rev it up, so that it would chug-chug like a little train?”

San Diegan Joseph Pejsa said he had resented Mayor Maureen O’Connor “almost forcing the exhibit on us,” but, once inside, he found it “stimulating, exhilarating, exquisite. I am ashamed, however, of these people who insist on smashing their fingers or faces against the glass and leaving smudges. I’m able to see these things from 4 or 5 feet away, so why can’t they?”

JoAnn Humphrey, president of the Academy for Holistic Education in La Jolla, marveled at the exhibit for “taking us into another age. Family photographs placed in an album are often forgotten in later years, but these eggs were a marvelous way of preserving likenesses and photographs.”

“A lot of these people were murdered in the revolution, but even their killers were reluctant to destroy the eggs,” Humphrey said. “There’s one egg that has a cuckoo that comes out. There’s another with a ship transporting tiny people on an undulating sea. There’s a train with a caboose, which has tiny windows and glass that reflects.

“I disagree with the critics. You have to define what art is. Does it inspire certain feelings? Does it preserve a time? These eggs do both of those things. The time was sentimental, romantic, ornamental. All of these are very elegant, very creative pieces. I think they’re terrific.”