A new temple of art serves several faiths

IN the ongoing effort to rethink what an art museum is -- and what it can be -- the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park offered unparalleled opportunities. Founded more than a century ago, and housed since then in a variety of unusual buildings that were haphazardly added and weren’t always suitable for their purposes, the De Young has long been a bit of a mystery. Specialists in 18th and 19th century American painting, Anatolian kilim rugs or painted Maya ceramics from Mesoamerica might hold the place in high esteem, but they likely didn’t stray much beyond their particular field.

And casual visitors, confronted with that art-jumble, could hardly get a grip.

All that changes on Saturday. An eagerly anticipated new building, clad in a remarkable stamped and perforated copper skin that is expected to slowly develop a green patina as years pass, opens to the public for a weekend-long celebration.

Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were blessed with a clean slate. The new De Young was built from scratch on the site of its former ad hoc home, destroyed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Sixteen years later, and for the first time, the museum’s collections have ample space and a welcome coherence.

The collections are a revelation. Since the 1960s, the De Young has developed considerable strengths in three areas: pre-Columbian objects, especially from the regions of modern-day Mexico and Central America; textiles, which seemingly represent every corner of the globe and every use to which a weaver’s loom has been put; and 18th, 19th and early 20th century American painting, sculpture and decorative arts.

Now a fourth area of depth has been added, Oceanic art, and for once the news release is right: It’s extraordinary.

The inaugural display features about 350 examples of Oceanic art, much of it from New Guinea. Partly a gift and partly a purchase, the selection is from an assembly of more than 3,000 objects acquired by New Yorkers Marcia and John Friede. The De Young has always had Oceanic objects in its Victorian-attic-style collection, but now it surely ranks among the finest such holdings in a public museum.

There are other types of art too, including exceptional African works, a rather mixed bag of contemporary crafts and more. Given the distinctive diversity, director Harry S. Parker III, his curatorial staff and the architects faced the challenge of bringing them together in harmony under a single roof. They approached the task in a couple of interesting ways.

The first is in the deployment of the collections. The second concerns the building.

Provocative artistic connections are made through clever installations, some of them startlingly successful. The Oceanic galleries, for example, are adjacent to the American art galleries. Between them curators have installed a large Colonial American wallpaper mural showing a lush, fantastic scene of Capt. James Cook exploring a richly romanticized Pacific island. His heroic image looks out from the edge of the American galleries toward the magnificent ceremonial figureheads, ritual objects and decorated tools of Oceania in galleries across the way.

In a room with several fine fool-the-eye still lifes by 19th century masters William Harnett and John Frederick Peto, a 1960s painted-lead relief of a slice of bread by Jasper Johns neatly bridges centuries, styles and American traditions. In the early ‘60s, a friend gave Johns a reproduction of Peto’s painting of a humble pewter drinking vessel, “The Cup We All Race 4.” At the De Young, Johns’ bread relief hangs near the actual painting.

Thoughtful juxtapositions like these speak more eloquently than endless texts printed on museum walls. The De Young has apparently learned from the unfortunate wave of theme-driven permanent collection installations of the last decade, which too often were used to hide gaps in a collection’s chronology or to show off pyrotechnic curatorial theories. Used sparingly, the insertion of a contemporary work into a historic gallery or the juxtaposition across time and space of wholly different yet pointedly resonant objects can be meaningful.

The De Young has also made a healthy commitment to new art, commissioning work from a number of prominent artists and updating its collection with recent work. Among the finest is a brilliant sculptural tableau by Josiah McElheny. Vessels in blown mercury glass set on a low, mirrored table subsume Brancusi, Arp, Noguchi and much of classic Modern sculpture into a reflection of the cheap alternative to the silverware that once furnished the houses of the rich.

But there are disappointments. The museum’s vast, white entry lobby is dominated by a big, rather bland digital mural of fuzzy gray dots -- they represent the atomic structure of strontium titanate, a synthetic substance often used to create artificial diamonds -- commissioned from German artist Gerhard Richter. This intellectualized rhinestone is flanked by a didactic standoff: Conceptual landscape paintings by Southern California artist Ed Ruscha hang opposite vertiginous Northern California landscapes by Wayne Thiebaud. OK, we get the point.

Likewise, in the outdoor entrance court, a commissioned work by British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy is composed of a long, meandering crack he cut into the sidewalk pavement, leading into the museum from the street and splitting a few boulders in half along the way. We know San Francisco is in unstable seismic territory -- indeed, the new building is engineered to float 3 feet in any direction when the Big One hits. But this cuddly cute articulation of deadly geological volatility is quietly embarrassing.

Kids are likely to love it, as will those who crave the comfort of simplistic narratives with their art. But, especially given the sophisticated programming across town at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the De Young is going to have to do better than this -- and better than it does in its haphazard, crowded postwar art galleries -- if it means to engage contemporary art in a powerful way.

The second approach comes in the art’s package -- in the way the museum has cast its identity in architectural terms. The image projected by the building is startling yet apt.

Horizontal and low-slung, it is punctuated at one end by a 144-foot tower, which twists as it rises. The dramatic tower is a marker in the park’s verdant landscape, nodding across town to Coit Tower and the skyscrapers of downtown beyond.

But stretched over this bulky, monumental form, the building’s skin is even more intriguing. It seems both natural and digital.

The pattern of perforations, adapted from photographs of dappled light through trees, contrasts with irregular shadows cast by stamped dots that mark the copper surface. On the massive, nearly 300,000-square-foot building, the design establishes a remarkable technological twist on an old European idea. Since 1830, when Berlin designer Karl Friedrich Schinkel established the motif of the museum as a Temple of Art, designers have reliably chosen between Classical Greco-Roman and Modern machine forms. The De Young, by contrast, may represent the first Postmodern temple.

Its original 1894 building was designed in an Egyptian Revival style. (It was named for a former San Francisco Chronicle publisher, who got it built as part of a world’s fair.) Two of the old building’s decorative sphinxes stand in an adjacent garden, and the inaugural exhibition slyly recalls that temple history with a survey of art from the ancient period of Egypt’s Queen Hatshepsut. But the De Young’s new “temple” has traded in the Saharan deserts for a jungle in Mesoamerica or on a Pacific island.

From some angles the sloping walls of the twisting tower, capped by a boxy top, recall a Zapotec pyramid at Monte Alban. The hulking building suggests something from Teotihuacan or Borobudur, while its patterned geometric cladding is like the tomb walls at Mitla. With its rippling metal skin and long, angular shapes, the structure has an overall appearance of a high-tech ruin from a futuristic civilization in decay -- tomorrow receding into history today.

The galleries inside also quietly recall a history of museum types, each made Minimalist and sleek. There are “white cube” spaces for 20th century art, humanly scaled Beaux Arts rooms with lantern skylights for 19th century painting and monumental, vaguely Germanic anthropological display cases clad in rich wood for African, Oceanic and pre-Columbian art. In the textile gallery, a glass display case for complete ensembles of clothing offers a cheeky suggestion of an urban department store window.

Without being coy or didactic, the design is a virtual compendium of established museum motifs. A few gallery rooms, especially for postwar art, are tall and awkwardly proportioned. Some of the installations of paintings, totems and decorative arts feel crowded, and issues of lighting aren’t always resolved, but that may simply be a result of curators working with brand-new spaces. Understanding how best to utilize new galleries always takes time.

One of the nicest features of the new museum is that Golden Gate Park sweeps right through the ground floor areas of the building -- indoor “park” space where no admission is charged. The tower, which houses offices and collection research libraries, is likewise free, and its lobby features a lovely permanent installation of 15 woven-wire sculptures -- a mini-retrospective -- by venerable Bay Area artist Ruth Asawa. Views over the city, bay and ocean and toward Marin are spectacular from its top-floor observation deck; when word gets out, prepare for traffic jams at the elevators.

Together, the vertical spike and the horizontal building create a template for an aesthetic landscape that consecrates art as the locus of the public sphere. Now that’s a culture-temple motif to celebrate.