Klimt, Rodin, and their Minotaurs: A guest blog by Dan De Vries

We, wife Chris and I, had quite a time finally getting to see the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco’s Klimt/Rodin exhibition during its last week at the Palace of the Legion of Honor.

We are FAMSF members and can each take a guest, and planned to see it with our friend Amy on Wednesday, but Amy’s grade-school-age son Oscar came down sick that day, so she couldn’t go and we decided to wait until Friday. On Friday, when the three of us did get there around 11 am they told us that the first available timed admittance was at 2:45.

It’s been at least a couple of years since we bothered, or needed, to reserve tickets to see a FAMSF show, so this took us by surprise. To compound our rolling mistake, we failed to realize that the tickets we were issued at 11 were in fact exhibition tickets for the 2:45 time. We thought they were just general admission passes.

We spent an hour in the Legion’s Dutch/Flemish gallery, admiring the homage to Kim Novak and the portrait of Carlotta from Vertigo, and some great Netherlandish painting, and went on to lunch at the Sunset Reservoir, were Chris and I rolled up the little stickers that would have got us back into Klimt/Rodin at 2:45, if we had known what we were doing, and we left those with our table service.

I told Amy I’d reserve tickets for Saturday or Sunday online when I got home. When I went online, Saturday was entirely booked and our truly last chance was 6 pm on Sunday, 90 minutes before the exhibit closed for good. Amy had to work Sunday, so it would have to be just Chris and me.

Sunday’s San Francisco coast-side weather sparkled and we celebrated with what was either a late lunch or early dinner at Original Joe’s in Westlake, never a bad idea. A couple of cocktails and the usual terrific food at Joe’s no doubt enhanced the pleasure of the drive up the Great Highway to Lincoln Park in shimmering late afternoon light off the sea. Pretty much the right number of San Franciscans and assorted others seemed to be enjoying the beach.

The light over San Francisco on a clear day in late January around 5 pm from Lincoln Park is a splendid thing. I can’t remember the last time I went to an art museum in late afternoon after drinks and dinner, and I just might remember to do it again some time. We were an hour early for our timed entry to Klimt/Rodin and, no, we weren’t getting in early even then, so we spent some time with Italian art from the late Renaissance.

Once we got into the exhibit I noticed immediately that the crowd at 6 pm on a Sunday, at least this Sunday, was decidedly lither and handsomer than the early afternoon weekday attendance to which I am accustomed. Usually, I feel at eldest of middle age, so to speak, if not even a bit youthful. This particular Sunday evening I felt downright geriatric.

Readers of the San Francisco Chronicle will recall the polemical back-and-forth occasioned by an op-ed objection to the gallery text panel which unartfully characterized Klimt’s depiction of “the entirety of the female experience – birth, youth, sensuality and decay.”  Better late than not at all, FAMSF quickly recomposed and reposted, with at least an online word of thanks to the op-ed author, Julia L. Kay, whose qualification to comment is undisputable.

Was that the reason everyone wanted to see the exhibit in its last week?  The early review from Chronicle art critic, Charles Desmarais, was ecstatic, it is true, but that was published way back in October.  Maybe it was like that the exhibit’s entire run.  I wouldn’t know, because the last week was the only one I even tried.

As we learned late, it was quite a small exhibit in the Legion’s three upstairs central galleries, none of which is all that large. (There was some spill-over through a passageway devoted to ceramics in the permanent collection, to another small passageway or gallery where a dozen or so sketches, I believe they were Klimt’s, hung.) I did not linger there.

The art I did see was notable. I wondered, for example, whether Henry James ever saw Klimt’s “Portrait of a Lady.” “Alley in front of Castle Chamber” suggests the arboreal pathways one sees in so many movies. “The Virgin” is spectacular, but there’s something almost deflating about looking at a painting that you have seen reproduced so many times in the past days, weeks, and months and realizing, – right, that’s what that looks like.

And for all that, it was a great experience. Friend Amy really did want to see the exhibit, and I regret not figuring out how to help her do so in better style. She did get a bit of a look at one of the Klimts through the portal between the Dutch/Flemish gallery where Carlotta has hung, and hangs now, in somewhat revised fashion, until an attendant shoed her away. And, turns out, she was showing the little sticker for admission to the exhibit, albeit for admission at 2:45, but the attendant can’t have known that.

Another amusing detail, to me if no one else: one of the pieces was a poster for an exhibition of the Viennese Secession, featuring a minotaur. Chris and I happened to intersect in our negotiation of milling crowd at that place and she pointed out that the horns from a minotaur in a nearby Rodin bronze were shadowed on the floor beneath the poster.

At that point I started reading posted text and learned that for one or the other of the featured artists (I have forgotten which) the minotaur was a signifier for the old art, to be discarded and abandoned.

I am a lifelong aficionado of the Scots duo The Incredible String Band, even if they did turn out to be Scientologists. The second track on the best of their three great albums, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter is “The Minotaur’s Song,” a fantastic Gilbert & Sullivan spoof :

A Minotaur gets very sore

His features they are such a bore

His habits are predicta-bull

Aggressively relia-bull, bull, bull . . .” & etc.

I can’t help but wonder if Robin Williamson’s minotaur was also a signifier of an old tired art or, more likely, a portal toward a renewal of the archaic.

At any rate, It occurs to me that this is why I go to art museums. My imagination during what turned out to be five-day foray (one thinks about how one is going to make it all work, as the days move on) was equally agitated and at specific times smoothed back into place by companions, Renaissance painting, imagery from a Hitchcock movie, favorite restaurants, cityscape, the Pacific, what I read in the newspaper, and the Incredible String Band. Can’t ask for a whole lot more out of life in the City.

Dan De Vries is a poet who lives in San Francisco. IF SF Published his book of poems, Past and Presently, in 2014. You can read additional poems on his blog, http://ppddv.blogspot.com/