Honeur et Patrie

(From last October)

On a rare, sun-filled day this weekend, I went to visit the Palace of the Legion of Honor, one of San Francisco’s three big art museums. The approach to the museum takes you uphill along a driveway that winds its way through a golf course and a park. Through the trees, you first glimpse the sunlit corner of a stone facade, then an old stone railing comes to view, and finally, at the summit of the hill, the San Francisco Bay opens up before you along with the stone columns of the museum’s entrance.

The architecture is rare for the west coast: it’s a formal, old European architecture, an echo of Grecian temples, medieval monasteries, imperial courts, and war memorials. The entrance runs through a double-row of stone columns that leads into a central courtyard, which in turn is surrounded by the three sides of the U-shaped museum. As you walk into the courtyard, you pass Rodin’s solemn and lonely The Thinker , and then see the words “Honeur et Patrie” engraved over the front doors of the museum. These are old words out of place in our modern culture (and our modern war), but I find that I like these words and values of an earlier generation. The Palace of the Legion of Honor is in fact a war memorial, built to commemorate the 3,600 Californian’s who gave their lives in France during World War I.

The museum’s collection is a testament to the achievements of Western culture. Rodin’s marble Severed Head of St. John the Baptist, resting on its side, stares back at me with a beautiful, softly furrowed brow, as if he’s both scared of and honored by his fate. Today I find I love the red officer’s uniform in a Reynolds painting, the red cape of Christ in Rubens' Tribute Money, and the vivid colors and painfully detailed backgrounds in some medieval panel paintings. I haven’t been inside a museum in months, and I’ve missed it. I see an artist new to me, Edward Lear, whose painting Masada fills me with sadness. It’s the fading light on a contested rock in the Middle East, painted in changing tones of orange and red, with the sliver of a blue river behind it. He painted this in 1858, a time of imperial conquests and roaming bedouins, of explorers and expeditions, a time when Honeur et Patrie was in its glorious, furious, murderous heyday. I walk on and see the Norwegian painter J.C. Dahl’s little sketch of the moon rising over pine trees. I am comforted again, because I have seen his vision many times, even if he saw it first two hundred years ago. Down the corridor Monet’s Grand Canal in Venice (and until today I’ve been shamefully bored by Monet) again pulls me back to an earlier time, a time in both my life and in the life of European culture. The old world still exists, even if, like the museum’s architecture, it’s rarely seen. For me, nostalgia for something unknown, or something vaguely remembered, or something heard of from an earlier time, is an essential ingredient to great art.

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Michael