a visit to Legion of Honor, San Francisco

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photo by Donald Kinney

I caught wind that there was a Man Ray / Lee Miller exhibit at the Legion of Honor, and although camera restrictions prevent me from showing you any of the fabulous examples from that exhibit, I visited my usual favorites, in and around the museum.



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photo by Donald Kinney

A while back my good buddy Michael Strickland of SF Civic Center fame supplied details on this rather odd sculpture which looks to me as if it has been banished to a fairly hidden location on the south side of the museum:

"The statue of Laocoön and His Sons, also called the Laocoön Group, is a monumental sculpture in marble now in the Vatican Museums, Rome. The statue is attributed by the Roman author Pliny the Elder to three sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus. It shows the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being strangled by sea serpents."

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photo by Donald Kinney

The Dead Soldier, 1789, by Joseph Wright, English, 1734-1794

...the parent mourn'd her soldier slain;
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolv'd in due,
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew,
Gave sad presage of his future years,
The child of misery, baptiz'd in tears.

The poet's forboding about the fatherless child's destiny is sidestepped by the painter. Wright focuses our attention and sensuous delicacy of the form of the pathetic young woman who grieves over the body of the father of her child. It is an intensely private scene played out against a backdrop of world events.  (Source: museum title-card)



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photo by Donald Kinney

(left) Bacchantes, ca. 1745, by François Boucher, French 1703-1770

(right) Hyacinthe Gabrielle Roland, later Marchioness Wellesley, 1791
by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, French, 1755-1842


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