San Francisco: Contemporary Jewish Museum

 

This building is a diversion of angles from the expected.  The contents, for Pat at least, were also a diversion from the expected.

 

The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) was founded in 1984 in San Francisco, with the goal of offering contemporary perspectives on Jewish culture, history, art, and ideas. In 2008, the Museum moved to the Yerba Buena Gardens district of San Francisco’s South of Market neighbourhood, into a funky new building designed by architect Daniel Libeskind.  The museum occupies and extends the 1907 Jesse Street Power Substation, originally designed by Willis Polk.

 

The museum has no permanent collection. Instead, it curates and hosts a broad array of exhibitions.  Pat was expecting to see exhibits of Moses parting the Red Sea, or perhaps bits of the Burning Bush.

 

In his viewpoint, Pat was unknowingly in accordance with Edward Rothstein of the New York Times, who   criticized the museum for its dedication to “multiple perspectives and open-mindedness…without a grounding in knowledge, without history, detail, object and belief.” Without a permanent collection, the Contemporary Jewish Museum forgoes a sense of a collective Jewish past, he says.  (So does Pat.)

 

When we visited, the museum was presenting Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories .  The exhibition is “an art-filled biographical exploration of Stein’s identities as a literary pioneer, transatlantic modernist, Jewish-American expatriate, American celebrity, art collector, and muse to artists of several generations. The exhibition also features Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967), Stein’s life-long partner, and explores the aesthetics of dress, home décor, entertainment, and food that the two women created together.

 

Gertrude and Alice OUT as a couple!  (From http://gsteinpics.blogspot.com)

 

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), one of the most influential Americans of the 20^th century, is perhaps most famous as a modern writer and the creator of such oft-repeated phrases as “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” But Stein’s reach across the arts was extraordinary, extending well beyond literature to include collaborations in opera, ballet, and more, and her influence as a style-maker, art collector, and networker was considerable.  (From http://www.thecjm.org/)

 

 

George Platt Lynes, Gertrude Stein, Bilignin, 1931, toned gelatin silver print.  (Courtesy of the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Cone Collection.)

 

Stein almost became a medical doctor, worked with William James, dropped out of that plan, joined her brother in Paris, learned to appreciate modern art before it was trendy, collected paintings, collected artist friends, collected writer friends, and influenced Hemingway (most famously). Her writing was never understood or successful until she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and then she was a sensation.  (I bought the book later that afternoon at a related exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which we visited next, and I’m really struggling with it!)

 

Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906.  (From http://gsteinpics.blogspot.com) 

 

We later saw the original of this portrait in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

 

Gertrude beside her portrait by Picasso.  (From http://gsteinpics.blogspot.com)

When someone commented that Stein didn't look like her portrait, Picasso famously replied, "She will."

 

I found the exhibition extremely interesting, while Pat did not.

 

Stop Press.  About a week after we returned to Australia, a security guard (who turned out to be a temporary employee), asked two women in the museum to stop holding hands. Ironically, they were viewing the Gertrude Stein exhibition, which not only celebrates her life and work, but also emphasizes her life long partnership with Alice B. Toklas and their circle of gay friends.

Apparently, the guard told the couple that they couldn’t hold hands in the museum, and the two women started to argue with him. After a small crowd began to form around them, the guard attempted to escort the couple out the door.

The museum has apologized to the couple and has asked the private security agency that employs the guard to reprimand him.  The agency will now be instituting “sensitivity training” for their personnel.

 

In addition, to demonstrate its ongoing commitment to diversity, the Museum is staging a special Hand Holding Day on Sunday 24th July.  Visitors are encouraged “to come and stroll hand in hand through the galleries, no matter who you love, and to celebrate the LGBT families in our community.”

“We are excited about welcoming everyone to the Museum for a day of celebration,” says CJM Director and CEO Connie Wolf. “The Museum is dedicated to engaging all visitors in the diversity of culture, history, art, and ideas. Sunday at the Museum will be an extraordinary opportunity to share in the diversity of people, ideas, and community.”

 

Can’t wait to see how it goes.