The Chapter in Your Life Entitled San Francisco: Part III

My last San Francisco post had too many photos, so I thought I’d save the last day and give it its own post. Pretty fitting, since we did do quite a lot of things that day.

October 10

We went to visit Bader at Vintage Court, which is where we usually stay when we go to SFO (it was full on our dates this year), but he was on break so we popped by Chinatown for lunch first.

After catching up—he’s retiring this year!—we went back to Golden Gate Park to see the de Young Museum. Fortuitously, it was open until 8pm that day (a Friday, but it doesn’t seem like it’s still open until 8pm these days, though!) so we went to go see the California Academy of Sciences first.

We saw it across the park and it looked so freaking Jurassic. Seriously, I said it before but I love San Francisco fog.

We decided to go in because of the special exhibit on skulls!

There was a beautiful short film inside the planetarium that was beautiful in itself. Then, there was penguin feeding! And our last stop were the aquariums.

AND THEN we went to de Young, which was small, but is such a beautiful building and it had a great (though, again, tiny) exhibit on Modernism. I wish there were more pieces but it was such a great collection, so that’s fine.

Burgoyne Diller, “First Theme”

Barnett Newman, “The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani”

I wanted to talk a bit about this Rothko because, as you can see, the tone is very somber. If you didn’t already know, Rothko killed himself in 1970. We were looking at this painting when my dad pointed out that this one was made in 1969, and my heart fell out of my chest, because I wonder what he was feeling when he made this.

And from one of my favorite Rothko interviews:

Somebody said to [Rothko], “Why do you paint these great, big maudlin canvases?” And he said, “Because if there happens to be somebody who’s feeling a bit lonely and they come and stand in front of one of my works, they know they’re not alone.”

Robert Rauschenberg, “Archive”