Legion of Honor | San Francisco, CA

Women’s studies sent me on a fieldtrip to the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, CA.

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I had a really great time over there, the museum is awesome and extremely affordable.  I recommend anyone who is visiting San Francisco or anywhere else in the Bay Area, to check out the Legion of Honor:   

Lincoln Park | 100 34th Avenue • San Francisco, CA

 

The topic of the class was Women in Art.  We began the quarter studying some early female painters and progressed into the use of women in art.  All in all, I was a little disappointed that we didn’t talk about Andromeda. 

Some of the fun at the Legion of Honor is the trail system, out behind the museum.  Here’s some pictures of that:

      

I was assigned to view Susanna and the Elders, by Jan van Noordt and The Bath, by Jean-Léon Gérôme. 

What I got from Susanna and the Elders was the surface misogyny but I felt, additionally, that Jan van Noordt was describing women’s introspective battleground.  That societies rules drove them against their natural self-imposition and he felt that man’s forbearance would lead them toward conservatism, effectively reversing psychology. 

Everything that fathers, husbands or men in general could say they detested about females was due to their own, self-interested, rule-setting.  All men really wanted was the instinctual woman.  The very thing that Jean-Léon Gérôme saw in the eastern orient. 

Here is Susanna and the Elders and The Bath side by side (the paradox):

I proceeded around the whole museum a couple of times.  The sculptures were better than I had seen anywhere else.  I don’t have a whole lot of museum experience but I’m sure you will agree on the quality of my samples. 

Enjoy the following photos, although, I cannot identify them!