I recently attended the Jewel City Exhibit at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park. Jewel City is a stunning snapshot of US and European art from the era of the 1915 World’s Fair, the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition, which took place in San Francisco from February to December 1915 in what is now the Marina District of the city. The graceful Palace of Fine Arts, a San Francisco landmark, is one of the few buildings remaining from the 1915 Worlds Fair complex. I was amazed and delighted at the unexpected quality and breadth of the works shown in this exhibit and fascinated by their placement in historical and geographical context. Although the 1915 World’s Fair was officially intended to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal, it also allowed the city of San Francisco to show the world that it had recovered from the devastating 1906 earthquake. Plans for the 1915 World’s Fair had begun in 1904 and city leaders chose to continue with the event even after the earthquake’s destruction.
The Land Divided, The World United was a slogan of the 1915 Worlds Fair: the Panama Canal dividing an isthmus, thereby uniting the world. One can also consider this as the land physically dividing during the earthquake of 1906, which it did north of San Francisco in Point Reyes, separating a formerly contiguous fence by six feet, and the world uniting after the terrible damage to San Francisco through the rebuilding of the city hosting the World’s Fair.
In 1915, many people believed that science, art and culture combined to improve the human condition. Technology on display at the 1915 World’s Fair included the first steam locomotive purchased by the Southern Pacific Railway and a telephone link between the East Coast and the West Coast for listeners on the Atlantic to hear the Pacific Ocean. Simultaneously, World War I had begun and German troops occupied Belgium and a portion of France in summer and fall of 2014. Rather than unifying, the world was being torn with the new machinery of war. Organizers of the Worlds Fair had negotiated for artwork from Europe to be displayed among the more-than 150 galleries at the Fair. The works from occupied Europe and Germany were considered property of an enemy state and were seized, thereby separating the world under the auspices of the Fair. Apparently the irony that imbues marketing slogans today was just as common one hundred years ago.
The Jewel City exhibit at the DeYoung Museum includes 175 paintings from American masters such as Winslow Homer, James McNeil Whistler, John Singer Sargent, French artists Rodin, Monet, and Degas and wonderful Scandinavian and German pieces. The scope and outstanding quality of the American Impressionists from that era on display is dazzling. So many of these were previously unknown to me. Masterpieces shown and created so close to home – impressionistic renderings of Western places I have seen and known provide thrilling inspiration. However, they are shown against the sinister backdrop of national and global unrest in our time a century since their creation. Against this play of dark and light and unification and division in the world is where I begin a new series of my own artwork in 2016.