Art Museums in San Francisco

Every local knows the first Tuesday of every month is a free admission day to visit many of the recreational activities in San Francisco (i.e. museum, zoo, etc).  We went to the De Young Museum in San Francisco to see the special exhibition from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris on Tuesday.  The first exhibition, Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, exhibited many magnificient oil paintings by famous artists from the mid-to-late 19th century in France.

Although it was a free admission day at the museum, we have to pay a fee for special exhibition.  It was $15 for adults and $10 for minors.  We rented the audio tour that comes with a headset for $7, so that we could hear about the life stories of the famous artists and their paintings.  I was so excited to see these famous original oil paintings.  Before our designated time to get in to the exhibition, we went to the cafe at the museum to get our lunch.  The food at the museum is usually pretty good.  We had these for lunch and they were excellent:

S H E L L F I S H V O L A U V E N T
 (wild shrimp, dungeness crab, bay scallops,

lobster cognac gravy, puff pastry, concord petite pois) $12.50

C O Q A U V I N ( red wine braised chicken stew with root vegetables )$11.50

Although we could not take pictures, here's a list of paintings that were exhibited.  These are a few of the famous paintings I saw and I downloaded from the website.

Degas - Dancing Lesson

Whistler - Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1

Edouard Manet -The Fifer

 

"The Floor Scrapers" is by far the painting I liked best from this exhibition.  All the lighting and details done on this painting just took my breath away.

Caillebotte - The Floor Scrapers

 

I was allowed to take some pictures without using flash in other galleries of the museum.  Here are a few pieces of modern art that I liked:

Paper Collage

Modern Furnitures

Blown Glasses

Wooden Human Organs

It would have been nice to go to the Legion of Honor to see the Impressionist Paris exhibition, but I wanted to visit the SFMOMA since I have never been there. I had really liked visiting the MOMA in New York and wanted to see the MOMA here in San Francisco.  It is so much smaller than the one in New York that we finished within an hour.  There were not many modern pieces that interested me except for these abstract paintings, but I was dissappointed to find there was only one painting exhibited from each of my favorite artists.

Painting by Paul Klee

Painting by Matisse

Painting by Picasso

It was a nice surprise to see Ansel Adams's photos here:

It was such an excited moment for me to see there were many original paintings from Claude Monet at De Young Museum, but unfortunately the paintings I hope to see were not there.  I am hoping that I will be able to go back to Legion of Honor soon to see other great masterpieces at the Impressionist Paris exhibition.