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Bemberg Foundation Treasures

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San Diego Museum of Art
Balboa Park, San Diego
September 5, 2021

We donned our masks and headed to the Museum of Art for our first conventional indoor museum visit in a year and a half.  We went to see the special exhibition “Cranach to Canaletto: Masterpieces from the Bemberg Foundation.”  The exhibition included more than 80 paintings belonging to the Bemberg Foundation collection in Toulouse, France.  Artists represented included, in addition to Cranach and Canaletto, Clouet, Boucher, Tintoretto, the younger Brueghel, and several others.  Their home is undergoing restoration, making it possible for the works to be sent on tour elsewhere.

We saw some impressive and beautiful works from the 16th through 18th centuries. They were gathered by type and subject matter, with portraits all shown together, interiors in another section, religious and mythological works together, and then landscapes and other exterior scenes in the final room.  Meredith particularly liked the portraits painted by Tintoretto.  We were both amused by Boucher’s putti (cherubs).  They were playing in their own paintings, apart from any larger scene, and looked as if they were taking a break from dancing attendance on God in some great theophany scene.

In the gallery just outside the Bemberg exhibition we looked at some contemporary paintings inspired by the pandemic.

The Bemberg exhibition has since closed. We are planning to go see the Renaissance to Realism exhibition currently on view which features secular paintings from the 17th century.

And Away They Go!

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Del Mar Fairgrounds
September 3, 2021

On the Friday before Labor Day, Meredith made her (usually) annual trek to Del Mar for the horse races. We did not go to the track in 2020. Although the races were held last year, due to covid no spectators were allowed in.

Meredith checked out the horses in the paddock before each race, placed her $2 bet, then walked to the rail to watch them run. A double bet on the second and third races paid $19.80, so she broke even for the day, always a nice feeling!

A large group of well dressed college students were in attendance. Meredith chatted with one couple by the rail near the finish line. The group turned out to be fraternity and sorority students from USC, and that couple had backed the race’s winner, so it was a fun time for them.

Labor Day weekend saw the end of this season, but thoroughbred racing will resume at Del Mar on November 3, 2021 and will run through November 28. Breeders’ Cup races are scheduled for Friday, November 5 and Saturday, November 6.

Great Caesar’s Ghost!

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Comic-Con Museum
Balboa Park, San Diego
Opening (first phase) November 2021

We first learned about plans for the new Comic-Con Museum at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2018. There was a booth on the convention floor with general information, and a Q & A session we attended as well. The following year we attended a fundraiser in the museum building, with pop up exhibits and activities celebrating Batman.

The museum will be in the Federal Building, where the Hall of Champions was located for many years. The Comic-Con Museum has a 37-year lease on that building, which needs extensive renovations. When done there will be about 68,000 square feet available for the museum’s use.

Comic-Con announced this week that phase one of the construction will be finished in time for a November 2021 opening. The event will coincide with Comic-Con Special Edition, a reduced-sized fall version of the Comic-Con convention held each summer in San Diego.

The vision for the museum is that there will be both daytime exhibits, of the traditional museum sort, and nighttime programs. Exhibits will rotate every few months.  The building has very little storage space so there will be a limited permanent collection, and the museum will rely more on loaned items. There are two classroom spaces planned for educational activities.

The museum is being founded by San Diego Comic Convention, the non-profit organization that produces the annual popular arts and culture celebration Comic-Con. The founders want the museum to appeal to all ages. They want to balance nostalgia on the one hand, and current artists and trends on the other. The museum exhibits will also explain sequential art for those unfamiliar with it. More information can be found here.

Money of course is needed to complete the construction, and donations can be made at the Comic-Con website linked above.

Virtual Connections

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Virtual Connections
March 2020 to the present

We have taken social distancing precautions seriously and drastically curtailed our excursions and interactions with other people. Much of that isolation was not by choice, as businesses closed and group gatherings were banned. We have kept old events on the calendar and still see notes for things long cancelled, like trips, Padres games, and opera and theater performances.

Before the pandemic, neither of us had even heard of the Zoom conferencing app. Now it is an integral part of our life. One of Bob’s sisters set up a standing Zoom date on Sunday afternoons, that family members can drop into to check in with each other. Some of Meredith’s continuing legal education conferences use Zoom.

Various groups at Meredith’s rowing club have adopted Zoom as a way to gather, virtually, including the rowing team for its monthly meetings (one is shown above), and for trivia nights and a virtual awards banquet.

Her dinner crew meets once or twice a month for a “cocktail hour” before dinner. At one gathering the attendees modeled masks.

We have enjoyed educational sessions offered by the San Diego Opera.

The parish book club has moved online and meets twice a month in Zoom sessions. We recently finished James Martin’s The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything, and we are now reading St. Therese of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul.

A silver lining in the pandemic cloud has been the chance to make connections we might not otherwise have done. During the summer, Meredith participated in yoga Zoom sessions organized by a rower she knows in Colorado. Most of the other participants live in the Fort Collins area. Ever since March, she has joined with several Avalon Rowing Club members who live on the East Coast in a Rosary prayer group every Friday by Zoom. (Feel free to send us your prayer intentions!)

Casey approves of anything that keeps his people in one place — whether it is sitting on the couch or lying on a yoga mat – and he is quick to settle in with us. We sometimes call him “Zoom Cat.”

Although it is wonderful to be able to connect by video, we do experience “Zoom fatigue” and find there is a limit to the amount of screen time we can enjoy. 

Pandemic Pause

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Pandemic Pause
March – September 2020

The last six months have been as strange for us as for everyone. When we were enjoying the Open House weekend back in March, the coronavirus was a distant storm cloud. It was a worrying news item, but not a part of our everyday consciousness. Less than two weeks later, on March 19, the California governor announced lock down measures.  It felt as if the whole world had hit the pause button, and nothing has been the same since.

We have to preface our thoughts with the acknowledgment that God has blessed us in many ways, and we have not faced the extreme hardships so many people have endured due to the pandemic and resulting disruptions. This blog post and those that follow offer some reflections, but not they are not meant to be complaints.

March and April were very strange months. Bob’s school extended its spring break, so for the first few weeks of the slow down he was on vacation. Meanwhile, Meredith worked remotely most days and went into the office just twice a week. Her assistant was working entirely remotely, and did so for several months, so Meredith had to do all the office tasks as well as her regular work. She became intimately familiar with the Pitney Bowes postage meter, a machine she has always disliked. When Bob did return to work later in the spring, he taught entirely remotely. Many students were missing in action, because the school district had decided as a policy matter that no student’s grades could be lowered from what they were in mid-March. Consequently, no assignments were required to be done for the rest of the spring semester; everything was extra credit. The remote platforms the teachers used were a mishmash and often did not work well.

We canceled our planned spring break trip; we had planned to see our children in Washington and Ohio. Of course, opera and theater performances were canceled, and Meredith’s rowing club suspended all in person activities, both rowing and social.

One of the hardest things for us was the closing of the churches. We always attend Sunday Mass, and Meredith often goes to Mass on Wednesday mornings before work. In the immediate aftermath of the lock down, we streamed the Masses which Bishop Baron was posting online through the Word on Fire website, and soon afterwards our parish started posting videos of both daily and Sunday Masses. Although Masses at church resumed a few months ago, our parish continues to offer its video Masses online, both Sunday and daily, for the benefit of those who cannot attend in person for health reasons.

During our “binary confinement” we have broken out the corn hole game, and we play it in the backyard from time to time.

We were saddened not to go out for a nice brunch on Easter Sunday. For the last couple of years we have enjoyed the Easter Brunch offered at the Abbey, so when we received an email from the Hornblower Cruise company, which runs that site, saying that they were offering Easter brunch in a “to go” box, we signed up. We drove down to Hillcrest to pick up our box and took a walk in the neighborhood as well.

Meredith took up jigsaw puzzles, to have something to do at home other than TV and reading. In honor of the Washington kids we didn’t get to see in March, she put together a puzzle of Whidbey Island.

Bob soon joined her in putting the puzzles together. We now have the card table set up permanently in the living room – why not, we are not having company over! – to hold the current puzzle in progress.

Historic Grant Hotel

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Open House San Diego 2020
U.S. Grant Hotel
Downtown San Diego
March 8, 2020

We spent a pleasant Sunday afternoon touring several architectural sites on view to the public as part of the Open House San Diego program.  The Open House concept began in London, England in 1992 as a way to bring a wider understanding of architecture to the public.  The San Diego version began in 2017 with tours of sites in Banker’s Hill, Downtown, the Gaslamp District, East Village, and Barrio Logan.  It has expanded its range since then. On these weekends, places that may not normally be open to the public are available.  The OH! San Diego program is organized by the San Diego Architectural Foundation.  In 2018 we toured some of the sites in the Banker’s Hill area as part of the Open House weekend, but never got around to blogging about them.

This year we visited several sites in the Gaslamp District, starting with a self-guided tour at the U.S. Grant Hotel.  We picked up a handsome brochure that led us around the public spaces of the hotel.  The brochure was available on the OH weekend at a table hosted by volunteers, but may also be available to the public at the Concierge desk for tours at other times.  The hotel is located on the site of the original “downtown” hotel, the Horton House, built by Alonzo Horton when he created “New Town” San Diego in the 1860s.  The U.S. Grant Hotel was built by a consortium of businessmen affiliated with Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., the second son of President Grant.  Construction was interrupted in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906, because of other demands for construction labor, but eventually the hotel opened in 1910.

The guide led us around the ornate lobby area, which holds historic images and information about the development of the hotel in the mezzanine level near the valet entrance.  There were no functions being hosted the day that we toured, and we were able to walk through all of the ballrooms and meeting rooms that are not on view when in use by private parties.  The Palm Court is an elegant space in the location of what was once the hotel’s dining room, and is named in honor of the former Palm Garden terrace, later enclosed to provide the “Presidential Ballroom” on the second floor.

Also on the lobby level is the beautiful and historic Grant Grill. The Grill was a meeting place for businessmen in its early years of the 1950s and 1960s; “Men ONLY Before 3:00 P.M.” read the sign at the time.  In 1969, that rule was challenged by a group of female attorneys who held a protest sit-in at lunch time, booking a table under an assumed, masculine name.  The rule was finally abolished after legal action was threatened.  One of the protesters later went on to become a member of Congress and another became a Superior Court judge.

We went up to the second floor and saw what seems to be the largest public space in the hotel, the Presidential Ballroom.  It boasts a stage area.  In the foyer on that level are portraits of all of the presidents and first ladies who have visited the hotel, while near the entrance to the ballroom are photos of presidential visits.

On the lower level we found several interesting architectural drawings, plans, and photographs of the hotel throughout its history.  In the 1930s, an eleventh floor was added to the hotel to serve as the studio and broadcast center for KFSD radio.

The elegant “Court” spaces, Chafee (pictured above) and Chairman’s, served originally as lounges for men and women preparing for or seeking respite from the events in the adjacent Crystal Ballroom.  The Crystal Ballroom is an ornate space that has been remodeled, most recently when the Sycuan Tribe purchased the hotel and modernized it in the early 2000s, but it retains the air of the original.  The travertine and marble are set off by the elegant pillars and gleaming chandeliers and draw the eye to the original fireplace at the far end.

Coming up: posts about the historic San Diego Trust and Savings Bank building, and sites in the Gaslamp.

Dream Machines

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Petersen Automotive Museum
March 7, 2020
Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles

We went to the Petersen auto museum to see the special exhibition Hollywood Dream Machines: Vehicles of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  Dozens of vehicles from science fiction themed movies and television shows are on display.  The exhibition was curated in collaboration with the San Diego-based Comic-Con Museum.  It runs through May 2020.

There are science fiction vehicles displayed around the lobby and even a couple in the parking garage.  The first car to meet us as we entered the main gallery on the ground floor was the familiar DeLorean from the Back to the Future movies.  We particularly enjoyed the numerous Batman related vehicles, not only the Batmobiles, but also Batman motorcycles, Joker cars, and models and images of the Batmobile over the years.

Meredith and her sister were taken by the Star Wars speeder on display. We rolled our eyes at the exhibit tag, though.  For all three of us the 1977 movie will always be Star Wars, and not The New Hope.

We also enjoyed seeing other non-Hollywood classic cars.  The Petersen has an extensive collection, which it rotates from time to time. Although we have been there before, there were many vehicles on display that we had not seen before, including the 1886 Benz Motorwagen pictured above.  The Motorwagen had 0.75 horsepower and could achieve a top speed of 10 miles per hour.  Although not the very first automobile, it may be the first practical one.

On our three prior visits, we went with Meredith‘s mother Margaret. Our most recent prior visit was to see the grand reopening in 2015.  Shortly before that the museum had remodeled its exterior; our blog post about that visit, including the architecture, can be seen here.  The year before that we went to the Petersen to see the Mustang exhibit, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Ford’s release of the first Mustangs.

The museum’s collection is extensive, and not all cars it owns can be displayed at any one time.  The Petersen, for an extra charge, offers tours of its vault.  We have never seen the vault but think it might be worth doing someday.

We noticed the same deficits in accessibility that struck us when we last visited, with Margaret in her wheelchair.  Although there are no steps to climb inside the museum, the internal doors are heavy and do not have push button openers, and the parking garage lacks an elevator.

Parking is expensive, a flat $17 for the day, but that reflects the Wilshire location.  Other parking options in the area are in the same cost range.

We are thinking that our next Los Angeles museum venture will probably be to the Skirball in May, to see the Star Trek exhibition, which will open on April 30.

Nixon Library and Museum

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Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
Yorba Linda
January 19, 2020

Our first museum trip of 2020 was to the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, up in Orange County.  Last year we visited the Reagan library in Simi Valley and purchased a membership.  That membership offers reciprocal admission privileges at other presidential libraries, and we were interested in the Nixon library, so we made a point of going before the membership expired.  (We never did write up our February 2019 Reagan outing, but a blog post about an earlier visit we made to the Reagan library can be seen here.)  We were also interested in the special exhibition at the Nixon library that ran just through March 1, about the Apollo 11 mission and moon landing.

We were totally engrossed by the museum, both permanent collection and temporary exhibit.  That’s why we are running behind with this blog post; a full report would require a much longer write up than we usually provide.  Let’s just hit the highlights.

The permanent collection recounts the history of Nixon’s life before, during and after his presidency.  It starts with his presidency, then the second section of the permanent galleries traces his life before and after his time as president.  (In contrast, the permanent galleries at the Reagan museum follow a strict chronological approach, starting with his boyhood.)  The Watergate gallery is comprehensive and does not pull punches.  We were completely fascinated by the exhibits and became immersed in the events of that era, to the point that we did not realize how much time had gone by.  Richard Nixon was never one of our favorite public figures, but as we traced the events of his life at the museum, we were impressed with his humble origins, work ethic, intelligence, and persistence.  We knew about, but were interested to revisit, the main events of his presidency: the trip to China, detente, the Vietnam war and disengagement, domestic social changes, etc.  But we were not aware of Nixon’s continuing role as an elder statesman, consulted by subsequent presidents on foreign policy matters.  We were also struck by one comment: that he was an introvert in an extrovert’s profession.

There are good videos throughout the museum, especially the introductory video at the entrance, which features some of Nixon’s advisors, including Henry Kissinger, as well as biographers and family members.  There are historical video recordings as well, such as the Checkers speech, and Nixon’s resignation speech which we both remember hearing.

Nixon’s birth home is located on the grounds and can be toured with a docent.  His father Frank Nixon built the house himself, from a kit supplied by a lumber yard.

Also on the grounds is the helicopter Nixon used while president, and it can be toured as well.  It is the one area that is not handicapped accessible; visitors must climb stairs to get into it.

The temporary exhibit commemorating the moon landing sparked memories for both of us, of that magical summer night when we first watched men walk on the surface of the moon.

The building that we visited was the museum.  The presidential library, with an extensive document collection, is a separate building, open for research Monday through Friday.

There is no full service café on site; there is a lunch cart, which closes at 3 pm.  Visitors are free to leave and eat elsewhere and then return.

Full price tickets are $16, with discounts for seniors, students, military, and children.  The museum is open Monday to Saturday 10am to 5pm, and Sunday 11am to 5pm.  Accessibility good, except for the helicopter.

Parking is free, and there were plenty of open spaces the day we visited.

Il Guercino

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Timken Museum
Balboa Park
November 24, 2019

Recently Meredith discovered the 17th century Italian painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri through a blog post featuring one of his paintings of the Annunciation.  The Angelus Project blog posts a new image of the Annunciation each week.  Barbieri is better known by his nickname “Il Guercino.”

She wanted to know more about Barbieri, and started with the Wikipedia article about him.  Apparently guercino is Italian for “squint-eyed.”  His Wikipedia entry has an image done by a contemporary artist, Ottavio Leoni, that shows Barbieri’s right eye crossing in, a form of strabismus (an umbrella term for several types of misalignment of the eyes).  Also intriguing was a link in that Wikipedia article to a medical journal article exploring whether Leonardo da Vinci may have had strabismus.  Other famous artists with various types of strabismus may include Rembrandt, Dürer, Degas, and Picasso.

We shared this information with our optometrist daughter, who told us that she had been discussing strabismic artists, particularly painters, with a colleague recently.  She was struck by the observation that paintings represent a 3D world in a 2D medium, and that translating three dimensions down to two may be easier for people who already see the world in two dimensions because of their strabismus.

Soon after that discussion we were visiting the Timken and discovered that there is a painting in their permanent collection by Barbieri, of the parable of the Prodigal Son.  In that parable, the father who welcomes back the errant son represents God forgiving sinners.  Luke 15:11-32.  A docent at the Timken explained to us that in addition to illustrating the original Gospel story, the painting also represents the Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation, ready to welcome back Protestants.

The Life in Your Years

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A British study published this month found that people who visit museums and art galleries regularly live longer. Other engagement with the arts, such as attending theater performances or the opera, had a similar beneficial effect. Over half the association is independent of factors that could explain the link such as wealth, mobility, and mental health.

We first saw the study reported in the December 22, 2019 New York Times, but their online paywall is a nuisance to navigate; a write up can also be seen on CNN’s website.

Researchers from University College London reviewed data from more than 6,000 adults in England age 50 years and older, who were taking part in a wider study on aging and who were followed for 12 years on average. They found that people who engaged in the arts more frequently — every few months or more — had a 31% lower risk of dying early compared to those who did not. Even going to the theater or museum once or twice a year was linked with a 14% lower risk.

Why? It is not clear, but one researcher commented that “engaging with the arts can act as a buffer against stress and build creativity that allows people to adapt to changing circumstances. It also helps people build social capital — accessing emotional support and information that helps people age more successfully. We also thought that a greater sense of purpose could play a role.”

New Year’s resolution: visit more museums!