San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum has long observed a balance between life and death. When it opened in 1924 it was dedicated to the memory of the 3,600 Californians who lost their lives on the battlefields of France during the “Great War,” World War I.
The donors who financed construction declared, however, that they wanted to “honor the dead while serving the living.”
Two new exhibits also strike a balance. “Last Supper in Pompeii: From the Table to the Grave” re-creates life in the Italian city destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D., killing thousands. A statement posted within the exhibit points out, “We also take time to acknowledge the millions of lives lost to COVID-19.” The pandemic delayed the exhibit’s opening by a year.
The second exhibit brings to the forefront recent sculptures by Wangechi Mutu, a Nairobi-born artist who divides her time between Kenya and the United States. Her works create what the museum calls a “new mythology.” One bronze sculpture is based on a mythological siren that captures lost and weak mortals. Another was conceived after Mutu learned of a Black woman’s murder in Oakland.
Preserving Pompeii
When it was first announced, “Last Supper in Pompeii” seemed like a minor-league glance at a tragic event. But it turns out to be an enthralling exhibit about daily life in the Roman era, and the pandemic’s effect stirs deeper questions now. What would we leave behind if our world ended so suddenly? How would it be considered centuries in the future?
One astonishing display is actually modern: an animated video that condenses the destruction of Pompeii to two minutes, from earthquake to volcanic eruption to burial under pumice and ash. How did anything survive?
Yet we know that evidence of this Roman civilization did survive, was excavated and restored. What we see in this expansive exhibit is amazing, not all singed ruins. There are wall-size frescoes depicting gardens and banquets and even Mount Vesuvius; a mosaic with an array of almost three-dimensional fish and shellfish; a portable grill that looks decidedly modern; a massive wooden strongbox with an elaborate locking mechanism; and a tiny ceramic cup holding bone toothpicks.
There’s more to the exhibit than food and drink — although Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and fertility, is ever-present. (A separate gallery at the end of the exhibit displays works that convey Pompeii’s erotic appetites as well.)
The spacious museum galleries suggest a walk through a Pompeian home, from reception area to atrium to dining room to kitchen. One 2,000-year-old item is instantly recognizable: a charred loaf of bread, left behind in a baker’s oven when the workers fled.
“How do you get to understand people better than through the food they eat?” asked curator Renee Dreyfus, who refocused this exhibit that originated at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at Oxford University. Items displayed come from museums in Pompeii and nearby Naples, of course, as well as the British Museum and even the Getty Museum ij Los Angeles, that reproduction of a Roman Villa on the California coast.
With a wealth of material from so many sources — and the prospect of traveling to Italy any time soon remote — “Last Supper in Pompeii” could be a once-in-a-lifetime attraction.
There are surprises at every turn: frames of the couches where the wealthy would lounge and be served by their enslaved kitchen and dining-room staff; a painting of Bacchus transformed into a bunch of grapes, looking like a performer at a San Joaquin Valley harvest festival; a sign from a tavern and a mosaic promoting fish sauce made from mackerel.
Some displays look strikingly familiar. There’s a painting of terraced vineyards on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius that could be in Napa or Sonoma counties (where volcanic soil also marks the “terroir.”) There are recognizable pots and pans, a delicately pierced colander, and glass beakers and bowls, made about the time blown glass was invented.
Not just dishes and utensils, but food has also been retrieved from Pompeii. The samples include carbonized grapes, olives, almonds and lentils — what might be a precursor to a California restaurant’s “Mediterranean Diet” menu.
Excavations at Pompeii have continued. The most startling display at the Legion was discovered in the 1980s in a room at nearby Oplontis.
This is the “Resin Lady,” preserving in epoxy resin the skeleton of a woman found face down in a room that became a tomb for a group fleeing the eruption. Along with her remains are the coin purse she carried, jewelry in a small basket, and a bronze jug, which might have carried water, found under her right arm.
Earlier in the galleries, a striking mosaic from a Pompeian dining room floor depicts a grinning skeleton carrying two wine jugs, a reminder of mortality as well as pleasure. The exhibit catalog explains with a quote from the Roman poet Horace: “Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero” or “Seize the day and do not put your hope in the future….”
Mutu’s sculptural musings
At first glance, the stately Legion of Honor museum building — modeled after an 18th-century palace built in Paris for a German prince — does not look like the best setting for contemporary art.
But former museum director Max Hollein and his current successor, Thomas P. Campbell, have proved that new sculpture can take its place at the museum among the signature collection of works by Auguste Rodin who, after all, revolutionized sculpture.
In fact, the building’s formal entry court and grand rotunda are the perfect venue for the works of Kenyan American artist Wangechi Mutu. Some of her sculptures are cast in bronze, others constructed from materials such as wood and ash. But they all convey what the exhibit curator calls Mutu’s “rare understanding of the power and need for new mythologies.”
There are some 20 new and recent works installed at the museum, some surrounded appropriately by Rodin’s 19th-century sculptures with their rough, expressive surfaces. Curators often hope to set up a “conversation” among artworks. At the Legion you can almost hear them, even though the exhibit’s title is “Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?”
The impact is immediate at the museum’s outdoor Court of Honor where visitors encounter Rodin’s “The Thinker.” Four of Mutu’s bronze sculptures “disrupt ‘The Thinker’s’ splendid isolation,” as the exhibit notes declare. The largest are Mutu’s new “Mama Ray” and “Crocodylus,” hybrid bronze goddesses that are part alien and part animal.
More startling are two “Shavasana” sculptures, suggesting the supine yoga pose, but here becoming female bodies with brightly colored stiletto shoes, covered by woven mats. “Shavasana II” was conceived after Mutu read about the stabbing death in 2018 of Nia Wilson, a Black woman, just outside the MacArthur BART station in Oakland. (The attack, and subsequent outcry, made national headlines; Wilson’s attacker is now serving a life prison sentence for murder.)
Elsewhere, Mutu’s figures and environments are “at once seductive and threatening,” curator Claudia Schmuckli observes. In the museum’s rotunda, the bronze “Water Woman” is part-woman, part fish’s powerful tail, but a far cry from the seductive mermaids of traditional artwork.
Other works shape nature into human figures. The “Dream Catcher” seems to wear a headdress of sticks; the whole work is created from red soil, paper pulp, wood, glue and crystals. The two figures depicted in “I Am Speaking, Can You Hear Me?” have jawbones and conch shells for ears and look past — not — at each other.
In fewer than two dozen works, Mutu explores past and present, reality and mythology, with materials ranging from polished bronze to grainy soil.
Like Rodin’s sculptures, Mutu’s figures seem to reconfigure themselves depending on the viewer’s vantage point. The female figure of ‘Sentinel IV” may be transforming into a tree, like the Greek nymph Daphne escaping from her amorous pursuer. Or is it a tree turning into a woman? The work’s caption only hints at a symbiotic alliance of “hu/wo/man and nature.”
LEGION OF HONOR
What: Two exhibits, “Last Supper in Pompeii” (through Aug. 29) and ‘Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking; Are You Listening?’ (through Nov. 7)
Where: Lincoln Park, 34th Avenue and Clement Street, San Francisco
Hours: Hours: 9:30 a.m.-5:15 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday
Admission: “Pompeii,” $15-$30 includes general admission; Mutu sculptures, general admission, $6-$15; timed-entry advance tickets required; 415-750-3600, legionofhonor.famsf.org
