Photo by Hanson Switzky

You still have a couple more weekends to spy on the Great Blue Herons that are nesting at Stow Lake!

Sarah B.

The California Academy of Sciences recently posted the trailer for their upcoming Planetarium show, “Evidence of a Restless Planet”, narrated by the always handsome Benjamin Bratt.

The new film will be part of the Academy’s Earthquake exhibition, which opens May 26.

The show includes a model of the earth you can walk through (“to find touchable geology specimens and interactive stations explaining the basics of plate tectonics”) and the infamous “Shake Table” is back, simulating what it felt like to experience the Loma Prieta quake of October 17, 1989. And of course, some safety tips for how to survive the next big jolt.

Sarah B.

This Sunday, the Legion of Honor museum is throwing an Easter celebration, in theme with its current exhibition “The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860–1900″.

The event kicks off at 12noon with a free, Victorian Easter Egg hunt for kids on the front lawn of the museum. A Mad Hatter – outfitted by the A.C.T. Costume Shop – will be on hand to emcee the hunt. Bring your baskets!

Other events on Sunday include Victorian hat decorating, a screening of the animated Alice in Wonderland film, and more:

12-3:00 p.m.
Adorn your Easter hats in the Mad Hatter fashion. Petrushka of Petrushka Couture Accessories will assist museum visitors with transforming their bonnets and top hats into a colorful and crazy headdress! Don’t worry, you can put your bonnets and top hats back to “normal” after you are done impressing the Mad Hatter.

12–3:00 p.m.
Join our museum artists in Gallery 8 and create an origami Easter basket for your hunts beyond the museum.

12:00-3:00 p.m.
Paper cut-out demonstration will be given by Sara Burgess in Gallery 10. Her intricate details reflect the beautiful aesthetics of the Victorian Era.

Florence Gould Theater
1:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. Enjoy the 1951 classic animated version of “Alice in Wonderland.” (75 minutes) Rated: G.

Happy Easter!

Sarah B.

On Thursday, we got a sneak peek at the new de Young exhibition featuring the works of fashion icon Jean Paul Gaultier. The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk celebrates the French designer, featuring 140 ensembles from his 35 year career that has touched not only the fashion and haute couture worlds, but cinema, popular music and the arts.

But don’t expect a refined retrospective like you saw in last year’s Balenciaga exhibit. The Gaultier show not only features a modern fashion icon, but it also utilizes multimedia and innovative techniques in the installation and display of his intricate designs.

The most notable is the projection of live video faces onto the faces of some of the mannequins. It makes for an eerie effect, amazingly lifelike as you move through the exhibition. Their eyes blink, mouths move – almost like they are living and breathing live models on the catwalk.

In another part of the exhibition, the mannequins revolve on small pedestals that rotate around the oval catwalk – as if you were watching the models move down the runway. Perfectly placed lighting washes up each garment as it turns the corner.

The show is comprised of six themed sections that take the visitor through the various creative phases of Gaultier’s career. His signature blue and white designs are featured (one of them featuring the designer’s face and voice), as well as a “Boudoir” theme exploring Gaultier’s fascination with lingerie that was made most famous by the pointy bustier worn during Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition tour.

Equality, diversity and perversity have been Gaultier’s mantras during his fashion career, and they are all on display in the exhibition. The “Skin Deep” gallery features garments inspired by themes of bondage and body art, including one design that looks like the muscles of the human body.

The “Urban Jungle” gallery features a diverse medley of influences ranging from Frida Kahlo to Hassidic Jews. The final “Metropolis” themed gallery highlights Gaultier’s work in film (The Fifth Element, Pedro Almodovar), and his relationship with pop (and fashion) icons like Kylie Minoque and Tina Turner.

In addition to seeing his beautiful fashion, you also experience the breadth of Gaultier’s design aesthetic across a variety of mediums be it sketches, stage costumes, film clips, dance performances and of course, haute couture. He plays with conventional gender stereotypes, dressing men and women alike in some collections, for what he playfully refers to as “a wardrobe for two”.

The show also mixes in fashion photography from some of Gaultier’s renowned contemporaries including Andy Warhol, Steven Meisel and David LaChapelle.

Gaultier was on hand for the press preview on Thursday, delighting the media with stories of his early visits to San Francisco, and of dressing up his childhood teddy bear with his earliest fashion creations – including an early version of the cone bra Madonna would later make famous.

The designer is in town through the weekend and on Saturday, he’ll sit for a Q&A with Suzy Menkes, fashion editor for the International Herald Tribune. The event is already sold out, but you can watch it streamed live from the de Young’s website beginning at 11am.

The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk opens Saturday at the de Young Museum, and runs through August 19.

The museum is the exclusive west coast venue for the exhibition, and during its stay in Dallas, was consistently sold out. After seeing this beautiful, innovative and fun show, we can understand why. Don’t miss it!

Sarah B.

The famous bustier worn by Madonna on her Blonde Ambition tour

A message left by Jean Paul Gaultier on the wall of the exhibition

Playland on the Great Highway, 1948. Photo by Eugene Gallagher

Some hot and spicy local links for you all – happy Thursday!

• Jean Paul Gaultier, the fashion god behind the new de Young museum exhibit that opens this week, took in the view from the tower. His review? “The view from the @deYoungMuseum tower is absolument magnifique! #iLoveSanFrancisco” he wrote on Twitter.
• Snow ice, a popular Taiwanese dessert, is growing more popular according to the Chron. You can try it for yourself at 100% Sweet Cafe (2512 Clement & 26th). It looks like a crepe but it’s not, as “snow ice starts out closer to ice cream.” At the cafe, “the dessert comes as a mountain of snow ice drizzled with a choice of sauce, such as strawberry or chocolate syrup. It’s finished with three toppings – anything from lychee to red beans to grass jelly.”
• Art studio and shop Foggy Notion (275 6th Avenue) will be celebrating their grand re-opening on Friday night with a party from 6-9pm. The shop will feature jewelry, recycled vinyl and leather goods, and showcase designers and artists from SF and beyond who create handmade, organic, and environmentally-conscious products.
• Vietnamese restaurant Le Soleil (133 Clement) has re-opened after closing for renovations, including the addition of two new ADA-compliant restrooms. They were one of the many restaurants in the neighborhood who had been sued for ADA violations. Glad to see they were able to afford the upgrades and re-open.
• Hey guys, need some brownie points to get you out of the doghouse? 7×7 recommends Pacific Cafe (7000 Geary at 34th Avenue) as a good place to take your lady as thanks for putting up with your March Madness debauchery. “No need for reservations because they don’t take them, but they provide friendly pours of red and white wine while you wait to be seated, and the seafood dishes are delicious.”
• Ethiopian chef Eskender Asegad tells 7×7 readers to stop by Assab Eritrean Food (2845 Geary) for their lamb dish. “Amazing with a spice mixture that’s more sweet than spicy hot. It’s very intriguing, with a generous amount of garlic—a very soul-warming dish.”
• SFWeekly named the “fish fillet with explosive chile pepper” dish from Spices! (294 8th Avenue) as one of their top 50 for 2012. “The audible crunch of the batter, which masks the delicate fish, is only part of the dish’s crackle. That comes from the citrus buzz of the Sichuan peppercorns, the pain-inducing warmth of the chiles, the nutty flashes of toasted sesame seeds, and the electric jolt of the cilantro scattered across the top.” Woah, pass the Tums!

Sarah B.

It’s that time of year again when the de Young fills up with dozens of fresh flower installations, designed as accompaniments to pieces from the museum’s permanent collection. It’s known as Bouquets to Art and features creations from over 150 innovative floral designers.

The photos above are from last year’s show which included a fabulous Superman, a flowing Niagara Falls, and even a flower-studded Balenciaga dress. I imagine that there will be some designs in this year’s Bouquets to Art that are inspired by the upcoming Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition.

The show runs only from Tuesday through Saturday next week, and we have two pairs of passes to give away.
To enter, fill out this entry form. We’ll pick two winners at random and mail off your passes by the weekend so you’re all set to attend next week.

Entries are due by 5pm on Thursday, March 8. Good luck!

Sarah B.

John Spencer Stanhope, Love and the Maiden, 1877

It took museum curator Dr. Lynn Federle Orr nearly ten years to pull together the “Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860–1900″ exhibition that opened last weekend at the Legion of Honor.

It’s no wonder – the show is a hand-picked, exquisite collection of 180 paintings, furnishings, textiles and other decorative pieces that represent the breadth of the British Aesthetic Movement.

While Britain was in the midst of an Industrial Revolution, its artists and designers began a movement in aesthetic beauty, aimed at redefining the relationship between art, the artist and everyday society. Why should beautiful things and artistry be confined to museum and gallery walls? The movement’s rallying cry of “Art for Art’s Sake” was avant-garde in and of itself.

“Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860–1900″ showcases many different types of art from the period, featuring artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Thomas Jeckyll and American ex-pat James McNeill Whistler.

One section of the show is dedicated to London’s influential Grosvenor Gallery, founded in 1877 and heralded for housing work by artists – like Whistler, Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones – who were shunned by the more classical and conservative Royal Academy.

The artists of the period were multi-faceted, more like designers that worked in painting one day, home decor the next. While Whistler is best known for his paintings, the exhibition highlights his other contributions to the movement.

Spotlighted in the show is a replica of Whistler’s decadent, yet tastefully elegant “Peacock Room”, which he designed for a client in 1908. The “re-construction” of the room for the show is innovative – created entirely from one-dimensional, lifesize photographs that line the walls. Akin to walking into a three dimensional picture of the room (Whistler’s original “Peacock Room” is housed in the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian – view a panorama).

Whistler’s “Peacock Room” is recreated using photographic overlays on the walls

The show also displays some beautiful wallpapers, which are representative of the emerging trend in home decor of the period. Artists created rich wallpapers and furnishings to decorate their own living spaces, inspiring a trend towards House Beautiful, showcased in the “Aesthetic Houses for Beautiful People, 1870s–1880s” section of the show.

Home decor became more affordable and accessible during the period, driving commercial manufacturers to market signature wallpapers, fabrics and other decorator items at affordable price points. Suddenly, beauty within one’s own home was achievable by more than just the wealthy upper class.

Curator Dr. Lynn Federle Orr describes the movement well in her essay in the exhibition’s catalogue, writing, “Like a fine Victorian novel, the story of the Aesthetic Movement is one centered around serious social debates—shifting class structures, the confrontation between science and religion, art’s place in society, the impact of new market forces and a unique emphasis on the middle-class home.”

A later room in the show, entitled “Late-Flowering Beauty: 1880s–1890s”, displays rich paintings and sculptures from artists of the period like Rosetti, alongside examples of fine book design and poetry.

In contrast to the austere, cold and sometimes harsh representations we often encounter in Victorian era culture, the “Cult of Beauty” highlights the opposing forces and colors that shone through during the Aesthetic movement. Soft blues, colorful peacocks, rich blues, reds and golds – these are the colors of the art from this avant-garde period that opened the doors for later movements like Art Nouveau.

What’s unique about the “Cult of Beauty” show is that it showcases a movement that rarely is given its own exhibition. Normally you’d see these pieces are parts of other exhibitions dedicated to single mediums or decorative arts. But here is assembled the beauty of the British Aesthetic Movement in its entirety – from modern tea sets to home decor, to richly expressive paintings and sculptures. Art for art’s sake, and it couldn’t be more beautiful.

The Legion of Honor is the sole U.S. venue for the “Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860–1900″ exhibition, which runs until June 17.

Sarah B.

Edward William Godwin, Sideboard, 1865–75

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Chair, ca. 1884-6