The story
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are really two buildings on opposite sides of the city, run as one. The Legion of Honor, above the Pacific in Lincoln Park, is a three-quarter-scale copy of a Paris palace, built in the 1920s by the sugar heiress Alma Spreckels as a memorial to Californians who died in the First World War. A cast of Rodin's Thinker sits in its forecourt.
Across town in Golden Gate Park stands the de Young, rebuilt after earthquake damage as a copper-clad modern box that has weathered to a soft brown. It leans toward American painting and the arts of the Americas, Africa and Oceania.
Together they hold European old masters, a deep Rodin collection and a broad American one, a single institution that asks you to cross the city to see all of it. The de Young's twisted tower gives a free view over the park and the ocean.
