The story
In the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the old de Young in Golden Gate Park was damaged so badly that it could not be saved. Its replacement, designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, opened in October 2005 with the next quake in mind. The building rests on sliding plates and fluid dampers that let it shift by up to about three feet without coming apart.
Earthquakes have followed this museum from the start. It began in the Egyptian-style Fine Arts Building of the 1894 Midwinter Fair, an exposition driven by the newspaper publisher Michael H. de Young, whose name the museum later took. The 1906 earthquake closed it for a year and a half.
Today the de Young is one of the two Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, alongside the Legion of Honor, and its share is American art and the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. Painting lovers usually head for the American galleries. Frederic Church's Rainy Season in the Tropics throws a double rainbow over an imaginary landscape. Grant Wood's Dinner for Threshers sets out a farm meal in his native Iowa as one long horizontal scene. Thomas Cole, the founding figure of the Hudson River School, painted Prometheus Bound in 1847 as one of his largest canvases, with the chained Titan almost lost among the mountains. Cole sent it to London for a competition, and it was still there when he died the following year.
