A "shipshape" exhibition space
At Fisherman’s Wharf, below Ghirardelli Square and overlooking Aquatic Park, you come upon a building that resembles a great yacht. This is San Francisco’s Maritime Museum, a striking architectural curio, with its Streamline Moderne style. Begun in 1936, it was a joint venture between the city and the New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA), and intended as a public bathhouse. In the 1950s it was turned into a museum offering photographs and artifacts from the turn of the 20th century, an era when San Francisco’s notorious red-light district, the Barbary Coast, had its heyday, and Jack London embodied the city’s affection for the arts, the wilderness, and socialism.
But more than wharf history, the must-see here is the artwork, particularly the murals done by Hilaire Hiler and Sargent Claude Johnson. Hiler (1898–1966), whom Henry Miller once called a “hilarious painter whom I always think of with hilarious glee,” was a true Renaissance character. He lived as an expat in Paris in the 1920s and then made his way to San Francisco. He is perhaps best remembered as an influential color theorist. His murals in the museum explore a fantastical undersea terrain, which at first glance have a childlike quality but upon closer study reveal the full extent of Hiler’s vast imagination.
Info
Address 900 Beach Street, San Francisco, CA, 94109, +1 415.561.7100 | Public Transport Bus: 19, 30, 47 (North Point St & Polk St stop) | Hours Daily 10am–4pm| Tip Stop for a famed Irish Coffee at the historic Buena Vista cafe, just across the street at 2765 Hyde Street.
The other muralist represented at the museum is Sargent Claude Johnson (1888–1967), a celebrated black sculptor, ceramicist and painter. His more abstract murals were funded by the Federal Arts Project (FAP). In 1964, during the making of the museum’s oral history, Johnson noted, referring to the FAP and WPA: “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me because it gave me more of an incentive to keep on working . . . I thought about getting out of it because I come from a family of people who thought all artists were drunkards and everything else . . . but I think the WPA helped me to stay.”
Back
To the online map