This feature was published to celebrate the site of SFSFF’s 27th festival
The Palace of Fine Arts lay just west of the central block of eight primary exhibition palaces built for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), which was held in 1915—about six months into the Great War in Europe and a mere nine years after the city’s devastating earthquake and fires of 1906.
Architect-in-charge Willis Polk could not envision a palace in the “mudhole” where it was supposed to rise and called in his friend Bernard Maybeck who had designed Berkeley’s First Church of Christ, Scientist.
“This thing you call a mudhole,” Maybeck told Polk, “that’s your opportunity. You can make a reflecting mirror of that.” Maybeck’s charcoal rendering was so striking it was unanimously accepted for the Palace design—once Polk offered to pay the architect’s fee out of his own pocket.
Maybeck’s drawing evoked an ancient ruin. Among his inspirations were Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s 18th-century etchings of decaying Roman buildings and an 1880 Arnold Böcklin painting set in moonlight, Island of the Dead, which also famously inspired composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and painter Salvador Dalí.
Maybeck used Chief of Landscape Gardening John McLaren’s wizardry to achieve an effect akin to a mossy, centuries-old building. McLaren’s panels of mesembryanthemum (ice plant) that had been grown flat in boxes were tilted vertically to simulate thick, solid hedges of flower-studded greenery.
Sculptor Ulric Ellerhusen’s statues of women atop the colonnade were meant to be weeping over trailing vines growing from the boxes against which they leaned, but budget cutbacks meant no more plants. Without them, visitor and etiquette expert Emily Post complained they resembled wives of a fat Mormon crying over his coffin.
Painter Jules Guérin was PPIE’s official color consultant who specified a palette of ivory, gray, golden orange, oxidized-copper green, cerulean blue, and Pompeiian reds for the palace block. The Palace colonnade had echoes of the Roman Temple of the Sun, and, unlike its current monochromatic incarnation, its short columns were painted pale green, the tall ones a shade of terra cotta.
Meant as a respite from the hubbub of the Exposition, the Palace was surrounded by water, walkways, and green spaces dotted with violets. Its lagoon hosted many nighttime events, such as a Venice Carnival celebration and, on Kamehameha Day in June, a floating bandshell with Oahu native and mezzo-soprano Marion Dowsett singing traditional Hawaiian ballads accompanied by strings.
Inside were 148 art galleries showcasing more than eleven thousand works by artists from all over the world—including forty-five hundred American artists—from Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, and Mary Cassatt to Laura Knight, Edvard Munch, and Utagawa Hiroshige. It was the first major international art show on the West Coast. Half of PPIE attendees reportedly made their way through its galleries.
While the Palace was devoted to traditional arts, PPIE was “the first great exposition since the popularization of moving pictures.” An estimated one million feet of film was exposed for the event and about two dozen small theaters screened “nearly a hundred little picture shows,” sometimes accompanied by live narration.
The Motion Picture Exhibitors Association held a conference at the PPIE. Matinee idol Francis X. Bushman accepted an award on Metro Day. Movie fans could take to the dance floor with the likes of Cecil B. DeMille, Geraldine Farrar, Mae Marsh, Beatriz Michelena, Owen Moore, or Mack Sennett. Chaplin visited, riding a giraffe on the carousel and taking in the panoramic view from the 265-foot high Aeroscope. Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand starred in a short film touring the Exposition that showed them, among other things, meeting famous opera contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink and exploring a notorious Australian convict ship on display.
None of the structures at the PPIE were built to last, but the Palace of Fine Arts was so popular plans were afoot almost immediately to make it permanent. The Exposition’s Palace of Fine Arts Preservation Day alone raised $8,000. Part of the entertainment that October day was “Butterfly Dancer” Loïe Fuller’s Parisian Muses, who fluttered about inside the rotunda.
After PPIE closed, Phoebe Apperson Hearst (prodigious art collector and mother to newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst) was instrumental in the effort to save the Palace. Her death from the so-called Spanish flu in 1919 ended plans to turn it into a permanent gallery. Meanwhile, an Architectural Review article that year reported the structure “grows more beautiful as weather and plant life give it added interest.”
Over the years, it might have stood unkempt but it was not unused, serving as storage for the Parks Department and the U.S. military. At one time it housed tennis courts and a telephone book distribution center. During the Great Depression select artists of the W.P.A. created new murals to replace the decaying ones in the rotunda. In 1962, a nonprofit was established to maintain it and it was rebuilt with more durable materials, reopening in 1967. In 1970, its theater was unveiled and has been in use ever since. The Palace’s most recent refurbishing, completed in 2010, included a seismic retrofit. The Palace and the Marina Green are the only remnants of the PPIE still on site. — Editor
With invaluable contributions by Laura A. Ackley, author of San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.