What is your favorite Fairy Tale or Children's Story?

- Fairy Tale Art, Illustrations from Children's Stories, the exhibit, provides a wide avenue in which to contemplate the artfulness of illustrations for children. Not only can museum visitors appreciate the artist's skill in drawing and painting and media, but the entire set of production skills needed to design and produce a classic tale can be more fully appreciated when viewing a single frame of the evocative stories now on display in the Lower West Gallery. It becomes clear that a deftly executed panel for children can provide the exact moment of drama which the author intends. The recent Gallery Talk by Lisa covering these illustrations explored the converging skills of production, dramatic effect and intended meaning that a successful story delivers to a young imaginative reader (or to an adult reading to young listeners).
- Hundreds of children's stories have passed through generations to reach the status of a classic. Aesop's Fables, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Nursery Rhymes, Greek myths and 20th Century children's stories have influenced and fired the imaginations of succeeding generations of children, not all of whom loved and read the same stories. How many young people know of these rhymes?

There was a crooked man,
And he went a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence
Upon a crooked stile:
He bought a crooked cat,
That caught a crooked mouse
And they all lived together
In a little crooked house.

[This little rhyme is intended for easy learning by kids.] Or,

This little pig went to market;
This little pig stayed at home;
This little pig had roast beef;
This little pig had none;
This little pig said, "Wee, wee!
I can't find my way home."

[It's easier to explain how this rhyme lasted--playing with the toes of a toddler, what else?]

But, children's stories often had "morals" as in the Aesop's fables.
"The Ant and the Grasshopper" (It is best to prepare for the days of need.)
"The Crow and the Pitcher" (Necessity is the mother of invention.)
"The Goose with the Golden Eggs" (Greed oft o'er reaches itself.)
"The Emperor's New Clothes" (Multi-faceted. You provide the answer! )

Other stories are so riveting that children experience the thrill, fear and terror of prevailing over an evil, as in "Hansel and Gretel" in which the wicked witch kidnaps two very young children in the deep forest. How about "Goldilocks and the Three Bears"? Or "The Big Bad Wolf"? Have you ever seen modern children who know all of these stories? Perhaps not all children do, since contemporary children's stories have developed newer themes and not always to teach a moral. True storytelling that enchants and propels young readers and serves as their gateway to a lifetime of loving reading is a key concern of parents and teachers. The Harry Potter stories serve as a modern example of storytelling enchantment for the young. So what is YOUR favorite nursery rhyme, children's story or fable or fairy tale? Which one made you want to go back and re-read it more than once? Why? Comments are welcome!

Little Choristers: Music Item for a Wedding

--> 24 small boys stand in the abbey choir school around a grand piano, rehearsing music they will sing not for tourists but for persons in attendance at a wedding Friday April 29.

The heavy door muffles sound. A good thing, because the music is a secret that the boys are honor-bound not to reveal to anyone, not even their parents. Misplaced trust? Perhaps, but these are not ordinary boys. They are Westminster Abbey choristers: heirs to a great tradition, impeccably trained, ridiculously mature and about to get the experience of their young lives, singing at the wedding of a future king of England.

“They know the drill,” said the man at the piano, the abbey organist and music director, James O’Donnell. “They know what’s expected of them. Details of the wedding service are embargoed by the royal household, so we’re not allowed to say anything. And we don’t.”

“Secular choirs like the Tallis Scholars and the Sixteen have given visibility to the music we do day in, day out liturgically, and that brings us into the fold. Listeners can buy their CDs or ours, and sometimes they prefer ours. So we are there, being heard.”

Ranging in age from 8 to 13, they enjoy the privileges of an elite education, attending a school with only 34 pupils and 9 teachers. In return they shoulder the workload of professionals. Nerves fray, voices break. Check that: “We don’t say ‘break’ here, we say ‘change,’ ” Mr. O’Donnell said. “It sounds less rupturing.”

[From the New York Times, Sunday April 24, 2011]

With Matisse, Taking Notes

Imagine having Henri Matisse, a titan of modern art, as a teacher in Paris. Sarah Stein did.

Sarah, sister-in-law of celebrated Oakland native and poet Gertrude Stein, and Gertrude's brothers Leo and Michael, together in Paris collected the work of Pablo Picasso and Matisse - the 20th century's greatest painters - before and after the year in which Leo and Sarah studied there with Matisse. Fortunately, Sarah took notes.

[Photo from Estate of Daniel M. Stein. Matisse at center. As printed in SF Chronicle April 25, 2011]

Transcribed portions of Stein's 1908 studio notebook - recording Matisse's artistic advice firsthand - appeared in Alfred Barr's 1950 book "Matisse: His Art and His Public." But the original was presumed lost until San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator Janet Bishop located it in the Portola Valley home of the late Daniel Stein, grandson of Sarah and her husband, Michael. Bishop and her colleagues had already invested months of research in the exhibition "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde," which opens at SFMOMA on May 21.

"We were very interested in locating the Stein heirs," said Bishop, "and we knew that Dan and (his wife) Betty had been consulted by the organizers of 'Four Americans in Paris,' " the thrilling 1970 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, on which "The Steins Collect" builds.

"Sarah and Michael Stein moved to Palo Alto in 1935, the same year that SFMOMA was founded ..." Bishop said, "And they brought with them. . .

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/24/DDT11J1Q5I.DTL#ixzz1KYSmVUlu

An Unexpected Time Capsule from the Gold Rush

- From an article printed in the San Francisco Chronicle dated April 26, 1986:

Archaeologist Allen Pastron announced the discovery of a major find of Gold Rush artifacts in San Francisco - in a canvas shack dating from 1849. The dwelling, discovered during preliminary excavations for a high-rise office building at First and Mission streets, has yielded about 75,000 items. It was a temporary shack, built of either tar paper or canvas and thrown up in the fall of 1849, when San Francisco was a wild boomtown and First Street was the edge of the bay. The area, then called Happy Valley, was a little hollow just south of Market Street and was the site of a tent city where people lived during the winter of 1849 while waiting to go to the gold fields. Pastron says "he is almost certain" the shack he dug up was a Gold Rush rarity - a family home. Most of the city's population of about 30,000 were single men who had come to make their fortunes in the Sierra foothills. Men outnumbered women 20 to 1. But Pastron thinks a married couple lived in the shack, based on the types of household goods - dishes, pins and scissors. "If it were a brothel there would have been more glasses and bottles," he said. There were only a few bottles - one of them once containing a quart of Gen. Taylor Whisky, distilled in Baltimore in the 1840s. "It is the rarest bottle I've ever found," Pastron said.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/22/PKS71ILUR0.DTL#ixzz1KT7RtVOC

Art Trainees View Fine Arts Storage

Guess which painting has arrived home and is awaiting its turn to regain its spot in the McKee Gallery. See below left. And who is the Florentine lady at the left. Kylee knows.














Docent Art Trainee Class continues. It's most recent class on April 14th allowed them a view of the Fine Arts Storage area. Kylee Denning led the group.