Page 25 - 2014 Travel Guide to California

A MUSE by Rosalba Carriera (1673-
1757), above, hangs in The J. Paul
Getty Museum, Los Angeles, right.
required) will open in the summer of 2014.
Ten years and half a billion dollars in
the making, the California Academy of Sci-
ences in Golden Gate Park features a
walk-through rainforest with free-ranging
birds and butterflies, the world’s largest
all-digital planetarium, and a “Living Roof”
with 1.7 million native California plants: a
world unto itself.
Two hours south of San Francisco, the
Monterey Bay Aquarium deserves to be listed
among the Seven Wonders of the World for
its fantastic displays of sea otters and jellies,
its hypnotic three-story kelp forest and a
staggering million-gallon “Outer Bay” tank
that holds visitors enraptured for hours. Get
tickets in advance, and give yourself one full
day for the marvel of a museum.
The Tech Museum in San Jose (the heart
of Silicon Valley) is the country’s first
museum dedicated to the digital world,
with exhibits on robots, the Internet and
the ever-popular Earthquake Platform. A
special Star Wars exhibition continues
through February 2014.
In Los Angeles’ Exposition Park, the Cal-
ifornia Science Center still claims to be the
largest hands-on science museum on the
West Coast, with ongoing exhibits on
ecology, space travel and the worlds of
invention and innovation. In 2014, crowds
will arrive to see the Space Shuttle
Endeavor, and view a photographic record
of its epic journey to the museum.
The Arts
For many international visitors, one high-
light of their California visit is the fabulous
Getty Museum—which includes the Getty
Center in Los Angeles and the Getty Villa in
Malibu. The world-renowned Villa will
have a marvelous run of exhibitions in
2014, from a portrait of the Emperor
Tiberius to The Art of Byzantium. At the
more modern Center (which features the
Medieval period to the present), artists will
range from Queen Victoria to Ansel Adams.
Touring downtown Los Angeles? It’s
possible (and desirable) to spend hours
wandering through the galleries of the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
The museum always has at least a few great
temporary shows, but it’s worth a visit for
their permanent collections. Just try not to
get waylaid by the voluptuous gods and
goddesses in the outstanding Asian Art
collection. Farther downtown, the
Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) and
Geffen Contemporary are showcases for
the best in 20th- and 21st-century painting,
sculpture and conceptual artwork. Also
downtown, the architecturally dazzling
Broad Museum is expected to open on
Grand Street in 2014, with more than 2,000
works of contemporary art.
In Pasadena, the Norton Simon Museum
features a wide range of Modern and Euro-
pean artists, including this writer’s favorite
Picasso (Woman with a Book, 1932). The
sculpture garden is beautiful and serene.
Nearby, in San Marino, the sprawling
Beaux-Arts mansion and grounds of finan-
cier Henry E. Huntington are now The
Huntington Library, with its 120 acres of
botanical gardens. Here you can view a
Gutenberg Bible, admire Audubon’s bird
drawings and see “some of the finest rare
books and manuscripts of Anglo-American
civilization.” The adjoining art collection
spans four centuries.
Ninety miles north of LA, the Santa Bar-
bara Museum of Art is renowned for its
ambitious and imaginative exhibitions. An
equal distance to the south, San Diego’s
Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa
Park is California’s only museum dedicated
exclusively to photography, film and video.
San Francisco’s two classical art
museums are as architecturally different as
two buildings can be. The Legion of
Honor—set in Lincoln Park, on a hill over-
looking the Golden Gate Bridge and Pacific
Ocean—is a ¾-scale recreation of Paris’
Palais de la Légion d’Honneur, and holds an
extraordinary collection of European art as
well as changing exhibitions from around
the world. Close to the entrance, sur-
rounded by Beaux-Arts columns, is a
bronze cast of The Thinker—one of 70 Rodin
sculptures in the museum’s collection.
In nearby Golden Gate Park, meanwhile,
the de Young is literally a pillar of modern
architecture. Featuring a 10-story observa-
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