‘Jewel City’ has art but not the sparkle of Pan-Pacific Expo

Sprawled over 635 acres of reclaimed marshy land in what is today the city’s posh Marina district, the 1915 fair was both an optimistic marker of new beginnings and a World War I-shadowed farewell to international blowouts of this kind.

Even as the expo was attracting 19 million visitors during its successful 10-month run, political and technological forces were at work to transform big expos into sleeker and ultimately more corporate enterprises.

Mounted to mark the Panama Canal’s completion the year before, the Pan-Pacific trumpeted San Francisco’s recovery from the devastating 1906 earthquake and staked the city’s claim as the commercial and cultural capital of the trade- and travel-enhanced West Coast.

In the de Young Museum’s new exhibition “Jewel City,” a voluminous look back at the art on exhibit at the exposition, the sense of shining pride and promise leads the way.

From that point on, with one exception — a salon-style gallery of American Impressionism that includes a photomural of the 1915 installation — the de Young show makes almost no attempt to invoke the atmosphere and complex experience of the expo itself.

Visitors to the museum can get a little feel for it in a 10-minute reel of still photographs and video playing in a gallery outside the exhibit space proper.

Fulfilling its self-proclaimed mission to showcase some of the 20,000 works of art that were on display in the 1915 pavilions, “Jewel City” does deliver with more than 200 paintings, sculptures, photographs and prints, handsomely displayed.

[...] by virtue of lead curator James Ganz’s understandable desire to include as much art as possible from some 70 lenders, the show misses an opportunity to capture the scale, variety, garishness and cultural resonance of a signal moment in the city’s history.

Museumgoers will have to read the fine, hefty catalog to learn about the Joy Zone midway of both harmless and dubious attractions (such as the African Dip) or see some of the evocative period photographs and documents.

Was Lawton Silas Parker’s “Idleness,” a female nude rendered in lifeless, gray-toned flesh, really a medal winner?

A largely perfunctory gallery of Western Art (save for James Earle Fraser’s arresting sculpture of a devastated American Indian on horseback) gives way to a small gallery of photography that documents a young medium finding its artistic footing.