How to have fun in California

California is known for many world-class museums. We are talking about the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the Museum of J. Paul Getty.

The Getty Museum (J. Paul Getty Museum) is the largest art museum in California. The museum consists of two locations – the famous Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades and the Getty Center in Los Angeles. The Getty Center exposition presents a large exhibition of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present day. The Getty Villa Museum presents one of the largest collections of antique art in the world. More than 1.3 million people visit the Getty Museums every year, making them one of the most visited museums in the United States.

The famous museum was founded in 1954 by the collector and oil magnate J. Paul Getty (1892-1976), one of the richest people of the twentieth century. The billion-dollar museum fund created by Paul Getty allowed the Getty Museum, after the death of its founder, to become one of the largest buyers of antique and European art at the world’s leading auctions. The creation of the collection was carried out with such success that the museum’s management was often accused of deliberately creating an artificial stir in the art market, as well as of illegally buying and exporting works of ancient art. Initially, the museum was located in the Getty Villa, built on the model of the famous ancient Papyrus Villa in Herculaneum. In 1997, the Getty Center building, designed by architect Richard Meyer, opened in Los Angeles, the construction of which cost $ 1.2 billion. Between 1997 and 2006, the Getty Villa was closed for renovation. The museum’s collection is so large that it occupies four exhibition pavilions. Only part of the Getty collection is on public display.

While traveling around the museum, you can take an audio guide or plan your tour in advance based on the media files and bookmarks provided on GettyGuide. The museum also hosts special children’s tours and entertainment seminars. Admission to the Getty Museum is free. The museum is open all year round, except Mondays, January 1, July 4, Thanksgiving Day and December 25. Concerts and other cultural events are held on the territory of the museum.

The main art museum of San Francisco – the Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art or SFMoMA for short) is 18,500 sq.m of total area, almost 5,000 sq.m of exhibition space, more than 26,000 works and names such as Warhol, Pollock, Matisse, Rauschenberg, Rivera, Paul Klee, Weston and so on. In the ranking of contemporary art museums in the United States, the museum is second only to the New York Museum of Modern Art.

The author of the building project is the famous Swiss architect Mario Botta, the original, whose creations are difficult to attribute to any style. Botta did not want to create another “box full of art” (a well-known criticism of the new building of the de Young Museum). He presented the townspeople with a strange, at the same time awkward and elegant building with a giant “eye of the Cyclops” at the top – a huge cut-off cylinder (he is also a hatch for ceiling lighting). This unusual volume not only highlights the building from the outside, it organizes a spectacular open space inside the building. The interior generally makes a strong impression: these are striking spaces filled with light with an interesting change of angles and unexpected details.

In SFMoMA, when you get enough of art to a certain limit, you can have a snack and drink coffee in the Caffe` Museo on the ground floor, with its espresso bar, or in the Rooftop Coffee Bar, a small cafe on the roof. The most creative employees of this latter create cookies and cakes inspired by works from the museum collection – for those who really want to get drunk on art. They can enjoy it there, in the sculpture garden (which, unfortunately, is surrounded by walls, which deprives you of a view of the city). The museum is quite popular, especially on weekends.

From a cultural point of view, Los Angeles will also be interesting, where in addition to luxury hotels, restaurants and shopping complexes, many museums and exhibition centers are open. The Patersen Museum is dedicated to cars, and in the Museum of Fine Arts you can see beautiful paintings and sculptures. The most famous open-air museum is the Asphalt Lake La Brea, located on the territory of Hancock Park. A rich collection of fossils is presented here.

The bay near San Francisco is popular with tourists due to the Victorian architecture. The design of the city was formed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Daniel Burnham, although now the architectural tone is set by Frank Gehry and Joe Eric who live here. Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck lived in California, as well as “beat writers” Jack Kerouac and Alain Ginzburg. Now writers Emmy Tan (“The Joy and Luck Club”) and Sue Crafton have taken the creative baton from them. Beach Boys, Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead and Red Hot Chili Peppers started their careers in California. Renowned Californian cuisine was created by chefs Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters: they combined local ingredients with Asian cooking methods. Californians love to eat, generously washing down dishes with selected local world-class wines.