When I approached the entrance to San Francisco’s de Young Museum for a private event and showing of the exhibition Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, on display through March 2010, it seemed that getting in to see the show would prove almost as difficult as entering Tut’s tomb. I had missed the press preview I was kindly invited to after previewing the exhibition in Robb Report (May 2009), so the press office suggested I come to the cultural tourism party and evening exhibition a few days later. As I and several groups of other excited partygoers approached the entrance, we were stopped by a museum docent who began grilling us as to what we were there for.
“What are you here for?” she asked, to which a woman in front of me said, “The party.”
“Which party?” she queried. I chimed in, “The press office invited us to your event this evening.” “Which event, hun?” she pressed, looking into my eyes with distrust. “I do not remember the name of the party,” I said, “But I assure you we are on the list.” She replied, “There are a lot of people trying to get into your party, hun.” She finally acquiesced and counted us on her hand-held clicker. “So far, so good,” one of the women in the group ahead of me remarked.
After navigating our way through the crowd at the check-in tables, my fellow visitors and I were treated to an open wine bar, canapés, and a belly dancing show. The museum director warmly greeted us and thanked us all for our interest in the exhibition. After a semi-confusing trek to the downstairs exhibition, and a theme park-like cordoned-off maze to navigate, we found ourselves at the entrance to the exhibition.
Like well-tended cattle, the first group of us was ushered into an antechamber that included a screen upon which we were shown a very short film narrated by Omar Sharif. While the scene felt a bit contrived, the film did provide a sense of excitement as well as an opportunity for the museum to pace the groups of visitors going through the exhibition. At the end of the film, a pair of wood double doors opened automatically, which reminded me too much of the elevator in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride, minus the holographic corpse hanging from the ceiling.
The first exhibition rooms were dedicated to other royalty and nobles entombed in Egypt, most specifically, women. The clear highlight was the gilded coffin of Tjuya—a noblewoman and priestess married to the 18th Dynasty courtier Yuya—whose presence helped make up for the fact that King Tut’s famous gilded mask and coffin, central to the Tut exhibition in the 1970s, will never again leave the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In the darkness of the exhibition room, encased in glass and beautifully lit, Tjuya’s exquisitely carved coffin was simply breathtaking in its prone stillness. Upon seeing the detail on the coffin, my husband remarked to me that the carvings brought up for him the issue of slave labor prevalent at the time. I myself imagined that the artists must have dedicated their lives to their art, unmatched in its execution of needle-thin lines carved into the forgiving gold.
The well-paced exhibition soon segued into Tut’s treasures, which included a 15.5-inch-tall coffin carved in his likeness—gilded and inlaid outside and carved both inside and out—which once held Tut’s viscera. Another surprising find was a gorgeous bejeweled gold scarab that spells out Tut’s name in a rebus code, never seen in the States until now. Yet the ultimate treasures were found in the last exhibit room, which housed items from Tut’s burial chamber. From the royal diadem found on Tut’s head to necklaces, sandals, and valuables placed along his body to help him on his journey through the afterlife, those satisfied our deepest curiosities and brought us directly into the king’s final resting place.
It was downright jarring to leave the cool, dark, tomblike quietude of the underground exhibition and be thrust into the museum’s gift shop filled with Tut trinkets—another theme park ploy—while what we had just seen had barely begun to resonate. Still, there is simply no substitute for seeing these items up close, and, despite a few hiccups, the exhibition itself could not have been better planned. The integration of the other burial chambers provided an enlightening, modern context, and made the short wait for Tut’s treasures all the sweeter. (415.750.3600, www.famsf.org/deyoung)
