A little known fact about the founding of the Legion of Honor concerns the appointment (and soon thereafter, the firing) of Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman as Director and Associate Director of the yet-to-be-built museum. Alma Spreckels invited the pair, recently married after an affair that cost him his professorship at the University of California, to accompany her on their first trip to Europe to acquire collections. It was not a happy excursion leading to a fortuitous parting of ways that contributed surprisingly to future passionate engagements, including Pope and Ackerman’s compiling and editing the multi-volume Survey of Persian Art in 1938.

This lecture will situate Pope’s and Ackerman’s engagement with the Legion of Honor within the lineage of the Panama Pacific International Exhibition (1915), Pope’s first visit to Persia (1925), his involvement in Philadelphia World’s Fair (1926), her interior design of the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite (opened in 1927), his design for the Penthouse of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco (1927), and publication of the Survey of Persian Art (1938–39).