ART : Artful Awakening : After a sleepy 50 years, San Francisco’s museum scene, including the newly refurbished California Palace of the Legion of Honor, has burst into life.

SAN FRANCISCO —  When the California Palace of the Legion of Honor opened its doors Saturday after a three-year renovation and expansion, it was not a minute too soon for its many devotees.

Located in Lincoln Park, in a spectacular setting overlooking Golden Gate Bridge, housed in a re-creation of an 18th-Century French palace and dedicated to Californians who died serving their country in World War I, the Legion has never been an ordinary art museum. It’s a monument to tradition, culture and patriotism, as well as the object of popular passion.

“It has always had a very strong, special appeal,” says Harry S. Parker III, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which comprises the Legion of Honor and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in nearby Golden Gate Park. “The Legion has a unique personality because of its location. People think of it as a romantic museum, with fog swirling around an 18th-Century building, so they love it.”

And who can blame them? In one way or another, the Legion satisfies nearly everyone.

For history buffs, there’s the irresistible tale of the museum’s genesis. In a grand gesture of philanthropy, the building was commissioned and given to the city by Alma de Bretteville Spreckels and her husband, sugar magnate Adolph B. Spreckels, after she became infatuated with the French pavilion at San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The pavilion was patterned after the Ho^tel de Salm in Paris, an elegant structure near the Musee d’Orsay that was built in 1788 and used by Napoleon as headquarters for the Order of the Legion of Honor. Architect George Applegarth designed a three-quarter-scale adaptation of the original palace for the museum in San Francisco.

For patriots, there’s the heartwarming inscription on a bronze plaque by the museum’s entrance: “By the grace of God and in boundless love for the youth of our land who died to make men free, this palace is dedicated by Adolf B. Spreckels and Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, Nov. 11, 1924.”

For movie aficionados, there’s “Vertigo,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 double-identity thriller, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak. As an accomplice in a murder plot, Novak pretends to be a demented wealthy woman who repeatedly visits the museum to commune with a portrait of her great-grandmother, while Stewart--cast as an unwitting, vertiginous private investigator--trails along.

(“That’s my favorite movie. That’s why I moved to San Francisco,” confesses a friend who left Los Angeles 35 years ago.)

For the art crowd, the Legion offers an 87,000-piece collection spanning 4,000 years of ancient and European art. Along with an Assyrian relief, two French period rooms, a 15th-Century Spanish ceiling and paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, El Greco, Watteau, La Tour, Monet and Picasso, the museum claims one of the world’s largest collections of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture, and its Achenbach Foundation of Graphic Arts has the West Coast’s most extensive holding of works on paper.

“It’s the only museum in the Bay Area with a truly significant collection of Old Masters and decorative arts,” Parker says.

The museum attracted about 170,000 visitors a year before it closed in 1992. Parker is expecting an attendance boom that will probably subside after a few months but level off at a higher annual rate of about 250,000 visitors. The Legion is not the Bay Area’s equivalent of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a much larger institution that has more than half a million visitors a year, but it has its own considerable charms.

“It’s a refreshingly smaller-scale, elegant museum” comparable to Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum and New York’s Cloisters and Frick Collection, Parker says. “It’s a comfortable hour’s visit.”

With all that going for it, closing the Legion’s doors for three years while it underwent a major renovation and expansion was no small matter.

“It has been much missed,” Parker says.

But now the Legion is back--with more reasons to love it.

In a $36.5-million project--$12.7 million of it from public bonds and the remaining $23.8 million from private sources--the building has been completely restored, retrofitted with seismic supports and equipped with climate control and security systems. A 38,000-square-foot underground addition has increased the museum’s space by almost 50% (to 117,000 square feet) without altering the historic Neoclassical facade. New galleries, a restaurant, a bookstore and offices are on an enlarged garden level, and storage and conservation facilities have been added on a new subterranean floor.

The refurbishment of the Legion--which has an annual operating budget of $6.6 million and shares a $43-million endowment with the De Young--is only the latest event in an astonishingly ambitious effort to upgrade and expand San Francisco’s museums. Although plans to demolish and rebuild the De Young Museum await a proposed public bond issue and the resolution of controversies over the museum’s location and parking, several other institutions already have made bold moves.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened a new building in January, after raising $60 million for the facility and an additional $30 million for an endowment. The Asian Art Museum, which is planning to move in 1999 from Golden Gate Park to the old Main Public Library building in the Civic Center, is well on the way to reaching its $82-million fund-raising goal; with $51 million in hand from public bonds, in mid-October the museum received a $15-million leadership gift for its capital campaign from Chong-Moon Lee, a Korea-born Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The Mexican Museum also is planning to relocate, from Fort Mason Center to the downtown Yerba Buena District in a $15-million building to be designed by architect Ricardo Legorreta. About half of the money has been raised from a bond measure, which is to be matched by private donations.

After about 50 years of relative torpor, San Francisco’s museum scene has burst into life. Parker credits the explosion to damage from the 1989 earthquake, the development of an arts center in Yerba Buena and the arrival of a new generation of art patrons. In the case of the Legion, museum trustee John N. Rosekrans Jr., grandson of the museum’s founders, chaired the capital campaign.

The restoration and expansion, designed and carried out by architects Edward Larrabee Barnes and Mark Cavagnero, entailed removing all the artworks and ripping out walls, as well as grading rear and side slopes to provide light and outdoor access to the garden level and excavating for new space. The seismic retrofit, the largest ever for a museum, required weaving a steel truss into the attic, bracing the walls and effectively tying the new supports to the old structure.

“It’s been a pain in the neck,” Parker grumbles repeatedly as he leads a visitor on a tour just before the reopening. But the pain has subsided now that results of the project can be seen. With the equanimity of a proud parent who accepts his offspring’s odd quirks, Parker surveys the Legion’s big picture and points out idiosyncratic details.

“We have all the cliches--lions, an equestrian statue and ‘The Thinker,’ ” he jokes, standing under the arched entrance to the museum’s colonnaded front patio, or Court of Honor. Giant stone cats flank the front walkway. A bronze horse and rider are stationed on the lawn. Rodin’s famous cogitator sits on a pedestal in the courtyard, which has been paved with stone to accommodate outdoor receptions and sculpture shows and to form a roof for underground galleries.

“We even have a pyramid,” Parker says of a glass-covered structure that rises in the center of the courtyard. “But ours is a skylight for the new galleries. It isn’t an entrance, like the Louvre’s.”

Inside the museum, gray marble columns in the rotunda broke loose from their capitals during the 1989 earthquake and had to be removed for repair. Definitely a “pain in the neck,” Parker says. The rotunda’s stone walls stayed put, but they had to be resurfaced to get rid of unsightly streaks caused by moisture.

And that’s just the beginning. Flipping through photographs taken during the renovation, Parker reveals that not too long ago the museum was a virtual disaster zone. But the restoration is so faithful that visitors may not guess that the inner shell of the old galleries is largely new. Original faux marble walls of the sculpture galleries, stairwells and hallways have been re-created in scagliola, a material used since Roman times to simulate stone. Likewise, cornices that appear to be made of carved wood but are actually painted plaster have been replaced. Glass skylights have been supplanted by sturdier plexiglass.Display cases embedded in walls leading to the sculpture galleries also have been modernized.

Changes such as these are subtle, if not invisible. What is noticeably different in the historic part of the building is the art and its installation. The number of objects on view throughout the museum has been increased from about 1,200 to 1,500. The additions include recent gifts and acquisitions, as well as pieces that have been taken out of storage or transferred from the De Young Museum. In the culmination of a six-year effort to present the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s collection more coherently, the holdings have been reorganized, with ancient and European art and works on paper at the Legion and art of the Americas at the De Young.

‘Our guiding philosophy in the installation was to integrate decorative arts with sculpture and painting quite intimately throughout the museum, to illustrate interrelationships of the material,” associate director and chief curator Steven A. Nash says. “Yes, we want to show off the collection to the best advantage and at its highest quality, but we also chose pieces that would interrelate most eloquently.”

And many of them are looking better than ever. Being forced to dismantle the collection gave the museum staff an opportunity to study the artworks and assess their condition, Parker says. As a result, many objects have been cleaned, restored and reframed.

Continuing his tour, Parker laments that the museum’s horseshoe-shaped floor plan doesn’t lend itself to an ideal traffic pattern. To see the collection in roughly chronological order, it is necessary to walk through half a dozen galleries to the displays of medieval art, then backtrack and proceed through the rest of the horseshoe. But the journey is short and worth the small inconvenience.

“One of the appeals of the Legion is that you can get a pretty good medieval-to-modern sequence with major artists and excellent examples,” Parker says.

Among older works of art, the news at the Legion includes a recently acquired 9th-Century BC Assyrian relief depicting a “Winged Genius,” a group of ancient artworks transferred from the De Young and Renaissance jewelry that has been in storage. A gallery of Spanish and Netherlandish art is crowned by a 15th-Century Spanish ceiling from Toledo, which formerly hung at the De Young but is more effective at the Legion, where loftier ceilings allow it to be installed higher, like a canopy. Louis XV and Louis XVI period rooms have been reinstalled as walk-through environments.

Alma Spreckels, who died in 1968, formed the Legion’s early collections, including five Rodin sculptures purchased at the Panama-Pacific Exposition and an additional 75 pieces acquired directly from the artist and cast under his supervision. Three dramatic galleries that branch off the rotunda are devoted to Rodin and his 19th-Century contemporaries, as always, but they have been rearranged with some changes. One major addition is Rodin’s bronze group “The Three Shades,” which has been moved from outside, near the reflecting pool, to a grand room at the end of the building’s central axis.

Thanks to the reorganization of the Fine Arts Museums’ collection, the Legion has gained a gallery of British 18th- and 19th-Century art. A new 20th-Century art gallery is the final show space in the historic building’s chronological sequence.

Downstairs, nearly everything is new. Six changing exhibition galleries are arranged around a central sculpture court under the pyramidal skylight. “Picasso the Sculptor,” an exhibition of 15 works including loans from the Musee Picasso in Paris, christens the sculpture court, and “Treasures of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts” launches the new galleries with a survey of five centuries of prints and drawings.

The museum’s small collection of ancient art, transferred from the De Young Museum, is installed in a long, narrow space that leads to a spectacular new porcelain gallery, illuminated by a wall of windows. At the opposite end of the hall gallery is a handsome wood-paneled bookstore and a crisp white light-filled cafe that opens onto a patio with a view of the bay. Remaining space on the garden level is devoted to curatorial offices, paper conservation facilities and a prints and drawings study room, where visitors can use computer terminals to study works in the Achenbach collection. Images of the entire 70,000-piece holding have been digitally catalogued with explanatory information, which can be accessed by titles, artists, subjects and media.

It may seem odd to look at digitized images of artworks in a museum that has been scrupulously restored, but the experience is symbolic of what curator Nash calls a “marriage of the new and old” in the renovation and expansion project.

“The building has been so elegantly refurbished and expanded and the new touches blend so perfectly,” he says, “I think people will see the collection in a new light.”

* “Picasso the Sculptor,” to March 10, and “Treasures of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts,” to March 3, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 100 34th Ave., Lincoln Park, San Francisco. Tuesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-4:45 p.m.; first Saturday of each month, 10 a.m.-8:45 p.m. Adults, $6; senior citizens, $4; ages 12-17, $3; children under 12 and students through Grade 12 with ID, free; free second Wednesday of each month. (415) 863-3330.