Egypt's golden boy king back in S.F.

Renee Dreyfus fell under the spell of Egyptian art at the age of 3, when her parents took her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Decades later, she's still enthralled by the power and mystery of those exquisitely carved statues and gilded funerary masks."I remember looking up at those monumental sculptures that seemed all powerful and strong. There was something haunting about them," says Dreyfus, the curator in charge of ancient art and interpretation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. She's installing the much-anticipated "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" exhibition that opens Saturday at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum.It arrives 30 years after the first blockbuster Tut show dazzled crowds that packed the museum in record numbers to see the eye-popping objects from the tomb of the "boy king" who ascended the throne of Egypt around 1332 B.C., at the age of 8 or 9, and died mysteriously a decade later.Dreyfus installed that show, too, and its success led to her establishing the museum's department of ancient art. Over the years, she's put together a series of splendid Egyptian exhibitions, among them "Eternal Egypt" in 2002 and the 2005 show "Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh."The big Tut show that opens this month - organized by National Geographic and other cultural entities with the cooperation of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities - has been seen by 5 million people worldwide since it first hit the road in 2005. It features about 50 objects from Tut's tomb, which was discovered intact by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, and 80 from the tombs of his royal predecessors - among those of Amenhotep III and his in-laws, Yuya and Tjuya - from the 18th Dynasty, during Egypt's golden age.The objects range from the magnificent coffinette, made of gold, carnelian, obsidian, rock crystal and glass, that held Tut's viscera, to Tjuya's gilded funerary mask; a life-size gray-granite statue of Tuthmosis IV and his mother discovered at the Temple of Amun at Karnak; and an intricately carved and inlaid mirror case in the shape of an ankh, made of wood, gold and silver leaf, from the tomb of the boy king. SOURCE:SFGATE.COM