Most Publicly Owned Art Survives the Bay Area Quake

The city’s famed collection of municipally owned public artworks--ranging from 19th-Century monuments to cutting-edge sculpture and painting--largely escaped serious damage in last week’s earthquake, city arts officials say.

But an inventory of municipal art and citywide arts-damage assessment scheduled to be presented today to Mayor Art Agnos found that public art at San Francisco International Airport sustained some major losses and that some museums, theaters and galleries face daunting challenges.

Details of the first postquake arts catastrophe analysis were provided by Claire Isaacs, director of cultural affairs at the Arts Commission of San Francisco.

Isaacs said that while museum- and publicly owned art objects fared comparatively well in the quake, the most significant lasting effect for the local arts community may turn out to be in the problems posed by canceled or postponed performances, exhibition openings and fund-raising events.

But she said she hoped that the city’s collective pluck--showcased by the tenacity of its arts institutions in resuming normal operations--may have a major benefit for San Francisco. She said she has been concerned about erosion of the city’s self-image in the aftermath of the assassination of former Mayor George Moscone and the AIDS crisis, in particular, which has cast San Francisco in an unfamiliar morbid role in the last few years.

“The tradition of San Francisco has been that we sip wine while the world is falling apart,” she said. Through the arts, she said, “San Francisco shows the world that it’s OK. We need for the world to know that.”

On Saturday morning, the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park reopened, with plywood and 2-by-4 braces shoring up four archways just inside the front entrance. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park may reopen next week after engineers complete an inspection of heavily damaged interior decorative columns in the building’s rotunda.

Two small private galleries were condemned by building inspectors and will have to be demolished, Isaacs said, and the city’s Asian Museum of Art, which adjoins the de Young, must cope with both damage to 31 important objects in its collection and with the suspected release of asbestos fibers in the air in its storage spaces--apparently from pipes whose coverings disintegrated in the temblor.

Isaacs said officials conducted a hurried citywide inspection of nearly all of the municipal collections. The city owns several thousand art pieces, Isaacs said, ranging from large outdoor sculptures to paintings and small objects in individual city offices.

The inspection emphasized 262 of the most important pieces in the city collection, including such things as Depression-era paintings and frescoes in Coit Tower, the Vaillancourt Fountain, George Segal’s Holocaust Memorial at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park and Rodin’s “The Thinker” in the same location.

Isaacs said there was no damage apparent to any of the city artworks--except for at least three major contemporary pieces at the airport. They are among 64 airport artworks. Major damage was sustained after ceiling materials in the United Airlines area of the airport’s North Terminal collapsed and the quake motion set off fire sprinklers.

A huge untitled acrylic-on-canvas painting by Sam Francis suffered heavy water damage and was partially torn. A fragile paper and bamboo hanging sculpture by Nance O’Banion was devastated when it was hit by sprinkler water, which warped some of the wood and caused one piece of the sculpture to fall to the ground.

A large acrylic hanging sculpture by Freda Koblick was not damaged, said Isaacs, but will have to undergo costly removal so workers can repair damaged ceiling structures above it. All three works are in the United boarding-gate area.

Isaacs said initial fears of massive damage to the collection of the Mexican Museum in the Fort Mason Center turned out to be greater than actual losses, but she said the museum’s gift shop--a key revenue center--was severely hit.