City Art Collection Suffers From Neglect, Report Says : Culture: Holdings may be worth $2 million but are subject to pilferage and damage due to poor records and haphazard storage, panel is told.

Los Angeles’ municipal art collection is a jumble of donated prints, paintings and sculpture hanging on office walls or packed in boxes stacked in windowless Room 545 of City Hall East, according to a report prepared for the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission.

Without a full-time curator to care for an estimated 2,000 works, officials have been trying to organize the collection “catalogue”--a box full of yellow slips with the names of the businesses and residents who have donated art pieces to the city over the past 40 years.

And now, fearing that the collection, which some officials say could be worth $2 million, is in grave danger of pilfering and damage through neglect, the Cultural Affairs Commission is appealing to the City Council for funds to preserve the collection, repair damaged paintings and conduct a proper inventory and appraisal.

“The city needs to take the plunge and figure what the hell this collection really is,” said Al Nodal, the department’s general manager. “If it isn’t done, the stuff could just sit there for another 30 years.”

In a report to the commission this week, Edward Leffingwell, the city’s director of visual arts, said an inventory has not been conducted since 1981--when 200 objects were discovered missing.

Without an accurate appraisal, he added, it is impossible to know the true value of works “that are likely to become missing--a painting from an office taken home by a retiring civil servant, for example.”

The commission made a similar appeal in 1989, when a survey found that registration and maintenance of the works failed to meet even minimum standards accepted by conservation experts.

That survey concluded that the collection was “a source of professional and municipal embarrassment” and placed the city at risk of litigation “for failure to conserve objects in the collection, as authorized by city ordinance.”

Nonetheless, paintings currently in need of special attention such as matting, framing or glazing include a collection of portraits of mayors of Los Angeles and “A California Scene” and “Oaks at San Ysidro” by Benjamin Brown, according to the report.

The portraits of mayors, originally installed in the City Hall mezzanine, are in storage, Leffingwell said. When they were removed in 1989 to facilitate painting of the walls, “it was determined they were in poor condition: surface of paintings adhering to protective glass, and so on,” he said.

With the city facing its worst financial crisis in years, Nodal said the commission can only hope the City Council can somehow find the funds needed to preserve the works of art under its control.

“We need a full-time curator,” Nodal said. “We need to get a handle on this collection and manage it, or we will lose it.”

City Councilman Mike Hernandez agreed, with reservations.

“At this time there is no reason to create another city position,” Hernandez said. “I think we must look at the possibility of giving city curators, such as those at historic Olvera Street, more responsibility for preserving collection items.”

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, chairman of the Budget and Finance Committee, was more blunt.

“This is one of those things we can wait a year or two to do,” Yaroslavsky said. “If we don’t catalogue it this year the world won’t come to an end.”

The city’s art collection began before World War II when the Cultural Arts Commission purchased two paintings. Over the past 40 years, residents and business leaders have donated hundreds of works--from metal-flaked boxes to modernistic steel-plexiglass sculpture--the best of which have been displayed in City Hall corridors and offices.

The least admired works, about 30% of the entire collection, have languished for years in Room 545 of City Hall East.