Controversial Moscone Bust May Be Heading Home : Art: The provocative sculpture of the murdered mayor may wind up on loan to San Francisco’s De Young Museum, if an Oakland collector has his way.

The controversial bust of murdered Mayor George Moscone, which has spent more time traveling around the country than in the city that commissioned it, may soon return home.

The provocative Robert Arneson sculpture, which uses graffiti and images of bullets to tell the mayor’s life story, has been shunned by a city known for sophisticated tastes in art.

“It was too controversial,” says Oakland collector Foster Goldstrom, who purchased the piece in 1981 for $50,000.

The M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, however, is interested in taking Goldstrom up on his offer to return the work on a long-term loan. Goldstrom plans to meet museum officials today. If an agreement is struck, it will be the first time since 1982, after then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein banned the bust from display, that the artwork will be shown in San Francisco.

The wayward bust, after getting the boot from City Hall, landed in Goldstrom’s San Francisco art gallery for a short time. It then took up residence in his dining room and, more recently, completed a five-year tour to the Midwest and South with Goldstrom’s 77-piece exhibit, titled “Contemporary Icons and Explorations.”

“It’s been circling the area, like a plane above the clouds, unable to land,” says Steve Nash, curator at the De Young. “Maybe we can provide a landing pad for it.”

The 1,000-pound ceramic head rests on a 7-foot pedestal awash in words, drops of blood-red paint, four bullet holes, and an impression of a Smith & Wesson pistol like the one used by Dan White to kill the mayor and Supervisor Harvey Milk in City Hall. There is also a ceramic Twinkie, representing the diminished capacity, or “Twinkie” defense, White used successfully at his 1979 trial.

“It’s absolutely crucial that it returns to San Francisco,” Nash says. “It’s so intimately linked with the art world here, the social and political scene in San Francisco. It’s one of the Bay Area’s most important sculptures.”

However, when the bust was unveiled at the Moscone Convention Center in December, 1981, some felt it was more a monument to the mayor’s death than his life. Earlier that year, the city’s arts commission--none of the members still serve--approved the work, then rejected it under pressure from Mayor Feinstein, who took office after the assassination in 1978, Arneson recalls.

The commission learned a lesson in the perils of picking public art. “It was insane that they commissioned him in the first place,” Goldstrom observes. “They knew what he did: sculptures of people blowing their brains out, genitals exposed, toilets overflowing. They’re lucky he didn’t have (Moscone’s) finger up his nose.” (A show of recent Arneson works, “Earthly Delights and Self Abuse,” opens Feb. 29 at Santa Monica’s Dorothy Goldeen Gallery.)

After two days on display at the convention center, the bust was hauled away to the basement of the city’s Museum of Modern Art.

“It was sitting there in a big box; it looked like Dracula,” says Arneson, who lives in nearby Benicia. “All the remarks were, ‘Crush it and dump it by Alcatraz!’ I had threatening phone calls, and I thought, ‘Oh, man, I’m not going to win on this at all.’ ”

Arneson met with Feinstein for two hours. “I said, ‘Why don’t you cover it up for a year, pay me the rest of the money and let the museum have it?’ But Dianne said, ‘No way. Get that damn thing out of town!’ ”

The bust has garnered a national reputation. “I see it as maybe one of the most important portraits of our time,” says Daniel E. Stetson, who helped organize the Goldstrom “Icons” exhibit and is now executive director of the Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin, Tex. “It is an interesting image of our time, our life being graffiti as it runs through time.”

But an air of ambivalence, thick as fog, now hangs over the city. The bust’s artistic achievement is accepted, but folks don’t quite agree on where to place the imposing piece.

Nancy Boas, vice president of the San Francisco Arts Commission and a friend of the Moscone family, opposes returning the bust to the Moscone Convention Center. On the other hand, Museum of Modern Art director Jack Lane, who once asked Goldstrom to donate the artwork to his museum, now believes the convention center is where the bust belongs.

Goldstrom, meanwhile, says some in the arts community are miffed that he offered the bust in a letter to the San Francisco Examiner. The De Young Museum, he says, is the only city institution willing to touch the piece.

“They were irritated that I leaked this to the press; that I offered artwork through the media,” he says. “But I figured the best way would be to run up a flag and see who salutes.”

Goldstrom, who has received inquiries about buying the bust from collectors in Los Angeles, Florida and Texas, says he also wrote to the arts commission: “We got a letter from the secretary saying, ‘We are in transition. We have a new mayor.’ People are afraid of offending other people. Everyone would rather hibernate than make a decision.”

But Barbara Sklar, arts commission president, says her panel would support the bust’s return.

“I believe it belongs in the city,” says Sklar, a friend of the slain mayor’s. “I don’t believe it will be controversial now; I believe it will be emotional. It gives me a pang in my heart. I want it here, but I don’t know if I want to see it now.”

Arneson still believes San Francisco is where the bust belongs: “It needs to sort of settle in somewhere. It wasn’t made to travel. Wherever it goes, it should find love. That’s the important thing.”