A Fading Treasure : School Principal Fears Time Is Taking Toll on Famous Mural

The first thing Principal Carolyn Baker did at Sutter Middle School after the Northridge quake was to check on the Kay Nielsen mural.

Passersby know Sutter by the picture of Yosemite Sam that overlooks the schoolyard at the corner of Winnetka Avenue and Sherman Way. But inside the school’s library is a treasure--an enormous mural called “The First Spring” by one of the world’s great illustrators of books for children.

Overturned card catalogues and a sea of books had spilled onto the floor of Sutter’s Lee Gibbons Library, but the huge painting appeared to be unscathed.

Baker was relieved, but her concerns for the painting remain. She fears that decades of hot and dusty Valley summers are doing to the monumental mural what the Little Big One could not: slowly destroying it.

“I know it’s fading,” Baker said. “I can see a difference just in the eight years that I have been here.”

Like most Valley school buildings, the two-story library is not air-conditioned. As Baker explained, the windows must be left open in warm weather, so the students won’t melt over their term papers.

Although school officials try to keep the shades drawn, the sun often beats down on Nielsen’s highly imaginative rendering of the first days of the world, a subtly colored celebration of more than 200 species of living things, from a whale to a ladybug.

Baker said her maintenance staff estimated the cost of air conditioning the library at $100,000.

More than 30 feet wide and 20 feet high, the painting was already a fixture of Sutter Middle School when Baker became principal. Since the early 1950s new Sutter students have undergone a unique rite of passage: They try to find the four-leaf clover that the artist added to his work at a youngster’s request.

Generations of Sutter sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders have sat in the library, trying to reproduce Nielsen’s romantic white horse and other favorite animals in their notebooks. And, as is tradition, finding the four-leaf clover will be one of the assignments during orientation when the students come back to school this week.

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The Nielsen mural is more than 50 years old, and the Los Angeles Unified School District is aware of its deteriorating condition. “It needs restoration,” said a former school district official who examined the mural after the quake and found no obvious quake damage (he requested anonymity). “But we really don’t have any money for restoration,” he added.

No recent estimate has been obtained for the necessary work, but restoration would cost in excess of $20,000, he said.

Art conservation is just one of the things for which the financially strapped school district lacks money. It also lacks the funds to insure and provide security for the scores of art treasures it has accumulated in its 141-year history. These range from a remarkable cache of California paintings to dozens of silver-plated tea sets used to instruct young women in the home economics classes of yesteryear. The district has a second monumental Nielsen--a mural called “Canticle of the Sun” at Emerson Middle School in West Los Angeles.

But it is the Sutter mural that so enriched the life of Lee Gibbons, after whom the school’s library is named. Gibbons, 69, was the librarian there from 1952 until she retired in 1989. The Chatsworth resident came to know Nielsen (whose first name rhymes with sky) during the early 1950s when he spent two years at the school, restoring and extending the mural. She said she, too, is concerned about “The First Spring.”

“Society knows how to protect these great works of art, but nothing’s being done at Sutter,” she said. Flies and chewing gum sometimes got stuck on the painting, she said. (Last week, it showed evidence of what Baker quickly identified as “spit wads.”) The painting was cleaned once during Gibbons’ tenure, although she said she doesn’t know if the work was done properly.

Gibbons recalls how utterly devoted Nielsen was to his art: He was already at work by the time she arrived each morning at 7:30.

Born in Denmark in 1886, Nielsen was a successful stage designer and an illustrator of the first rank. According to Rodney Engen, a London art consultant and book dealer, Nielsen was a major figure whose illustrations for such classic children’s books as “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” (1914) and “Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales” (1924) show him to be the peer of English illustrators Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac.

Nielsen had come to Los Angeles in the 1930s to design a production of “Everyman” at the Hollywood Bowl. He also worked for several short periods at Walt Disney, earning a film credit as art director of the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence of “Fantasia” (1940), the one with the looming Satanic figure that continues to scare children silly.

“The First Spring” was commissioned in 1943 by the charitable Filippa Pollia Foundation, named for a lost child, that stipulated that the work be placed where children could enjoy it. Like illustrator Kate Greenaway and author-illustrator Beatrix Potter, Nielsen had no children of his own but had a special gift for moving them.

The children of Central Junior High School, Downtown, where the painting was first installed, helped choose its theme, also inspired by the book of Genesis and Haydn’s “The Creation,” the highlight of the first concert Nielsen heard as a boy.

When the Downtown school was closed and incorporated into the district’s new administrative headquarters, the painting was reassigned to Sutter, then under construction. The library roof was raised to accommodate the work.

Gibbons reports that Nielsen was horrified to discover that the five canvas panels that made up his masterpiece had been stored improperly. They had been rolled up with the paint on the inside, causing the surface to crack.

During restoration, he worked on scaffolding set up in the library, utterly absorbed in his own ongoing act of creation. When he was working on a particular animal, he would ask Gibbons to find every picture she could of the bug or beast. “He worked for a week on a nickle-sized water buffalo,” she recalled.

Generations of Sutter school children have been entranced by Nielsen’s vision. In painting the animals, he “edited out and concentrated the children’s attention, not just on how the animals looked, but how we feel about the animals,” Gibbons said. “Artists are good at that.”

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Nielsen’s wife, Ulla, was his tireless assistant. She drove him back and forth from their home in the San Gabriel Valley, took his phone calls, made his tea and brought him homemade soup for lunch. She was a painter herself, but “the only thing he would let her work on was the grass, not the animals, and the legend.”

“I never heard her complain,” Gibbons said. “I think her love and admiration and affection for him made her feel that she was serving the artistic purpose by whatever she did to protect his strength and energy.” Nielsen once told Gibbons that the Sutter mural was his favorite among his works. “That was his masterpiece,” she said.

Nielsen mixed his own colors in an egg-white base, as Leonardo da Vinci had, and Gibbons regrets that she didn’t keep better records of what the artist told her as he worked. He once revealed precisely how many shades of green he had used.

“I remember being overwhelmed by the number, but I don’t remember what it was,” Gibbons said. She also regrets that she didn’t keep Nielsen’s brushes and other artifacts. “I was too young, too involved with books,” she said.

Gibbons said the painting was a continuing joy during her years at the school. “I took the time to stand and gaze and soak it up. It was always an inspiration for me,” she said. “Sometimes when the chores got to be too many, that was how I got the energy to go on.”

No one has attempted to assign a dollar value to the painting in recent years, although Gibbons recalls that it was insured at one time for $75,000.

According to Engen, an appraisal would depend on the painting’s condition, but it is clearly a unique work by an important artist. Next week, James Cummins Bookseller in New York (for whom Engen consults) will send out a catalogue featuring material related to “The First Spring.”

The finished watercolor design for the mural, about two feet by three feet, is being offered for $15,000. Engen noted that Nielsen himself died “in penury.” Engen has seen designs for greeting cards Nielsen did during his last years. “He was obviously working on anything he could get.”

In all the years the painting has hung in the Sutter library, Principal Baker said, she has only once been asked if she thought a mural inspired by the biblical account of creation belonged in a public school. Baker said she told the concerned mother she saw no problem because the mural merely illustrated a passage from a book on the library’s shelves. Nothing more came of the matter.

Nielsen died in 1957. But his film career hadn’t quite ended.

As Dave Smith of the Disney archives explained, during the 1940s Nielsen had done some haunting pastel sketches on black paper of the mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic fairy tale. In the late ‘80s, a new generation of Disney artists found inspiration in the Nielsen drawings they uncovered in the files.

More than 30 years after his death, Nielsen got a film credit for his contribution to Disney’s 1989 hit, “The Little Mermaid.”