A Fading ‘Spring’ : Lack of Funds and Time Take Toll on School’s Famous Mural

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

Passersby know Sutter by the picture of Yosemite Sam that overlooks the Canoga Park 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 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 destroy 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 San Fernando 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.

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 1950s, new Sutter students have undergone an unusual rite of passage: As an assignment during orientation, they try to find the four-leaf clover that the artist added to his work at a youngster’s request.

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. “But we really don’t have any money for restoration.” Such a project would cost more than $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 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 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.

Gibbons recalls how utterly devoted Nielsen was to his art: He was 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 Christian 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 Studios, 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 in Downtown, where the painting was first installed, helped choose its theme.

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 it.

During restoration, Nielsen worked on scaffolding set up in the library, utterly absorbed in his 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.

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,” Gibbons said.

Nielsen mixed his own colors in an egg-white base, as Leonardo da Vinci had, and Gibbons regrets that she did not 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,” she said.

Nielsen once told Gibbons that the Sutter mural was his favorite. “That was his masterpiece,” she said.

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.

Next week, James Cummins Bookseller in New York will send out a catalogue featuring material related to “The First Spring.” The finished watercolor design for the mural, about 2 feet by 3 feet, is being offered for $15,000.

Art consultant Engen noted that Nielsen died in 1957 “in penury,” creating designs for greeting cards during his last years. 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.”