Art and Fire
The Wall Street Journal|January 21, 2025
What steps do museums take to protect their collections from calamity?
BY ERIC GIBSON
Art and Fire

In 1958, a fire broke out in the Museum of Modern Art. Smoke filled the building and it took firefighters an hour to contain the blaze. A retrospective of Post-Impressionist pioneer Georges Seurat was on the third floor at the time, the centerpiece of which was his "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" (1884), borrowed from the Art Institute of Chicago. This represented an exceptional "get" for MoMA, since a condition of the painting's 1926 donation to the Windy City institution had been that it could be lent only once. This show was the "once."

Nelson Rockefeller, chairman of MoMA's board of trustees, borrowed a fireman's helmet, rubber coat and boots, and "dove into the building," writes Russell Lynes in "Good Old Modern," his 1973 history of MoMA. Rockefeller reached the third floor just in time to keep firemen from breaking through a wall-on the other side of which was "La Grande Jatte."

The painting suffered only minor smoke damage. But one person died and other artworks fared less well. Two Monets were burned to cinders. Other canvases were severely damaged in the conflagration. About a quarter of the more than 2,000 paintings on display at the time had smoke damage, some of it severe. These included Jackson Pollock's "Number 1A" (1948), one of his signature drip paintings, which "required substantial cleaning," according to MoMA's website.

The fire, which started when a repairman updating MoMA's air-conditioning system dropped a lighted cigarette onto a dropcloth, left the physical plant a wreck. "Much of the building was a smoke-scarred, waterlogged, glass-strewn shambles. Water dripped from the blistered ceilings and lay in deep puddles on the floor," Lynes writes. It would be six months before the museum reopened at a cost of $850,000-almost $10 million today.

This is the abyss into which officials at the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles have been staring since wildfires started ravaging Southern California earlier this month.

This story is from the January 21, 2025 edition of The Wall Street Journal.

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This story is from the January 21, 2025 edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.