Nightmare at Noon

Rene d'Harnoncourt, director of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, rounded the corner of Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street shortly after noon one day last week and saw the most horrible sight a museum man can imagine. Smoke was pouring from his museum's shattered glass fac,ade; firemen were scrambling up ladders, axes in hand. In the distance was the wail of more fire engines bucking Manhattan traffic to answer the three alarms signaling the worst museum fire in U.S. history.*

People First. The possibilities of irreplaceable loss to the art world were monstrous. On the museum's ground floor was a special on-loan show of 63 paintings by the late Cubist Painter Juan Gris. In the gallery above the fire hung more than 150 works by famed 19th century French Pointillist Painter Georges Seurat, including four of his seven major canvases, lent by U.S. and European collectors (TIME, Jan. 20). Only one closed fire door stood between the acrid smoke and scorching heat and the pick of the museum's permanent collection, richest and choicest trove of modern masterpieces in the world.

But the people came first. Director d'Harnoncourt, who arrived as 30 children in the museum's painting classes were being led to the street, was soon leading search patrols to comb through the smoke-choked galleries. Museum Board Chairman Nelson Rockefeller donned a fireman's coat and helmet and plunged into the smoke to help. Director of Collections Alfred H. Barr Jr. led trapped museum staffers from the fifth floor to an adjacent brownstone roof. Other museum staff members led 500 visitors to the museum's rooftop restaurant or down the fire stairs. The fire's human toll: 30 firemen and visitors injured, one workman dead. Mute evidence of how bad the result might have been were the smudged, clawing finger marks left on a wall by Electrician Ruben Geller, 55, before he collapsed and died face down in 6 inches of water on the second floor.

Flight from Chicago. Concern for the art came second, but it was more widespread. In Chicago, Art Institute Director Daniel Catton Rich, who rounded up the Seurat show, including Chicago's most valuable painting, Seurat's La Grande Jatte, appraised at more than $1,000,000, got news of the fire by telephone 50 minutes after it started. Another 50 minutes later Rich was on a plane to New York, and four hours later he was standing before La Grande Jatte in the adjacent Whitney Museum. With an audible sigh of relief, he announced: "It's in excellent condition. No damage at all." It was the first time the Chicago Institute had lent the Seurat masterpiece, and it will be the last: it was given to the museum with the provision that it would be lent only once.

For the escape of La Grande Jatte, Rich owed thanks to Fellow Director d'Harnoncourt, who rounded up a volunteer crew of eleven to wrestle the huge, glass-covered, 10-ft.-long painting (weight: more than 500 Ibs.) from its temporary wooden frame, cover it with paper and tarpaulin against smoke and water stains and lug it to safety. To the credit of the museum staff, who struggled through smoke and water to carry paintings out of danger, only nine paintings out of a total of over 2,000 worth more than $4,000,000 were destroyed or damaged.

Two paintings are considered totally destroyed: Candido Portinari's 1939 World's Fair mural from the Brazilian Pavilion, Festival, St. John's Eve, and Monet's 18-ft.-long Water Lilies (TIME, Art Color, Jan. 30, 1956). Six others were blistered, smoke-stained or burned: Umberto Boccioni's The City Rises, Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing the Delaware, Jan Muller's Faust 1, Wilfredo Lam's The Jungle, Pavel Tchelitchew's Hide-and-Seek (often rated the museum's most popular oil), and Jackson Pollock's 9-ft.-long Number 1, 1948. Worst damaged of all was a smaller Monet Water Lilies hanging at the top of the main staircase: it was baked the color of an over-toasted marshmallow.

Out with the Wood. Restoring the burned and smoke-stained paintings will involve pioneering techniques. Tchelitchew never revealed what mixtures of medium he used in painting; Pollock worked on unprimed cotton canvas. Museum Art Conservator Jean Volkner has not given up hope that all can be brought back to near original state.

Wooing back the confidence of lenders, upon whom the museum depends for its shows, may prove more difficult. More devastating than the museum's $320,000 worth of damaged and destroyed paintings was the sharp report from New York Fire Commissioner Edward F. Cavanagh Jr., who praised the building's excellent construction and exceptional fire safety, but bore down hard on practices that "could have contributed to a major fire." The fire apparently was started by a cigarette carelessly thrown by a workman helping install air-conditioning equipment on the second floor. An open standpipe caused water to cascade down a stairway at 750 gallons a minute, cutting off an escape route; seven fire doors were tied open. Worst of all, from the art standpoint, was the fact that masterpieces--including the $1,000,000 Seurat-- were hung on highly combustible temporary wallboard and wood partitions.

The museum promptly set 250 workmen to tearing down the partitions and replacing them with cinder block. By week's end Director d'Harnoncourt announced that the museum will reopen its ground floor this week, will have at least its Seurat show back on the walls. Refitting the rest of the galleries will take longer. Said D'Harnoncourt grimly: "This time we are not going to open until the Fire Department, the building inspectors, and most of all, we ourselves, are convinced that not the slightest fire hazard exists."

* But small in comparison with the blaze that roared through Munich's Glaspalast on June 6, 1931, destroying all but 50 of the 3,110 paintings in the museum, and with a World War II fire that destroyed 417 works stored in Berlin's Flakturm Friedrichsain, including paintings by Rubens, Titian, Botticelli, Goya.

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