New Orleans Museum, Under Lock and Guard by SEWELL CHAN, New York Times
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 16 - It is a jarring sight: Two burly men carrying M-16 assault rifles on the marble steps of the New Orleans Museum of Art. Nearby, a sergeant from the Oregon Army National Guard, wearing dog tags, a brown T-shirt and camouflage pants, wields a leaf blower as if it too were a weapon. Any visitors had better be prepared to show some identification and provide a good reason for being here.
The museum withstood the fury of Hurricane Katrina, suffering little damage and no looting. Its well-regarded collections of French paintings, Japanese prints, African art, photographs and decorative objects survived. So did the artworks in a two-level underground storage area, despite flooding and a temporary loss of climate control. Even in the sculpture garden, where the storm toppled pine trees and ruined the landscaping, only one of 50 works was smashed.
The museum, which opened in 1911 and is one of the central cultural institutions of New Orleans, is an oasis of calm and beauty in a city of despair and ruin. But it is an empty oasis. Wind and water have driven away its 150,000 annual visitors, its 10,000 members, and many members of its staff and board of trustees.
E. John Bullard, the museum's director since 1973, said he initially considered evacuating the collection to Arkansas or lending its masterpieces to other museums. Now, after seeing the relative lack of damage, he has changed his mind.
"My first priority to the staff and trustees is to ensure that the museum opens up as soon as possible," he said in an interview here on Friday. "I wouldn't want to have our best pictures leave the museum right now."
That the museum can even contemplate reopening is a testament to the dedication of its staff.
Eight employees - three building engineers, two security guards, two maintenance workers and a secretary - and about 30 of their family members took refuge in the museum starting on Aug. 27, as the hurricane approached the Gulf Coast and local officials began to issue evacuation orders.
In galleries under skylights, paintings were taken off the walls. In the underground storage areas, artworks were put on wooden blocks to protect them from flooding.
The museum workers and their families filled every available plastic container, including garbage cans, with water for bathing and drinking, and subsisted on food from the museum café. Two days after the storm hit, on Aug. 31, representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency reached the museum and urged them to evacuate. They refused.
Only on Sept. 2, when National Guardsmen told the holdouts that they were under orders to evacuate the area, did they agree to leave. Buses took them out of the city.
Meanwhile, the museum's principal insurer - the Axa Art Insurance Corporation, an arm of AXA, the French insurance and financial company - had heard reports of looting and lawlessness in New Orleans. Its chief executive, Christiane Fischer, hired McLarens Young International, a loss adjusting company, and the International Investigative Group, a small security company.
The security company's armed guards, most of them retired New York City police officers, arrived on small motorboats - along with the museum's deputy director, Jacqueline L. Sullivan - on Sept. 4. They found two bodies floating nearby.
At least two guards are always on duty, while the others relax or sleep in a trailer parked in front of the museum. Several National Guardsmen, who were also deployed to protect the museum, have volunteered to clear debris, leaves and tree limbs.
Mr. Bullard, who was on vacation in Maine when the storm hit, estimated that the approximately 40,000 works in the collection are worth at least $250 million. Three jeweled Fabergé eggs, on long-term loan from the Matilda Geddings Gray Foundation, are valued at $10 million each.
The semicircular Beaux-Arts museum, located in City Park in the affluent northwestern section of New Orleans, was built in 1911 and was expanded in 1971 and in 1993. Except for one broken skylight, the interior space, 130,850 square feet, was barely damaged.
"It was a good feeling to see that we dodged the bullet and that the collection was hanging on the walls just as we left it," said William A. Fagaly, the curator of African art.
Museum officials have walked through the 46 galleries, surveying the 2,500 works on display. Mr. Bullard looked relieved on Friday as he pointed out Degas's "Portrait of Madame René De Gas, née Estelle Musson" (1872), a hallmark of the collection that the artist painted during a visit to New Orleans, his mother's native city.
The museum, now comfortably air-conditioned, was without climate control for nearly two weeks, from Aug. 29 to Sept. 10. Water had seeped into lower-level offices, where four feet of sheetrock at the base of the interior walls had to be removed. Dehumidifiers were brought in.
While the power was out, heat and humidity inside the building rose only gradually, Mr. Bullard said, and thousands of delicate prints and photographs appeared to be undamaged.
Less fortunate was the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, a five-acre public space that opened in November 2003. It cost $8 million to build, charged no admission fee and attracted nearly 300,000 visitors a year.
From the museum's boardroom, which overlooks the garden, Mr. Bullard and Ms. Sullivan pointed out the extensive damage. Kenneth Snelson's "Virlane Tower" (1981), a 45-foot work of stainless-steel tubes joined by cables, toppled into a lagoon. The bronze figures in George Segal's "Three Figures and Four Benches" (1979), which had been painted white, now have brown feet. Mr. Bullard estimated that it would cost up to $500,000 to repair or redo the landscaping.
The museum is trying to regroup. On Monday, Mr. Bullard and other top employees are scheduled to meet with S. Stewart Farnet, president of the board of trustees, in Baton Rouge, where the museum has set up a temporary office.
Mr. Farnet said the board had recently talked about plans for a $100 million fund-raising drive, a proposal that will almost certainly be shelved. The museum has yet to hear from 30 of its 110 employees; Mr. Farnet has been in touch with only three or four trustees out of 34.
"The energy that we expend in reconstituting the membership and our fund-raising efforts will continue - at a different scale and pace perhaps, but we're going to continue to pursue the ambitions we had before," he said in a telephone interview. "If we lose population in the city, certainly that will reflect itself in our membership. But there's going to be renewed pride in the city, and those institutions that are important to the life of the community are going to see a reawakened interest."
Ann M. Meehan
Curator of Education
Loyola University Museum of Art
820 North Michigan Avenue
Chicago IL 60611
312.915.7604 (direct)
312.915.6388 (fax)
http://www.luc.edu/luma/
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