Museums Shake, Artworks Safe : Art: Institutions suffer few damages in earthquake because of an obsession with safety measures. Precautions pay off.

Part of the commotion heard by Southern Californians in the wee hours of Jan. 17 was the sound of artworks turning into rubble. When the earth quaked, paintings jumped off walls, sculptures took a tumble, ceramics cracked and glass shattered in hundreds of residences, offices and galleries.

The ground shook under art museums too, but the results were strikingly different. When local museum administrators and staff rushed in to assess the damage, they found that only a few of the hundreds of thousands of works in their collections were in need of repair--and fewer still were destroyed or seriously damaged.

What made the difference? An obsession with the safety of artworks. Museum collections are protected by everything from high-tech methods such as shake-table tests and isolator bases--complex mechanical devices that can absorb up to 80% of ground movement while allowing sculptures to remain relatively still--to adhesive wax and bubble wrap.

As a result, the J. Paul Getty Museum’s 7 1/2-foot limestone and marble statue of Aphrodite didn’t budge from its place of honor, and entire cases of fragile Greek vases, ancient sculptures, glass and ceramics were completely unscathed at the villa in Malibu. The access panel to electrical controls above one display case was hanging by a single screw after the quake, but the artworks were in perfect order. A marble bust of a Roman boxer rotated on its mount and struck its pedestal, chipping a shoulder.

Even a freak incident that might have been a disaster ended well. In that case, a marble head that normally sits atop a Roman statue--lodged in place by an elongated neckpiece that fits into the figure’s chest cavity--shot into the air and landed on the floor about seven feet away. The damage? “A chip in the forehead that can be repaired,” said Jerry Podany, the Getty’s antiquities conservator.

The story was much the same at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, although the damage incurred was more severe. A larger than life-size sandstone figure from Cambodia, a Buddhist sculpture from Thailand, an Italian wood statue of St. Catherine and an Italian marble vase decorated with mosaic horses all fell from their bases and sustained serious fractures, while a contemporary glass and metal sculpture by Howard Ben Tre appears to have been broken beyond repair. About a dozen sculptures require first aid and others need to be remounted, but no artworks were harmed in gallery after gallery of pre-Columbian ceramics, ancient glass, porcelain, paintings and furniture.

At the Southwest Museum, which resides in an 80-year-old building on Mt. Washington, the temblor rearranged display cases, threw 500 books on the floor of the library and opened cracks in walls that had been patched after previous earthquakes but only broke 11 pieces of pottery out of a 12,000-piece ceramics collection. The most valuable casualty was a Zia bowl, worth about $4,000.

Still other museums--including the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Norton Simon Museum, the Huntington Library and Galleries, the Santa Monica Museum and the Armand Hammer Museum--reported no damage to artworks.

“It’s astonishing,” Sara Campbell, director of the Norton Simon Museum, said of the institutions’ collective good fortune.

Indeed, her colleagues all across Southern California are mightily relieved that their collections came through the quake so safely. But no one is chalking it up to an accident or a miracle. Although some museum officials have particularly sturdy buildings or fortuitous locations to thank, all are reaping the rewards of having taken precautions.

“No one has any excuse (for being unprepared),” said Pieter Meyers, chief of conservation at LACMA. “We all knew an earthquake would come; we just didn’t know when or how strong it would be. The measures we used for earthquake mitigation worked almost beyond our expectations.”

During the last decade Southern California conservators, scientists and technicians have reconsidered the risk to virtually every object in their museums’ collections, upgrading the mounts, pedestals and hanging devices of works on display and improving methods of storage. Leading the way--with the help of the Getty Conservation Institute and structural engineers from USC and the firm of Lindvall-Richter--the Getty Museum has carried out a 10-year program to strengthen its building, establish emergency procedures and train the staff to carry them out, study earthquake risks to artworks and install new protective devices.

“This has been a big effort for us. It has been a top priority,” said Deborah Gribbon, associate director and chief curator of the Getty.

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One place the effort paid off was at a Santa Monica high-rise, where the J. Paul Getty Trust leases space for several of its programs and stores the museum’s vast collection of photographs, Gribbon said. The photographs are stored in acid-free boxes, in a shelf system designed by Bruce Metro, head of the museum’s preparation and machine shop. Without those shelves, which are tipped backward (into the walls) and lined with skid-proof foam, some of the boxes would surely have fallen into water from a broken pipe, she said.

As it turned out, the photographs remained on their shelves, security officers covered them with plastic and within a few hours staff members had dried the facility.

But the Getty’s photograph storage is only one example of the new world of earthquake protection for artworks. At museums all around Southern California, paintings and other framed objects are fitted with hard rubber bumpers and heavy duty hardware that attaches to wall hooks or suspension wires. Vessels and small sculptures are tethered to display cases by monofilament (plastic fishing line) or attached to shelves with microcrystalline wax and form-fitting brackets. Larger sculptures are bolted or wired to bases that are loaded with 25-pound lead bricks to lower their centers of gravity, then set on Teflon pads so that they will slide instead of tipping over. Particularly vulnerable and valuable sculptures, such as the Getty’s Aphrodite statue, are installed on isolator bases.

Most of these devices go unnoticed by the public. While the wax and monofilament that saved thousands of glass and ceramic objects in the recent quake are nearly invisible, unsightly cables, weights and isolators are tucked away in pedestals.

“It’s a matter of aesthetics versus physics,” as Meyers puts it. And the problem of protecting art without impinging on its visual appeal can lead to heated arguments between conservators and curators. Saving Ben Tre’s sculpture from destruction would have meant installing it with an obtrusive mount, he said, so the museum took a calculated risk. But the piece might have been lost anyway because of inherent weakness in its engineering, he said.

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At the generously endowed Getty, where conservators Podany and Brian Considine work with technicians Mark Mitton and George Johnson to ensure the safety of the collection, mechanisms that prevent sculptures and other three-dimensional objects from toppling to destruction are particularly ingenious and well crafted. Shelves holding Greek vases are suspended by free swinging metal rods in plexiglass cases that sit on isolators. In the gallery of Cycladic art, sculptures appear to float, while a lid that seems to lean against a stone vessel is actually held in place by transparent wire.

“Here’s something I was really worried about,” Podany said, pointing out a life-size Roman statue of Apollo that has no visible means of support. “But when the earthquake came, it did its stuff.”

“It” in this case is a system of thin stainless cable that runs through the marble sculpture’s legs. The cable attaches the figure to an isolator, hidden behind marble panels that flip back when the earth trembles. A replica of the sculpture and its support system had been tested on a shake table with promising results.

As they assess the nature of the earthquake and the damage it wrought, conservators say that some problems can be explained while others are puzzling. The County Museum apparently sustained its heaviest jolt in the southwest corner of the top floor of the Ahmanson wing where the fallen Asian sculptures once stood side by side. The large Cambodian figure should have been placed on an isolator, Meyers said, but funds weren’t been available.

As for the smaller sculpture from Thailand, Meyers said he saw no inherent problem in the way it was displayed, so it must have been hit extremely hard. The same is true of the marble vase, which yanked its metal bracket out of its pedestal when it fell. The demise of the Southwest Museum’s Zia pot also is a mystery because it was one of 20 or so that are installed identically.

The Whittier earthquake in 1987 destroyed 208 pieces of pottery at the Southwest Museum, Wilson said, and most of them fell from storage shelves in the museum’s tower. Soon afterward, every fragile item in storage was sheathed in bubble wrap or Styrofoam, put in a cardboard box and set back on the metal shelves with cotton webbing tied across open spaces to prevent the boxes from falling.

* THE BEAT GOES ON

Despite jitters, it was virtually business as usual at live performances. F2