René 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 façade; 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.