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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.