Neglected Treasures

Wrapped in plastic, the soiled and deteriorated paintings were leaned against a wall inside a building secured and maintained by the Navy, next to a hodgepodge of mothballed artifacts from the defunct Treasure Island Museum.

They might still be there collecting dust, if it weren't for attorney Philip Hudner.

In 1939, Hudner was a third-grader living on a ranch near the Central Valley town of Hollister when he visited the fair on a school trip. He was instantly smitten with the anthropological maps, he says: "There was something about those murals and the enormity of them that just captivated me. I couldn't take my eyes off them."

Like many other people, he'd seen the five surviving murals over the years at the Ferry Building, not far from his Montgomery Street law office. But it wasn't until the building reopened after renovation — minus the murals — that he learned their future was in jeopardy. Hudner was uniquely positioned to play a role in the murals' rescue: He is the head of the Field Fund, a trust established by philanthropic San Francisco couple Charles D. and Frances Field that funds a wide range of charitable endeavors.

Courtesy of the foundation, Hudner made available more than $150,000 to pay for the murals' restoration. After prodding by Williams and others, the Mexican consulate made overtures to the office of Mayor Gavin Newsom. The result: The murals were shipped to Mexico City to be cleaned and restored under the auspices of the Fine Arts Museums, and the Treasure Island Development Authority agreed to the exhibition loans.

Williams was relieved. Having been snatched from oblivion and restored, Covarrubias' surviving World's Fair handiwork would be — for a time, at least — safe and secure, not to mention admired, while displayed at some of Mexico's leading cultural institutions.

The artwork was packed off to Mexico, as quietly as the mystery mural had disappeared four decades earlier.

Within art circles, Covarrubias' famously missing mural elicits both fascination and frustration. If the painting (consisting of 12 separate panels) had disappeared in the immediate aftermath of the Exposition, it wouldn't have shocked anyone. The World's Fair was dismantled in haste, even as the Navy prepared to procure the island for use during World War II.

But unlike numerous other pieces of art from the fair — including some relatively large sculptures — that are known to have become "lost" when the Exposition closed, the mural didn't vanish until long after it left Treasure Island.

The caricaturist, artist, and anthropologist executed the murals over several months before the fair began after agreeing to travel from Mexico with Cowan for the princely sum of $1,000 per month. The murals adorned the Exposition's largest pavilion, Pacific House. The artist's sponsors with Pacific House arranged the couple's accommodations at the Plaza Hotel on Union Square.

Pacific House was more than a mere pavilion. It was a nonprofit whose board members included Bay Area social and business luminaries who hosted visiting dignitaries from around the world. Its chairwoman, Leslie Van Ness Denman, was an art enthusiast and the wife of William Denman, the presiding federal judge for the Ninth District.

Casting about for somewhere to display the spectacular, if oversize, artworks after the fair, Denman and her board in 1941 found a prestigious taker in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It assigned the murals a choice spot in its towering 77th St. lobby.

But in 1953, the museum remodeled the lobby and placed the murals in storage. Pacific House offered to donate the murals to the museum, provided that they would be displayed permanently, a condition to which museum managers couldn't agree.

For five years, the paintings languished in storage in New York. Finally, in 1959, Pacific House — which by then existed essentially in name only, and whose sole function was as legal steward of the murals — notified the museum that it had decided to donate the artwork to the now-defunct World Trade Center at the San Francisco Ferry Building.

Enter intrigue.

That only five of the six murals were ever installed at the Ferry Building is easily explainable: There was no room to hang a sixth painting. Artist Eduardo Pineda, former director of education at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has long been fascinated by the disappearance. He believes the folks at Pacific House surely realized there was a space shortage beforehand.

Or did they?

While researching her book, Williams interviewed officials at the American Museum of Natural History, including its then-director, in the early 1990s. She says they "dug up every piece of paper they could find related to the maps, which wasn't much." The museum's records include a notation that six murals were shipped to San Francisco. But the records offer few details, including who was responsible for transporting them or even how they were shipped, she says.

Williams finds it difficult to imagine that the mystery mural would have stayed in New York; nor does she think it was lost or stolen in transit. In either scenario, she believes the stellar citizens of Pacific House — who exhibited interest in the paintings when they could have easily left them in the museum's care — would have voiced public concern if one of the artworks had not made it to San Francisco, something for which there is no evidence.