THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

November 26, 2000

Art That Captured a City's Pain
It's been a long, strange trip for bust of slain mayor

Author: Mike Weiss; Chronicle Staff Writer

Edition: FINAL
Section: NEWS
Page: A1
Dateline: San Francisco


Estimated printed pages: 8

Article Text:

On a mild winter day in February 1997, Jay Cooper, a middle-age doctor with a passion for art, and his wife, an amateur painter, wandered back from a walk on a beach in La Jolla and into a small gallery they had never heard of.

The gallery was called SOMA. "Real far South of Market," Joyce Cooper cracked to her husband.

Jay and Joyce Cooper were art collectors, and they were browsing with no more real purpose than a gaggle of teenage girls cruising an Old Navy in a suburban mall.

The dealer, Scott White, began to drop names. To make it clear to White that he wasn't dealing with a rube, Jay Cooper inquired: "Do you have anything by Bob Arneson?"

Jay was an avid collector of the works of the late sculptor Robert Arneson, and had bought some directly from the artist, whom he had known. But Arneson pieces didn't just drop from the sky. Jay had asked that question in galleries many, many times -- and no dealer had ever said yes.

Then, as fate would have it, Scott White responded: "Do you know the Moscone piece?"

That very day, Jay Cooper wrote a $155,000 check for Arneson's bust "Portrait of George" -- the most important work of political art ever created in San Francisco, and the most controversial.

And perhaps one of the most elusive.

Since its shocking unveiling in 1981, "Portrait of George" -- bloody bullet holes and all -- has pretty much disappeared from sight. Not easy for a 94- inch-tall, 500-pound polychromatic ceramic bust of a toothy, grinning George Moscone, the San Francisco mayor who was assassinated three years earlier.

The dramatic sculpture, in fact, has seen plenty of tragi-comic adventures in the past 20 years or so. It became the object of contention in a fabulously messy divorce. It passed through Orlando, Des Moines and Oklahoma City. It gathered dust in a New York warehouse. And it slipped through the fingers of the San Francisco museums not once, but twice.

It was even beheaded.

Nowadays, there is near-universal agreement among those concerned with these things that San Francisco is where this Arneson masterpiece belongs.

But 19 years after the controversy it stirred, 22 years after George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by Dan White, "Portrait of George" is nowhere near home.

It was 1980, and a new convention center was being completed downtown. The city decided to name it after the late Mayor Moscone. A commemorative bust was commissioned to grace its lobby.

Arneson seemed an unlikely choice for the job. His work had a sardonic, self-parodying quality, could be acerbic, and sometimes seemed cartoon-like. Yet his best pieces, usually self-portraits, were deeply touching. Like many artists, he was ferociously single-minded about his work and utterly committed.

Richard Mayer was on the Art Commission and helped to select Arneson. "Mayor Moscone's family indicated he wouldn't have wanted some kind of commemorative statue of himself. And Bob had submitted (a drawing of) a bust that was so compelling, so unlike a commemorative bust but very complimentary and faithful.

"It really did capture the verve and excitement that surrounded Mayor Moscone," says Mayer, himself a sculptor. "It was presented to Gina Moscone (George's widow), and she was charmed by it, and it went forward." The city agreed to pay Arneson $37,000.

Through her son Christopher, Gina Moscone declined to be interviewed for this story.

Arneson himself died of cancer in 1992. But his widow, Sandra Shannonhouse, remembers Gina Moscone coming to her husband's studio in Benicia to view the piece when it was near completion.

"Gina came up, Bob invited her. She was so sweet, she patted the cheek and said, 'That's George.' "

But Gina saw only the bust. Arneson had draped the pedestal out of sensitivity to the widow. That's when the trouble began.

It was the 58-inch pedestal -- with its graffiti-like scrawls and five bloody bullet holes -- that caused the uproar when the sculpture was unveiled in December 1981.

There were five bullet holes because that was the number of shots that Supervisor Dan White, an angry and rigid ex-cop and firefighter, had fired into Mayor George Moscone.

"BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG," it says on Arneson's graphic pedestal.

After shooting Moscone, White then hurried across City Hall from the Polk Street to the Van Ness side and fired five more shots into Supervisor Harvey Milk, killing him as well.

"HARVEY MILK TOO!" The bust says. And, "GAY."

As president of the Board of Supervisors, Dianne Feinstein succeeded Moscone, performing through that difficult time with calm and dignity, and resurrecting what had been a flagging political career.

"DIANNE BECOMES MAYOR." says the bust.

The pedestal also included images of White's revolver, and a Twinkie, a reference to White's defense that gorging on junk food had left him less than fully responsible for his actions.

Before it was even unveiled, the pedestal was being called shocking and inappropriate. There were front-page headlines in The Chronicle. And the city, especially its political leaders, felt protective of the grieving Gina Moscone.

"You've got to understand," says Christopher Moscone, who was 16 when his father was shot and is now a lawyer. "We were vulnerable. Though it was accurate and artistic, it kind of hit us in a place where we'd already been hit."

Mayor Feinstein decided it just would not do.

"She walks into this meeting we had in her office," Sandra Shannonhouse remembers, "wearing this little bow. We're all seated, and she's standing behind her desk. The first thing she said was she told the Art Commission they had to reject the piece, they were all her appointees, or else she would dissolve the commission. And then she said, 'Let's talk.'

"She said, 'Can you saw the head off the pedestal?' Bob said no.

"She said, 'Can you recast it in bronze?' Bob said no.

"She said, 'Can you paint over the pedestal?' And Bob said no."

At the time, now-Sen. Feinstein said in a recent interview, she was exquisitely aware of "the enormous polarization, the hatred and hostility in the city" after the assassinations, the Jonestown massacre and the White Night riots.

"My job was to try to put the bricks back together. I did not feel it was appropriate public art at the time. And I felt and feel very strongly about Gina and the family and what they had gone through."

A few days later, the Art Commission voted 7-3 to reject the piece and return it to Arneson. He had been advanced half his $37,000 fee and was asked to return it. There was a half-hearted attempt to raise the money for the city's museums to purchase the piece.

"What Dianne Feinstein did was censor a work of art," says Shannonhouse, "and the intellectuals of San Francisco turned tail and ran because of her."

Arneson received death threats. The piece was spirited out of Moscone Center by night, briefly displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, and then stored, awaiting whatever would come next.

Enter Foster and Monique Goldstrom.

"Foster had an impeccable eye and I had an impeccable mouth," says the voluble Monique, who now runs a gallery in Soho, in New York, and retains traces of her Romanian accent. "He bought and I sold. We were brilliant together. We made millions of dollars in the art business."

In the discreet, tightly knit world of the San Francisco art establishment, the Goldstroms were outre.

One evening the Goldstroms were in the A La Carte cafe in Berkeley reading about the brouhaha in Time magazine. Foster decided that he would buy "Portrait of George," which Arneson had let be known via Herb Caen's column was for sale for $50,000.

However, Arneson's dealer Diana Fuller wanted nothing to do with Foster Goldstrom. So Foster called Arneson, and they closed the deal on the phone. Foster didn't actually have the cash available, but Arneson agreed to be paid in installments.

It had been Arneson's wish, expressed to the Art Commission after it rejected the piece for display at Moscone Center, for it to be owned by a public institution and remain in his hometown.

But the museums were hesitant. Mayor Feinstein had decreed that no city money should be spent on the bust. Goldstrom assured an angry and despondent Arneson that if he ever sold it, he would sell it to the museums. So the private sale was consummated.

At first Foster and Monique displayed the piece in their Grant Avenue gallery, then moved it to their Oakland home. In 1987, the bust went on tour along with other pieces from the Goldstroms' private collection.

Oakland, Los Angeles, Des Moines, Charlotte, Palm Springs, Memphis. The bust of George Moscone wandered America. Binghamton, Oklahoma City, Portland.

Along the way, something spooky happened. The Goldstroms' son Michael had made a little clay replica. "It had the bullet hole and everything," says Monique. "It was my Mother's Day present when he was 7."

One day the replica fell off the mantle and broke at the neck. The next day, the Goldstroms learned that on its way to Portland, the bust of George Moscone had broken loose from its pedestal.

Arneson himself repaired it.

After Arneson's death in 1992, Foster Goldstrom loaned the piece for a retrospective at the de Young museum the following summer. In the catalog, the chief curator of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, Steven Nash, wrote:

"In its monumentality and vivid literalism mixed with the synthesizing quality of a Pop Art icon, Portrait of George is lasting and timeless."

Nash would soon have a chance to put the museum's money where his mouth was. The marriage of Foster and Monique Goldstrom had lost its luster, and the couple sought a divorce amid mutual bitter recriminations.

Upon its return from Vienna in 1994 at the end of its tour, it had been put into storage at Day and Meyer in New York, where it was still gathering dust, unseen even by its owners. Now a judge ordered the Goldstroms to dispose of some of their artworks to pay their lawyers.

"I begged the de Young to buy the piece," Foster says. It was San Francisco's second chance to own a great piece of public art, which everybody concerned agreed belonged here.

"The problem was," says Nash, "they had set a very high price on it. Way, way more than any other Arneson had ever sold for."

The Goldstroms were asking $175,000. "It's the most famous California sculpture in the world," was Foster's justification.

Nor was it entirely clear which Goldstrom had control of the piece. Monique felt that Nash's hemming and hawing, which he himself acknowledges, was one more example of the San Francisco art establishment disdaining her.

"He never called me back because he's too hot for us," Monique said recently. "He's covering his a -- because he did not buy it."

Whatever the reason, it was February 1997, and Jay and Joyce Cooper were at the La Jolla art gallery.

Scott White had heard through a fellow dealer in San Francisco that the piece was for sale, and he offered $140,000, turning a $15,000 profit for in essence making a phone call.

"I got an offer and it went. Boom!" says Monique. "I was nauseous to my stomach. So stupid. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb."

The "Portrait of George" was on its way to Phoenix.

Jay Cooper exudes the kind of casual confidence that being rich and successful imprint on a man of 56, even one as youthful in appearance as he is. He knows what he is about.

He and Joyce live in a gorgeous home of about 6,000 square feet in the Arizona desert. Not just the paintings and sculptures but everything in it is art, from the dining room table by the architect Michael Graves to the Kleinschmidt chairs in the den.

There is also a Calder mobile, and a massive blue metal sculpture of a horse called Red by Deborah Butterfield.

And "Portrait of George."

"I almost thought I was rescuing it," Jay says. "It's not the best piece he's done." That would probably be "California Artist," which is in the living room. "But I'm a caretaker for it. I knew the San Francisco museums were trying to raise the money for it, but I felt if I didn't buy it, it would fall into hands as unfeeling as Foster Goldstrom's."

We all have our dilemmas, and in a certain sense "Portrait of George" is Jay Cooper's. He sees himself as its caretaker. But he can't let go. In the three years he has lived with it, he has watched it change, as great art will.

"There's an evolution," he says, looking up at it. "Now the bust is more cynical than the base because of how we think of politicians. He certainly looks like someone who knows more than he's telling us.

"When we are no longer able to give the piece the attention it deserves," he continues, "it belongs in San Francisco. It's not happening tomorrow."

"Why was I in San Diego that day?" he says. "Why walk into that gallery in La Jolla? And that's why I'm not ready to be without it. To be perfectly honest, I think it was fated."

The parties most concerned with whether "Portrait of George" will ever come home to rest are probably the San Francisco museums, the Moscone family and the Arneson family.

"It really stops you in your tracks," says chief curator Steve Nash. "That's its power as public sculpture. I think it can be rightfully named as one of the most important sculptures ever produced in the Bay Area . . . and obviously it documents one of the most tragic incidents in the history of our politics."

Feinstein, who vehemently rejected the piece at the time, now agrees that it is "appropriate for a museum."

As for the Moscones, Chris Moscone happened to be escorting out-of-town friends through the de Young in 1993 when it was on display. He caught a look but did not approach.

"I wouldn't oppose its coming back," he says. "It's a piece of art, it captures a moment in the city's history. I don't think my mother would have a problem with its coming back. If it's in memory of my father and his legacy, we can't control that. But I won't go see it."

Arneson's adult son Kirk wants the piece returned. "It belongs here," he says forcefully. "Why is it in Arizona?"

But Sandra Shannonhouse is more philosophical. She went to Arizona to see "Portrait of George," and knows the Coopers, who, remarkably enough, were visiting with Arneson in Benicia at the very time the Art Commission rejected the work and sent it on its journey toward them. Fate indeed.

"They've got it in their gorgeous home. It's really well-loved," she says. Then she exhales sharply. "Do I want it to be in San Francisco? I'm kind of beyond it. You know, the piece is always going to ask tough questions. Truth is not always what people want."

Caption:
(1) The bust of Mayor George Moscone, (2-3) Above: Art collectors Joyce (left) and Jay Cooper displayed some of the artworks in their Arizona home: a horse sculpture called ""Red," an untitled painting by Hassel Smith, and the famous Bob Arneson sculpture of former San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. At left, some of the graffiti-like inscriptions on the pedestal.
Photos by Brian Fitzgerald for The Chronicle
PHOTO (3)

Memo:
E-mail Mike Weiss at mweiss@sfchronicle.com.

Copyright 2000 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
Record Number: 3151118