Off-the-wall art of saving murals -Restorerses 'strappo' technique

Daily News /L.A. Life - Monday, September 23, 1991

By Meg Sullivan -Daily News Staff Writer

Nathan Zakheim was standing in front of a stunning fresco painted on the garden wall of Beverly Hills home, tryin explain what he does for a living.The side facing an indoor courtyard looked much the way it had when a noted muralist covered it with graceful female figures more than 60 years ago.But Zakheim studded the wall's unadorned side with holes and reinforced it with wooden beams in anticipation of stripping the garden of its masterpiece."I guess you could say I'm a male stripper," he said with a chuckle. But if that's the case, Zakheim, 47, isn't just a male stripper. In the world of mural removal, he's the Gypsy Rose Lee, having developed a reputation as a leading authority in the field."He's tops in what he does," said Topey Moss, a Los Angeles galley operator.Beginning with dramatic removal and relocation in 1978 of a beloved diptych from the Santa Barbara Library that was undergoing renovation, Zakheim has had his resin-encrusted finger in many high-profile cases.While he was laboring over 38-foot-long Beverly Hills mural - details of which are being kept under wraps for security purposes - he was also working on a plan to relocate a 240 -foot-long mural painted by noted post -surrealist Helen Lundeberg in 1941. "The history of Transportation," located on an obscure corner of Centinela Park in Inglewood, is considered one of the masterpieces in Los Angeles and relocated it to the Los Angeles Museum of National History in 1983. He also restored "Prometheus," one of three U.S. murals by the noted Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, at Pomona College in the early 1980s. Now, thanks to recent court case, Zakheim is expected to be even more in demand.The case involved "Filling up on Ancient Energies," a large mural in Boyle Heights painted by three-man team in 1980 and lately demolished in 1988 by Shell Oil to clear access to parking lot. A lower court ruling that the mural was not protected by state law enacted to preserve works of art was later overturned on appeal. The California State Court refused to hear the case, essentially siding with fans of the big picture."Now murals will be protected by statute," said Amy Neiman, the attorney who represented the muralists behind the work. "They now are considered a painting under the California Art Preservation Act, which says an (art) owner cannot destroy (a mural) without giving an artist the opportunity to remove the work."The owners of property decorated with murals will now be required to give the artist 90 days to find a new home for their work before taking steps that would destroy it. Property owners who fail to do so could be assessed the value of the destroyed mural as well as punitive damages and legal fees, Neiman said.That raises the thorny problem of removing and relocating murals, which is where Zakheim comes in. He claims to have the only proven approach to removing murals, ad others concur."The stuff he does is pretty unusual," said Bill Lasarow, the president of Mural Conservancy, a preservation group. "I am not aware of anything like it." It's hard to imagine that Zakheim, who looks more like the folk singer that he once was than a conservator, would have a hit upon such an approach. But he maintains murals are in his blood. Phyllis Wrightson, a noted surrealist, is his mother, and Bernard Zakheim, who oversaw the decoration of San Francisco's Coit Tower with murals in 1930s, was his father."I was raised in an art commune, and it wasn't until I went to public school at 10 that I realized everyone wasn't an artist," he said. By trial and error Zakheim claims to have mastered "strapo" - Italian for stripping - techniques that have been used for centuries to remove fragile Renaissance frescoes in one piece from crumbling walls. Zakheim has adopted the technique for today's acrylic murals, which are more frequently threatened than they're rarely considered as valuable as the structures or the real estate they grace.He coats murals with acrylic to form a tough, pliable layer much like kitchen plastic wrap. He then attaches a piece of canvas to the acrylic layer with adhesive. Repeated impact with an air hammer like those used by auto body shops lifts the image from the wall and attaches it firmly to the canvas.The mural is peeled in one piece from the wall like contact paper, and a solvent is later used to free the layer from the canvas, so it can be glued to fiberglass panels or stretched for display in new location.Today muralists are beginning to anticipate that their works may become threatened, said David Botello, one of the three artists who painted "Ancient Energies" on the side of the gas station. But the options are fewer for older murals, which are painted to hold forever to a wall." People need to know that there's this process out there to take murals off walls, so they don't make the assumption that mural can't be saved and then destroy it," Neiman said. One prominent case that is expected to benefit from the new legal precedent is that of Kent Twitchell's "Freeway Lady," which loomed over 101 Freeway near Silverlake until it was covered over in 1986.Depending on how that case turns out, Zakheim may be asked to relocate the famous mural, whose 1986 covering become a rallying cry for preservationists, he said.