Warhols, Harings: Art collector rues losses due to LA fire

Art collector Ron Rivlin estimated that more than 200 artworks had been burned in his home, with the losses amounting to millions of dollars.

Los Angeles: As the flames grew closer and closer to his home in the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood of Los Angeles and his teenage daughter pleaded with him over the phone to evacuate, Ron Rivlin decided to flee, taking three Andy Warhols with him, all that he could carry.

“I grabbed those, and as I was leaving, I saw the fire ahead of me on the hill,” Rivlin said.

When he returned a few days later, he found that his home had been destroyed, and with it his considerable art collection. Rivlin said he had lost more than two dozen Warhols — he owns a gallery in West Hollywood that specializes in Warhol — along with works by Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, John Baldessari and Kenny Scharf.

“It’s dust at this point,” Rivlin said Monday as he returned to the site of his former home, which was built about five years ago, specially designed with his art collection in mind.

Now, it is a pit of rubble. Standing ankle-deep in the twisted metal and crumbled concrete, Rivlin searched for any remnants of the art collection he was forced to abandon.

There had been a hot-pink Warhol print of Queen Elizabeth hanging behind his desk, a set of Campbell’s soup can prints in his living room and a colorful portfolio of cultural characters including Superman, Mickey Mouse and Howdy Doody — known as the “Myths” — in his basement.

Rivlin estimated that more than 200 artworks had been burned in his home, with the losses amounting to millions of dollars. He said he had made the initial insurance claim on the lost works. Many art insurers are bracing for potential large losses.

In Los Angeles, where the threat of wildfires is always a concern, museums go to great lengths to protect their collections. The Getty Center, a Los Angeles art institution that was in the mandatory evacuation zone of the Palisades fire for a time, was built of fire-resistant stone, concrete and protected steel and surrounded by well-irrigated landscaping. So far it has been spared.

But private art collections like Rivlin’s tend to be more vulnerable. And the scope of the art losses in private homes is only beginning to come into view.

Rivlin had sprinklers installed in every room of his home, but his Warhols were not protected from the kind of blaze that swept through the Palisades. The fire spread so quickly that there was no time to move them to his gallery.

“There wasn’t really a lot of time to think through, ‘Oh my God, do we need to get the art out of there?’” said Melanie Breitman, the manager at Revolver, Rivlin’s gallery on Sunset Boulevard.

Rivlin, 51, came into the art world after a career in the music industry. When he bought his first Warhol in 2011, it started an obsession; in addition to his gallery devoted to the artist, he has consulted with the FBI on identifying forgeries.

When Rivlin moved to the Palisades, he fashioned himself into a kind of nightlife promoter for the neighborhood’s Gen X residents, inviting guests to dance in his home and starting a “nightclub” event at a restaurant that was restricted to people 40 and over. “This was the house that everybody came to,” said Max Abadian, a friend of Rivlin’s who also lost his Palisades home in the fire.

Among the Harings he lost, Rivlin said, was a 1986 screen print called “Andy Mouse” that depicted a cartoon Warhol as a Mickey Mouse-esque character and a 1988 carved plywood sculpture called “Totem.”

Even more emotionally valuable, Rivlin said, were the family photo albums lost in the fire.

Concerned that his gallery could face the same fate as the region continues to fight several fires, Rivlin has handlers on standby who are ready to load the art into a truck if necessary.

When he first returned to the neighborhood after the fire, Rivlin said he was stunned at the level of destruction.

“I surrendered to the loss,” he said. “It was looking at my property but it was looking at all my neighbors’ as well. I lost a lot of hope. Frankly, I thought it would be impossible for us to even consider moving back there.”

But when he returned to the site of his home on Monday and began picking through the rubble, he started to notice what had survived.

He spotted a filing cabinet from his office, the base of a 14-foot-tall skeleton that his family puts out in the yard around Halloween and, sitting in the wreckage, the metal numbers that identified his house number: 7-5-0, the zero broken into the shape of a horseshoe.

Toward the back of his property, one piece of art had survived. It was a stainless steel sculpture by the artist Michael Benisty that depicted two figures, holding hands, who are designed to appear as though they are partly disintegrating. It was tilted on its side but appeared to be in good condition.

“Today gave me hope,” Rivlin said.