ABOVE: detail from Degas’ Portrait of Mme Rene De Gas nee Estelle Musson, one of the prize works of the New Orleans Museum of Art, which weathered Hurricane Katrina through sound planning and sheer pluck.

There’s a moral to the following story: As hurricane Katrina bore down on the Gulf coast, pushing a cold front of evacuation orders before it, a clutch of employees of the New Orleans Museum of Art brought their families and holed up in the gallery to safeguard the art. As CNN et al. blithely soft-pedalled the seriousness of the hurricane, the employees were removing art from the walls of galleries with skylights, placing stored works in the basement on top of wooden pallets, stockpiling water and food, and generally battening down the hatches. New Orleans is a sodden mess today, but, as the New York Times reported this week, the museum is shipshape, taking little damage and remaining untouched by looters.

A portion of the credit must also go to the museum’s insurers, AXA, which, in a fit of intelligent foresight, paid for an armed private security company to guard the building immediately after the storm. The most shocking thing about the Times story is near the end, when the museum director says that out of 110 museum employees, 30 are still missing, unheard from, and an even larger portion of the museum’s board of trustees are whereabouts unknown. The cleanup is just beginning, but John Bullard, the director, estimates it’ll cost $500,000 just to rebuild the landscaping in the outdoor sculpture garden.

LINK: New York Times > New Orleans Museum, Under Lock and Guard