Art, kids can play well together

It’s hard enough getting adults to keep their hands off the valuables. Children need a bit more help, but it’s not impossible.

By Janet Eastman

July 12, 2007

AT least once a week, Shai Bernat-Kunin visits his grandparents, whose San Fernando Valley home is filled with contemporary art and glass sculptures. During his visit last Friday, the 2-year-old ate lunch in his highchair within a spoon’s throw of a one-of-a-kind glass piece by Ivan Mares.

Unleashed on the ground, Shai could be like a bull in a china shop. But grandparents Sam and Nancy Kunin have taken precautions to ensure their art is carefully placed, secured and insured. They say they are more concerned about earthquakes and women who visit with big purses than their seven grandchildren.

“This is a home and not a museum. Art, for us, is part of what a home is,” says Sam, standing in his family room next to a Dan Dailey glass sculpture that was lent to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last year. “There is no reason art and children cannot coexist.”

Every home has something of value that is off-limits to children. But with art, adults want to display it and kids want to touch it. Colorful paintings and sparkling glass pieces “are inviting because of the texture artists put into them,” says Suzanne Isken, director of education for the Museum of Contemporary Art. “Teaching adults, let alone children, not to touch is a huge task.”

Museums employ guards, ropes and alarms to keep onlookers at bay. At home, experts say kids can be trained and art can be placed behind see-through barriers or out of reach of probing little fingers.

“All of our grandchildren have learned these very important words: ‘Be careful,’ ” Sam says. “The older children respect the art. Shai, the youngest, still has to be watched all the time, but even he knows he can’t throw a ball in here and he loves to throw balls.”

But not everyone shares this sense of live and let live. Placing art too close to kids and telling them not to poke it is “unfair to the child and it’s unfair to the artist,” says Rosamund Felsen, a Santa Monica art gallery owner and mother of four. “There is no good way to protect art without changing the perspective or having something come between the viewer and the artwork.”

She advises parents to continue to collect but store the art someplace else – “let friends have it in their house” – until children are older.

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“I couldn’t imagine living in a house without art,” says Jennifer Simon, who grew up in L.A. with Lichtensteins, Henry Moores and Brancusis at home. She earned a degree in art history at Tulane University, started acquiring original paintings and then got married. She now has a 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter who are learning as she did to live with beautiful objects. “When I was buying art before I had children, I never thought about them ruining it.”

When her son turned 1, Simon remembered a Mommy and Me class she attended in which the discussion turned to baby-proofing the house. “Kids are kids and will touch stuff,” she says she learned. “The instructor said to really think about what’s in the house so I wouldn’t have to say ‘No, no, no’ all the time because that’s not positive.”

Simon called Russ Roberts at Art Services Melrose to walk through her Beverly Hills house and suggest safety and conservation methods for the artwork. Most of the paintings are too high on walls to be tapped by gooey fingers. But in the living room there is a floor-to-ceiling oil on canvas by Wesley Kimler.

Roberts designed a round-edged acrylic panel that rises about 3 feet from the ground and wraps around the canvas. It’s secured to the wall with cleats, making it strong enough to withstand earthquakes and “kids climbing on it,” he says. “We created something protective and aesthetically pleasing. The case doesn’t harm the art, and it can be removed.”

But it may just stay in place. The acrylic panel doesn’t bother Simon. “I don’t know if I’d ever remove it, even when my children are older,” she says. “Maybe I’ll keep it for my grandchildren. It would work for dog-proofing too.”

Children can put their hands all over the 16-foot-high Ann Weber sculpture in the atrium. “It’s made out of cardboard boxes that have survived being shipped around the county,” she says. “Kids can’t hurt it.” Roberts anchored it to the top of the stairs with fishing wire to make sure it doesn’t topple over. There is also an indestructible metal sculpture of two intertwining rings in the front yard that her children and their friends walk through.

Simon also installed prints by Richard Tuttle and Robert Rauschenberg in her daughter’s room and a Sam Gilliam painting in her son’s room. “Instead of a mural of painted clouds, I put fine art in my children’s rooms,” she says. “They’re not going to outgrow it.”

MOCA’s Isken says the study of art, often neglected in schools, helps children think creatively. “Seeing the real thing is different from seeing something in a book,” she says. “There’s a relationship between you and the artist.”

The Kunins began seriously collecting art in the 1970s when their three sons were in elementary school. They now have about 350 pieces in their home, including contemporary wall art by California artists Chuck Arnoldi and Tom Holland, and glass art by Dale Chihuly, William Morris, and Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova.

This is even more impressive: Nothing has been damaged by a child.

Three pieces of glass art and three Art Nouveau biscuit barrels were shattered in the 1994 Northridge quake. And once, usually steady-handed Sam, a retired urologist, dropped a glass sculpture, which the artist, Karen Willenbrink-Johnson, then remade for them.

The cost of repairing or replacing accidentally damaged art is usually covered by a homeowner’s insurance policy. Rosemary Speiser, director of insurance claims at Aon, says her company has paid to fix a sculpture when a preschooler snapped off a teacup and when a boy opened a can of soda and it sprayed his mother’s oil-on-canvas.

“If it’s not a malicious act done by an unruly teenager but a kid with a crayon, it’s covered,” says Maureen Hackett, vice president of property insurance for AIG Private Client Group, which includes $50,000 coverage of breakables in its policies of $1 million and more.

The Kunins’ collection is secured onto pedestals, tables and shelves with museum gel or wax. “They would be hard to knock over,” Sam says. Some of the glass art weighs hundreds of pounds.

And some are OK to touch. “Fingerprints can easily be cleaned off glass,” says Nancy, a family therapist. “You can be practical and still have art.”

Near the backyard pool is a large multicolored ceramic figure, “Standing Woman 1” by Viola Frey. “She’s easier to see and she looks better when the removable pool fence is down,” Nancy says. But the fence is always up when kids are here.

For a few months, they put a clear barrier in front of a triptych in the living room by Marta Klonowska. Called “Portrait of a Lady Holding Her Pet King Charles Spaniel,” it was inspired by a 17th century Dutch painting and is constructed of metal and glass. “There are sharp spikes,” Nancy says. Now the safeguard is gone. “Shai has learned to avoid it.”

“Once when Shai was trying to climb on a table, one of the other children said, ‘We don’t get up on tables,’ ” Sam recalls. “What we teach children about taking care of art is also good lessons in life in general. They need someone to put brakes on them.”

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 janet.eastman@latimes.com

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Kid-proof displays

The art could be a Jackson Pollock or your child’s first splash with a paintbrush, but it’s precious to you. Here are some ways to protect it:

Distance: To keep art out of reach of climbing children, avoid hanging it on walls above couches and chairs or near tables. Place sculptures and figurines on high, sturdy shelves and secure them with museum wax. In smaller spaces, try creating “physiological distance” as museums do by using ropes or platforms.

Cases: Transparent display cases can be ordered in any size, starting at $40 for small Plexiglas cubes. “If you put a basketball out, a kid will play with it. If it’s in a case, it’s art,” says Russ Roberts of Art Services Melrose, (310) 247-1452; www.artservicesmelrose.com.

Wall covers: Acrylic covers are backless. They are wider and longer (usually 1 to 2 inches all around) than the art they protect and are mounted to the wall separately. Online specialty plastic case makers sell a 26-by-2-by-30 inch cover starting at $127. SPF Wholesale Specialty Plastics, (800) 582-9038; store.casesforcollectibles.com.

Barriers: Acrylic panels can be made as high as 80 inches, Roberts says. Free-standing, U-shaped ones can be moved when not needed.

– Janet Eastman