What should happen to privately owned art in public places, art whose caretakers now regard it as dispensable and in need of a new home?

My April 6 story about the large murals by Pierre Soulages and Virgil Cantini in the lobby of Downtown's One Oliver Plaza ('Two Modern, monumental, once-cherished artworks need new homes') generated a flurry of calls and e-mails from concerned Pittsburghers, some wanting to adopt them, put them in storage or help pay for their removal.

An easier and cheaper solution came from several other readers, including Bellevue ceramic tile artist Anders Anderson, Sewickley designer Peter Floyd and Shadyside gallery owner Steve Mendelson. Keep the murals in place, they suggest, but cover them with false walls.

"It will only be a matter of time before aesthetic tastes change again and future generations of art lovers will want to uncover and enjoy these artworks again in their original designed location," Floyd wrote in a letter to the Post-Gazette.

The K&L Gates law firm, which soon will be a tenant in One Oliver Plaza, is seeking new locations for the murals, which a spokesman has said are inconsistent with the firm's planned renovations to the building and surrounding plazas.

Cantini's daughter and son-in-law continue to work on finding a new home for his mural and believe they are close to settling on a new location in Oakland, which they are not ready to identify.

Lisa Cantini Seguin is not keen on the idea of enclosing her father's mural in a false wall.

"It could be covered up for 50 years until somebody decides that '70s art is back in fashion," she said.

But Renee Piechocki, director of Pittsburgh's Office of Public Art, believes removing the murals will set a bad precedent. Not only that, "We will be kicking ourselves in 50 years when our Modern landmarks are not available for the public to enjoy," she said in an e-mail.

I empathize with Seguin but agree with Piechocki, who said, "Removal should be a last resort."

Not that it hasn't happened before. But it's one thing to relocate, say, Tony Smith's yellow-painted steel sculpture, "Light Up," from Downtown's Westinghouse Plaza to Oakland's Forbes Quadrangle and another to permanently dismantle a building lobby's original, primary decorative components. While privately owned, the One Oliver murals in a larger sense are Pittsburgh's patrimony, as were Boardman Robinson's epic murals for Kaufmann's department store, now in Colorado Springs, and Frank Lloyd Wright's office for Edgar Kaufmann, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

As One Oliver Plaza prepares to shed its Soulages, Paris' Centre Pompidou is assembling a major retrospective of his work that will debut in the fall. The Louvre also will pay tribute to the French painter, now in his 90th year.

Two recently discovered articles shed new light on the Soulages mural, his only such work. It was created with the assistance of ceramist Jean Megard in a specially built studio near Aix-en-Provence, France.

The clay was "chamotted," mixed with terra cotta ground to small fragments. The building's architect, William Lescaze, described the clay on a visit to Pittsburgh in April 1968, a few days before the mural's installation.

"It has been baked and fragmented, baked and pulverized, and baked, and so on ... ," he told The Pittsburgh Press. The result was an irregular stippled surface that took the glaze well.

After the clay was rolled to the desired thickness, Soulages applied the design with pieces of wood that he dragged across the surface while standing on a scaffold above. The clay was cut into 294 tiles and kiln-fired. Epoxy was used to attach them to the wall; more epoxy was used in places where the clay bulged during firing. Soulages considered those areas happy accidents.

The undulating mural is "animated by the moulded surface so that the colors and reflections of the enamel come to life. In the words of the artist himself, the colors and forms 'are having a dialogue with each other,' " journalist Jeannette Seneff wrote in Carnegie Magazine.

The strong diagonal lines within the Soulages and Cantini murals also are meant to contrast with and enliven the subdued, rectilinear lobby.

Soulages worked on the project most of the summer and fall of 1967.

Not everyone has an appreciation of period abstract art, and shouldn't be expected to. And while an appreciation of Pittsburgh's art, architectural and corporate history, so momentously entwined in the One Oliver Plaza murals, should be easier to come by, that doesn't seem to be the case here.

One Oliver was to be the first of two towers; the second would have been square but with the same amount of floor space. By the time the second came along in 1975, Lescaze had died and architectural trends had shifted away from the rigor and simplicity of the International style. Skidmore Owings & Merrill's Two Oliver Plaza (formerly the Equibank Building, now Two PNC Plaza) is an angular figure-eight-shaped building with a sleek, shiny glass curtain wall.

So the Soulages and Cantini murals and the building they inhabit are not only of a piece, but also of a fleeting moment in time.

Covering them with false walls may keep them hidden for decades, but ultimately preserve them in place for our children's children and give K&L Gates blank canvases on which to make its own statement.