Month: December 2010

Conservators play a role in the reattribution of art

In “When Overlooked Art Turns Celebrity”, Michael Kimmelman uses the recent reattribution to Pieter Bruegel the Elder of the painting “The Wine of St. Martin’s Day” as a starting point for a discussion of why attributions affect people’s judgement of works of art. In his recounting of how the reattribution of this particular painting came about, Kimmelman notes the examination by conservators which provided the information about materials and techniques which enabled the painting to be linked to Breugel.

[ A detail of the painting

The Mariners’ Museum conservators restore USS Monitor’s steam engine

NEWPORT NEWS – When Navy divers and NOAA archaeologists recovered the USS Monitor steam engine from the Atlantic in 2001, the pioneering Civil War propulsion unit was enshrouded in a thick layer of marine concretion.

Sand, mud and corrosion combined with minerals in the deep Cape Hatteras, N.C., waters to cloak every feature of Swedish-American inventor John Ericsson’s ingenious machine, and they continued to envelop the 30-ton artifact after nine years of desalination treatment.

Just this past week, however, conservators at The Mariners’ Museum and its USS Monitor Center drained the 35,000-gallon solution in which the massive engine was submerged and began removing the 2- to 3-inch-thick layer of concretion with hammers, chisels and other hand tools.

Working slowly and carefully to avoid harming the engine’s original surface, they stripped off more than 2 tons of encrustation in their first week of work alone, gradually revealing the details of a naval milestone that had not been seen since the historic Union ironclad sank in a December 1862 storm.

….Read the full article as it appears in The Daily Press., with video.

10 Tips for Becoming a Conservator

Tip #3: Take advantage of online resources

If you’re reading this blog then you’re already on the right track! Blogs are generally written as editorials, but contain valuable resources like researched articles, interviews with conservators, or links to other useful sites. And if readers add their own comments (hint hint), you can build a great dialogue between a diverse crowd. Here’s a sampling of some blogs worth visiting: Art:21 Blog, Brooklyn Museum, Dan Cull Weblog, Indianapolis Museum of Art, June and Art, Jeff Peachey.


Social networking sites are wonderful resources for organizing information in one place. Even if you don’t feel like connecting with friends, you can use Twitter and Facebook to network with other professionals or simply check the pages for conservation articles, current news, and links to blog postings. Both sites do more or less the same thing—bring you updates from a variety of people and institutions—but some conservators prefer to tweet than share, or like instead of follow. On either site you will find up-to-date reports from ICCROM, IIC, the University of Delaware and more!


AIC also produces an online news bulletin, on top of the quarterly newsletter sent out by mail. Even if you’re not a member, spend some time perusing the AIC site. You can watch tutorials on chemistry, register for workshops and online courses, and watch a video or two.


Finally, be sure to subscribe to the Conservation Distribution List. Each week an email is sent out listing events, job postings, conservation questions, and general conservation news. Like all of the other websites mentioned, the distlist provides up-to-date information, but it’s all compiled nicely into an email and sent to you. Sign up here.


The greatest thing about all of these resources is that they are open forums that allow you to participate; you can share a link on Facebook, comment on AIC news, or even post your own article on the ECPN blog—and I hope you do!

The Midwest Regional Conservation Guild

If you’ve been reading our 10 Tips for Becoming a Conservator, you know how important it is to get involved with professional organizations. The Midwest Regional Conservation Guild (MRCG) is a great example of a regional group that has a lot to offer, and it exists to benefit conservators like you! I asked the current president, Laurie Booth, some general questions to get an idea of what the MRCG is all about:


1. When and how was the guild founded?

The guild was founded 30 years ago by a group of professionals in the Midwest who felt it was time to form a regional group in order to facilitate a dissemination of information and to represent the needs of Midwest conservators to organizations like the AIC and Heritage Preservation. Our last meeting was dedicated to a history of conservation in our flagship cultural institutions as well as a history of MRCG itself.


2. How many members does the guild have, and who is membership available to?

Membership fluctuates from year-to-year, but ranges from about 70-120 members. The Midwest is loosely defined in our case. We have no restrictions on memberships vis a vis location of our members. We have members from Colorado, Tennessee, New York, Pennsylvania, etc.

We are working on an official discount for student members – please refer to the wiki site where we will post more information on the discount (for meeting fees) when they become formalized. The actual discount will probably vary from meeting to meeting. 3-4 students are given discounts to each meeting but are expected to assist with registration and other duties in exchange.


3. What are the benefits of becoming an MRCG member?

Membership fees include receipt of our semi-annual newsletter and inclusion in the official directory. We have one meeting a year in the fall, sometimes associated with a special workshop that is occasionally opened to allied professionals, but only members are typically allowed to attend meetings, which involve separate fees.

Our meetings are designed to be low-priced and are usually offered at cost to our membership. In the last few years we have begun to offer workshops on such topics as museum storage, art in transit, the conservation of contemporary art, mastering fills, and similar subjects.


4. Does the MRCG have a website?

Our wiki site, set-up by Richard McCoy, objects conservator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, is excellent and provides just about everything you need to know about the Guild and how to join.


5. Finally, what is the most special thing about your guild?

We pride ourselves on being open, friendly, convivial and an excellent place to meet fellow professionals. At our meetings (which tend to be small, typically 30-60 participants) we share information in a multi-disciplinary format that is not readily available at AIC conferences as most specialty group sessions run concurrently. Regional guilds are a great way to get a taste of the various disciplines available to the budding professional and to effectively network with conservators working at the various regional cultural institutions as well as those in private practice.


Thanks, Laurie, for that introduction to the MRCG! I hope our readers will take advantage of your website and contact you if they have any more questions!

Using IR and UV to examine papyri at the Brooklyn Museum

Conservators at the Brooklyn Museum are regular contributors to the museum’s blog. The most recent entry, by Pavlos Kapetanakis, project conservator of paper working on the Egyptian Book of the Dead of the Goldworker of Amun, Sobekmose, desribes how IR and UV light aid in examination and treatment.

Excerpt:

We typically use traditional photography to record images of artifacts in the visible light spectrum; this way we record on a digital file that which the human eye can see (fig.1). However, this technique can provide only a limited amount of information, since the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is a very small portion (400-700nm) of the entire spectrum. By eliminating the visible light using barrier filters, we are able to record images that the unaided human eye could not detect. Generally, we record images in the near infrared (700 to 900 nm) as well as the ultraviolet ranges (200- 400nm).

Link to the blog by clicking here.

NYT reports on the treatment of the Dyer Library & Saco Museum’s ‘moving panorama’ by Williamstown Art Cons. Center

From the New York Times, Dec. 2, 2010:

Victorian theatergoers packed halls to watch canvases roll past. Entrepreneurs would ship paintings of exotic scenery hundreds of feet long to theaters nationwide, and stagehands, as if anticipating animated movies, would slowly reveal section after section of the “moving panoramas.” Pianists supplied uplifting music, and actors’ voice-overs explained the plot.

One of the more successful productions, “Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress,” started making the rounds in 1851. Artists as prominent as Frederic Edwin Church and Jasper Cropsey had designed the images, based on John Bunyan’s 1678 didactic Christian allegory about a family confronting angels and demons at the edges of abysses and castle walls.

Reviews of the panorama were ecstatic. In Charleston, S.C., “the pleasure of witnessing it was enlarged by the presence of about 130 of the Orphan House children, with their shining, happy faces,” a local newspaper reported.

By the 1860s, however, Bunyan’s somewhat ponderous tale of journeys through the “slough of despond” and “valley of humiliation” had gone out of fashion, and a theater owner in Maine let crates of the rolled-up muslin molder in storage. The Dyer Library and Saco Museum in Saco, Me., inherited them in 1896 and rediscovered them a century later. For the last year, restorers at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center in Massachusetts have been working on about 800 feet of fabric stretched out in the hallway and driveway.

“Benign neglect allowed it to survive,” said Thomas Branchick, the center’s director.

The restorers sometimes wore socks to avoid leaving footprints while removing dust, creases and signs of water damage known in the trade as tide lines. Lower portions of the paintings have been left slightly scraped, as evidence of countless unrollings.

“The bottom edge would have dragged on the stage floor,” Mr. Branchick said.

Saco financed the restoration partly with a $51,940 Save America’s Treasures federal grant. The muslin will be shipped home in a few weeks. Digital photographs, taken from a camera on the ceiling, will be spliced together to create a panoramic reproduction that the museum will use in live performances.

Read more here.