A painting is not a “crime scene in which the culprit is the chemistry of decay”

It is not a frequent occurrence that an article about conservation is published in the news section of a major newspaper. We should therefore be pleased that the article, “Fighting chemistry of decay” by Robert Lee Hotz was published in the “U.S. News” pages of the August 12, 2013 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Hotz describes in some detail both the various forensic tools used by the Getty Conservation Institute to analyze Jackson Pollock’s 1942 “Mural” and the findings of that investigation. He writes about the heroic conservators battling decay dressed in their face masks and multiple layers of gloves. What gets lost in this story,save for the last line, is that conservators make aesthetic judgments and that conservators work with works of art– not crime scenes.