According to an article in the January 25, 2016 issue of The New York Times (“Egyptian Officials Face Tribunal for Damaging Mask”, by Declan Walsh), eight Egyptian museum officials have been suspended from their jobs and face permanent dismissal as well as fines after having been charged with negligence and violation of scientific and professional rules in connection with the 2011 repair of the burial mask of King Tutankhamen. That repair, made with epoxy, and attempts to remove the epoxy left the artifact with permanent damage. Eventually, the epoxy was removed and the mask repaired correctly by German conservators. One positive message we get from this sad occurrence is that conservation is now taken seriously in Egypt. Another message—not at all positive—is that Egypt lacks trained conservators who are able to care for its cultural heritage.
Author: Rebecca Rushfield
My favorite place to read about conservation
“The Custodians”, by Ben Lerner (The New Yorker, January 8, 2016), begins as an article on how the Whitney Museum determines which works of art cannot be conserved and should be replicated, but shortly turns into a meditation on what it means to be a work of art today, how institutions acknowledge their intervention into the life of works of art, and how our inherited perceptions of what works of art should look like influence what is done to them. Another wonderful New Yorker article. It is becoming my favorite place to read about conservation.
When will someone write that book?
When I hear about a new novel which features a restorer or conservator as a major character, I am always hopeful that it will be one in which the restorer/conservator neither solves mysteries nor is a thief or forger. Unfortunately, “Unbecoming”, by Rebecca Scherm (Viking, 2015) is not that novel.
The main character, Grace, is a thief and forger as is her colleague, Hanna. When they speak about restoration it is in the least complimentary of terms. Talking about her life after she was released from prison for forgery, Hanna says, “Well, I had to find something else I could do. And restoration, as you know, is not so far from forgery. Except the work is half done for you.” When Grace thinks about her work, she notes that as long as the clients “kept their valuables close, away from carbon dating and fluorescent spectroscopes, no one would be disappointed.”
Isn’t it time that someone write a novel that features a protagonist who is like the real life conservators we know?
A backward look at conservation in the U.S. through issues of the AIC newsletter
Because I am doing research on the history of the National Institute for Conservation/Heritage Preservation, I have been spending considerable time going through issues of the AIC’s newsletter beginning with volume 1 (1975). While doing this, I have had to force myself to stay focused on the research at hand and not get sidetracked by the wealth of information about people, meetings, exhibitions, publications, and disputes. I would recommend that anyone who is interested in knowing where the field came from and how it got to where it is today, spend some reading older issues of the AIC newsletter.
Perhaps we need a museum of offensive monuments
According to an article in the December 20, 2015 issue of The New York Times (“Monuments’ Removal Challenged”), a plan to remove four Confederate monuments, two of which are on the National Register of Historic Places, from New Orleans has been challenged by three preservation organizations and the New Orleans chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Although the suit is based on the issue of whether the land beneath the monuments is publically or privately owned, it contends that the monuments are part of the city’s history and should be protected. Many who pushed for their removal see the monuments as representatives of an offensive ideology. If we are being honest we must acknowledge that many much older monuments that we look at and judge primarily on aesthetic terms are representatives of different offensive ideologies. Perhaps what is needed is to send them all to a museum of offensive monuments.
It may be legal, but is it wise?
On December 24th, Hyperallergic, a forum on art and culture, reported on an experiment that is being conducted by “Cards Against Humanity” in which 150,000 people who paid $15 apiece for the privilege of receiving eight mystery gifts during the month of December have, as one gift, been given the opportunity to vote on whether they wish to receive a sliver of a Picasso print–the linocut “Tete de Faune, edition of 50– or to have the work donated to The Art Institute of Chicago (http://hyperallergic.com/263915/150000-people-will-vote-to-preserve-or-pulverize-a-picasso/). If the majority wish to say that they own something by Picasso, then the print will be divided into 150,000 pieces using a laser. While this experiment may be legal, is it wise?
This could open up amazing possibilities
I only read The New Yorker on the subway. Since I haven’t spent much time on the subway recently, I’ve been behind on my New Yorker reading and only just saw John Seabrook’s article, “The Invisible Library” from the November 16th issue. In it, Seabrook discusses how digital technologies like computerized tomography, x-ray fluorescence imaging, and x-ray phase contrast XRPC) imaging are being applied to the reconstruction of the texts of badly damaged manuscripts, focusing on attempts to have a carbonized papyrus scroll excavated at Herculaneum (in the collection of the library of the Institut de France) brought to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble for XRPC examination. The scroll has not yet been “virtually unwrapped”, but if this is accomplished one day, imagine what amazing possibilities could open up.
Am I being too cynical?
A brief note in The New York Times (“A Digital Substitute for a Stolen Caravaggio”, by Elisabetta Povoledo, December 12, 2015) and a longer post in The Daily Mail Online (“Painting Stolen by the Mafia is Resurrected”, by Gian Volpicelli, December 11, 2015) present the news that a team of conservators, computer experts and artists utilizing digital scans of both a photo of that painting and other paintings by Caravaggio, have recreated Caravaggio’s “Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence” which was stolen from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo in 1969. As we welcome the technology (I am sure that each of us can think of a number of works of art for which it could be applied), would I be a cynic to take note of the fact that the reproduction was commissioned by the Sky Television Network which will broadcast “Mystery of the Lost Caravaggio”, a documentary about the process, in 2016?
This is one painting that might be better seen and not heard
The Improbability of Love, a recently published novel by Hannah Rothschild, film director and trustee of several British museums, is a tale of plundered paintings, self important art experts, desperate art dealers, and greedy art collectors. One of the few noble characters is a conservator who works in the National Gallery’s lab. Through descriptions of her work, the reader learns about conservation procedures like test cleaning, sampling, and cross section analysis. This positive view of conservation is muddled by a Watteau painting that expresses its view of restoration (yes, the painting, a major character in the novel, speaks—although no one hears it): “Imagine my horror at the latest turn of events: the young man has found a restorer. The mere mention of the word sends shivers through my paintwork. The atrocities committed in the name of restoration; look no further than a certain Velazquez in London or Leonardo in Paris. I am so delicate that whole swathes of my composition could disintegrate in the wrong hands. Though my patina is smeared with layers of soot, candle smuts, human effluents, tobacco smoke and varnish, the prospect of a restorer let loose with bottles of noxious spirits fills me full of quaking, mind-blowing terror.” This is one painting that might be better seen and not heard.
A wonderful article containing an unfortunate insult to the profession
In the arts section of the November 15, 2015 issue of The New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote about her visit with Museum of Modern Art sculpture conservator Lynda Zycherman and what she learned from Lynda about the conservation research that preceded the opening of MoMA’s Picasso sculpture show (“Art ‘CSI’: Of Beauty Beneath Picasso”). Smith wrote about seeing “how a professional thinks through a work’s being, tracks physical clues and subjects them to forensic scrutiny and scientific testing, with results that potentially yield new art historical knowledge”. All in all, Smith presented conservation in a wonderful light. However, while discussing how MoMA’s conservators try to recreate artists’ works to better understand them, she wrote, “chief conservator Jim Coddingham had also tried to recreate Pollock drip paintings—which made newly clear why many forgers start out as conservators”—a statement I find false (at least for American conservators) and insulting to the profession.