In the November issue of “W Art”, a supplement to “W” fashion magazine, there is a feature on women who are transforming American museums (“Who’s Who”, photographed by Peter Ash Lee). Each woman is pictured with a quote. The quote for Anne Pasternak, Director of the Brooklyn museum is: “Every day on the job is a day of discovery. I mean, who knew one of the original Monuments Men was the first conservator.” While her quote makes conservators sound exciting and any positive mention of conservation in a mainstream publication is a good thing, it’s a shame that she didn’t mention Sheldon Keck by name.
Author: Rebecca Rushfield
Ultimately, was this a wise thing to do?
In an interview in the November 2015 issue of Harper’s Bazaar (“The Private World of Patti Smith”, by Joan Juliet Buck), the composer/musician/poet/author Patti Smith spoke about visiting Assisi in 2012 while she was composing “Constantine’s Dream”. “…so I went to Assisi, and the monks took me way up high inside the basilica where they were restoring some of the Giottos. I had to wear a hard hat. They were working on the sky, and they gave me a brush and some paint and said, ‘Please.’ I said, ‘I can’t touch Giotto’s painting.’ They said, ‘It’s watercolor.’ I said, ‘I’m so sorry, Giotto. It’s not my fault…’” Not having heard at the time of this conservation encounter, I checked the contemporary news accounts and saw photos of Smith brush and palette in hand. Smith was sincere in her trepidation about touching the work and this sounds like it was done to gain publicity for the project. Ultimately, was it a wise thing for conservation to imply that a non-professional can be brought in at a moment’s notice to help restore a work of art.
Where are the men?
In a long article about how construction projects in Istanbul have been held up for years because of the spectacular archaeological finds that have turned up during the initial excavations (“Letter from Turkey: The Big Dig”, The New Yorker, August 31, 2015), Elif Batuman writes: “In Yenikapi, I visited the makeshift lab where all of these objects are processed by the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. In one trailer, a group of conservators, all women, were restoring small wooden objects.” This all-female conservation lab is far from unique. Where are the men who could be/used to be working in conservation?
In the future: Detecting forgeries using DNA
According to The New York Times (“Eyeing DNA as a Tool to Ensure Art’s Authenticity, by Tom Mashberg, October 13, 2015), the artist Eric Fischl is one of about three dozen artists, foundations and museums who are advocating an art authentication system that uses specks of synthetic DNA to tag and identify works of art. While this system could be quite useful for works created from here on in, the authentication of older works will still have to rely upon provenance research, subjective expertise, and knowledge about and analysis of materials.
Succinct advice to pass on to your clients
In the wealth management section of the September 21, 2015 issue of The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Grant provided a brief primer on what an owner of works of art should know about damage and restoration (“The Delicate Restoration Dance”). Working from the proposition that “…when it comes to protecting the value of one’s art, the manner in which a piece was damaged doesn’t matter. What matters a thousand—perhaps a million – times more is how the owner can go about restoring the piece’s value…”, he discussed the assessment of damage, how medium affects the success of a restoration, and how to find out if a potential purchase has been restored. This might be something to hand out to one’s clients.
How will we deal with the ruins should order be restored?
When reading “Ancient City Faces Destruction”, by Dana Ballout in the October 6, 2015 issue of the Wall Street Journal, the latest of the seemingly non-stop reports of the destruction of ancient monuments and sites in the Middle East by Daesh (the preferred name for “Isis”), I began to wonder what will happen conservation wise should a time come when there is stability in the region and governing bodies that are not threatened by the existence of the visible remains of a multiplicity of cultures. Will these destroyed sites be reconstructed in some way either physically or virtually? Or will the ruins be left as is because their destruction is an important part of the history of the sites?
Was the novelist prescient or had he heard about the opening of the conservation program?
For many years I have been compiling a bibliography of works of fiction which in some manner deal with conservation and restoration. Quite often these works are mysteries that feature conservators whose lives are quite removed from the reality of the conservators I know. The protagonist of Georges Perec’s “Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere” is a conservator turned forger turned murderer whose life is likewise quite removed (I hope) from that of the average conservator. However, one detail in the description of his training in conservation stunned me: “Gaspard Winckler, trained at the Ecole du Louvre, holding a diploma in Painting Conservation from New York University and the Metropolitan Museum, New York,…”
While the novel was not published until 2012—decades after Perec’s death–it is believed that he wrote the final version in 1959 just before he left France for a job in Tunisia. In 1959, the NYU conservation program was just forming its first class of students. Unless Perec was prescient, the program must have been well advertised internationally.
What does the onlooker get from the experience?
According to Eve M. Kahn’s “Antiques” column ( “Repairing a Famous Catch”, The New York Times, September 11, 2015), the L.C. Bates Museum’s twelve foot long preserved marlin (caught by Ernest Hemingway in the Bahamas in the 1930s) will undergo conservation treatment in the museum gallery. Conservation is slow and laborious. Many of the processes are not dramatic or even interesting to the uninformed onlooker. Whenever I hear about a conservation project done in full view of the public, I wonder what understanding of the conservator’s work will the visitor who watches for five minutes or even an hour take away from the experience.
“The Japanese are different from you and me”
In his beautifully illustrated essay, “History Has No Place”, published in the September 23, 2015 issue of T Magazine (The New York Times’ occasional style supplement), Pico Iyer mourns the forthcoming destruction of several major monuments of Japanese Modernist architecture while acknowledging that because Japan has a culture based on impermanence, the Japanese are less attached to things than to values and do not feel the need to preserve them. (He says, “the Japanese are different from you and me”.) Since this is the case, do American and European conservators have the right to promote their value system worldwide through international conservation organizations?
Conservators are interesting to the Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal finds conservators interesting. A number of years ago for its “What’s Your Workout” series, it profiled Jim Coddington, head of conservation at the Museum of Modern Art. Recently, as part of its “What’s in Your Bag” series, it profiled Thomas Roby, a conservator of mosaics with the Getty Conservation Institute (“A Mosaic Expert Packs for Ruins in Tunisia”, by Hilary Potkewitz, August 5, 2015). Fortunately for public outreach, Roby carries two bags– one of which holds his tools– and the reader is told how each item in the bag is used in conservation work.