Author: Rebecca Rushfield

The January/February issue of the Library of Congress Magazine is devoted to “The Science of Preservation” and contains short articles written for the non-specialist on such topics as the use of hyperspectral imaging to study Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, the lifespan of digital media, and mass deacidification of paper based items. While all of these articles will be edifying for the publication’s wide audience (it is distributed free of charge to publicly supported libraries and research institutions, academic libraries, and learned societies in the U.S.), the page with the greatest impact may well be “Preservation by the Numbers” which lists the numbers of items from the Library’s collection that are treated in a year. A few of the astounding numbers: 1,098,488 volumes and sheets deacidified, 162,462 items bound, and 37,725 photographs rehoused.

On December 14, 2014 the architecture critic Martin Filler wrote in the New York Review of Books blog of his horror at seeing the restoration work in Chartres Cathedral during a visit in the fall (“A Scandalous Makeover at Chartres” ). He said that the trompe l’oeil marble painting on the limestone surfaces was like something found in “some funeral parlor in Little Italy” —a strong indictment of what will have been when it is completed in 2017, an $18.5 million, eight year restoration project. Filler maintained that since little is known of the church’s original appearance and since for most of the church’s eight century history, the walls were not painted, the walls should not have been repainted– especially since the lighter walls feel wrong and change one’s perception of the stained glass windows. Although he quoted architectural historians and medievalists to bolster his case, in the end whether Filler’s view prevails or that of Frederic Didier, the restoration architect in charge of the project, for the individual viewing a restored work of art or architecture it always comes down to feeling and perception.

According to Kristina Peterson writing in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal on December 25, 2014 (“Calder Sculpture Triggers Heavenly Debate in Washington”), there is a debate going on among U.S. senators over whether the sculpture that fills the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building– “Mountains and Clouds” fabricated after a design by Alexander Calder— should be restored so that its mobile elements will once again be operational. This situation raises a number of thoughts about the factors that go into making the decision to conserve a work of art. Among them: What has to change for a work to get treatment if it has been left in a damaged condition for more than a decade? If many of the people who will involved in making the decision about appropriating money for its treatment dislike a work, will it have a chance of being treated? Would it make a difference if the work were thought of as being “by Calder” rather than being “after a design by Calder”?

Most of us remember the story from 2012 about Cecilia Gimenez, an 83 year old Spanish woman who disastrously restored a fresco of Jesus crowned with thorns in her local church and became a worldwide laughing stock and sensation. According to The New York Times (“A Town, if Not a Painting, Is Restored”, by Doreen Carvajal, December 15, 2014), that crudely overpainted work of art has drawn to the town of Borja thousands of people who are willing to pay one Euro for the chance to see the art work and has brought an economic revival to a once struggling region. And to think that if Gimenez (or a professional conservator) had performed a careful, subtle treatment, few people would come to see the work.

The kind of crowd-sourced installation art that is created by protesters or mourners (think World Trade Center) presents major preservation problems as there is no agency or arts council to plan and oversee its future care. Joyce Lau recently reported in The New York Times (November 16, 2014, “Art Spawned by Protest; Now to Make It Live On”) that this has become a major issue with the art created by pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong. With the knowledge that the city will soon clear the protest site, scores of volunteers have been digitally documenting the installations and Umbrella Movement Art Preservation formed rescue teams ready to move art on short notice and truck it to private galleries for safekeeping. Should conservation organizations be thinking about developing guidelines/instructions which might be helpful for such volunteers?

According to David W. Dunlap, writing in The New York Times on November 6, 2014 (“The First Step In Restoring Rare Murals: Finding Them”), the conservators who went searching for two painted over murals in the Goldwater Memorial Hospital complex on Roosevelt Island and then removed them before the building was torn down, worked in the most difficult of conditions. There was no power in the building when they had to carry heavy mural sections down a pitch dark staircase. The facility where they worked for two months in the late spring removing lead based paste from the backs of the murals often reached temperatures of 100 degrees and they had to work in full body protective suits. Many on-site conservation projects present physically challenging circumstances. Were these circumstances so extraordinary that the conservators should have received hardship pay?

According to an article in The New York Times (“A Return for Rothko’s Harvard Murals”, by Hilarie M. Sheets, October 26, 2014),when the newly renovated Harvard Art Museums open on November 16, 2014, among the works on display will be the five paintings by Mark Rothko which comprise the mural cycle he painted for the university’s Holyoke Center in 1962. While on display, these badly faded paintings will be restored to their original colors with projections of carefully calibrated colored light. When the projectors are turned off– as they will be for one hour each day so that visitors can make comparisons– the canvases will revert to their faded selves. Now, that’s easily reversible conservation!

The “Goings on About Town’ section of the October 20, 2014 issue of The New Yorker
opens with a large photo of an antique dress lying on a muslin covered table with small beakers and tools around it. Several pairs of disembodied hands are doing things to it. This photo is the accompanying illustration to a blurb about the “Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire” that was to open at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that week. The photo itself has no caption or explanation—just a credit to Pari Dukovic. The person who is familiar with conservation methodology will know that the dress is undergoing either test cleaning or spot cleaning. I wonder what the uninformed person will think. A brief caption would have done so much for conservation outreach. Another a missed opportunity.