Author: Rebecca Rushfield

On Saturday night September 6th, the Picasso curtain which had adorned the lobby of the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building for fifty-five years was taken down and sent on its way to a conservation treatment and its future home. As if the long battle between the building’s owner and the curtain’s owner did not have enough drama, Benjamin Mueller writing about the deinstallation in The New York Times, (“After 55 Years in Vaunted Spot, A Picasso is Persuaded to Curl”, September 8, 2014), described a scene with lots of drama telling the reader that “one false tug could cause its [the curtain’s] demise” and noting that “the spector of the unknown haunted the proceedings”. As conservators, we know the careful planning and consideration for safety that goes into such an operation. Am I alone in finding Mr. Mueller’s manufactured drama a bit insulting to the professionals involved?

In a brief article in the September 6- 7, 2014 issue of The Wall Street Journal (“A Museum Wins the Arm Race”), Alexandra Wolfe recounts the story of “Neptune’s Daughter”, a sculpture by Melvin Earl Cummings which was on display for decades in the garden of the de Young Museum until it was vandalized in 2011– one of its arms was detached and taken from the site. It was written off as a total loss by the insurance company. However, in 2012, the missing arm was anonymously returned to the museum. The sculpture was restored and will soon go back on display. How nice that this conservation story had a happy ending as the work could well have been relegated forever to a storeroom or insurance company back office like other art works which have been declared beyond repair.

In his July 10, 2014 New York Times article,“Nearly 3,500 Years Old, an Egyptian Monument Gets a Laser Cleaning”, about the cleaning of “Cleopatra’s Needle” (the Egyptian obelisk that stands in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art), David W. Dunlap provides a very clear, concise explanation of how laser cleaning works. Anyone needing to explain laser cleaning to a lay person might well appropriate this –with credit to Dunlap, of course.

According to recent articles in The Wall Street Journal (“Iraq Conflict Menaces Heritage Sites”, by Matt Bradley, June 28-29, 2014 and “Creating New Monuments Men”, by Melik Kaylan, July 3, 2014), Iraq’s museums and monuments are once again in danger of destruction. This time it is by insurgents of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) who have issued a decree saying that any and all sites and objects that veer from the dictates of Islamic law are to be destroyed. It was just eleven years ago in 2003 that Iraq’s cultural heritage was imperilled during the U.S. led invasion. Unfortunately, to quote Yogi Berra, “it is like deja vu all over again”.

The five Caryatid statues in the Acropolis Museum (Athens) have been cleaned of centuries of pollution in a three and a half year conservation treatment program utilizing lasers and are now on display in time for the fifth anniversary of the museum’s opening. Liz Alderman noted in an article in the July 8, 2014 issue of The New York Times (“Acropolis Maidens Glow Anew”) that the cleaning and display are being used to press Greece’s case for the return of the sixth Caryatid and the other Parthenon treasures in the British Museum as they show that Greece is capable of properly caring for the pieces. Whatever side we are on in terms of the ownership of these works, what are our feelings when conservation becomes a tool of politics?

The Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park, built in 1923 and the site of free outdoor concerts is in desperate condition. According to an article by Kia Gregory in the June 25, 2014 issue of The New York Times (“Gold Touches Up Sullied Band Shell in Central park”), cosmetic cleaning and regilding were recently completed in time for the summer 2014 concert series. While the cosmetic treatment cost $15,000 and a full structural conservation treatment would cost $5 million, does it make sense to spend money to make the surface look nice when the structure beneath is crumbling?

In her Wall Street Journal article about the preparation of objects for display in the National September 11 Memorial & Museum (“Restoring the Ruins”, June 25, 2014), Lee Rosenbaum focuses on conservators Steven Weintraub and John Childs and how they dealt with their mandate to preserve the objects that were destroyed in the attack on the World Trade Center while maintaining the integrity of the destruction. It is good to see an article about a museum in the general press that puts the work of its conservators front and center.

The May 19, 2014 issue of The New Yorker contains a fascinating long article by Alec Wilkinson, titled “Annals of Sound: A Voice from the Past”, which describes in layman’s terms the optical metrology techniques that Carl Haber, an experimental physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory developed to “play” century and a half old wax cylinder recordings. This story of the search for lost voices is a model of writing for the general public. If conservators partnered with professional writers, would we be more successful in getting our message to the public?