On Wednesday June 18th, the day before David W. Dunlap’s article, “A Gilded Monument Is Mysteriously Shedding Its Brand-New Gold” appeared in The New York Times, I was riding in a bus down Fifth Avenue and passed the regilded William Tecumseh Sherman monument glittering in the sunlight. There was something wrong about it. It looked garish and harsh—not at all like the understated monument I had gotten used to seeing over the years. And there was something wrong with it—just not what I perceived. It was shedding its recently applied gilding. Something went terribly wrong in the gilding process and the gold leaf did not properly adhere to the sculpture.
Author: Rebecca Rushfield
It makes one wish she was going to London this summer
“50 Shades of Almost Everything”, by Mary M. Lane (The Wall Street Journal, June 14- 15, 2014), provides a tantalizing preview of the National Gallery (London) exhibit, “Making Colour” which will open on Wednesday, June 18th. What the many visitors who are sure to come to the museum will find are beautiful paintings and in depth information about the development, manufacture and use of pigments in the years 1300-1900. It makes one wish she was going to London this summer.
It may be June, but it is worth checking out these articles published in May
May 2014 was the month for newspaper articles about outdoor monument preservation projects. The New York Times published two articles about monument cleaning projects—“For ‘Cleopatra’s Needle”, a Cleaning Meant to Last”, by Lisa W. Foderaro in the May 8, 2014 issue and “Outlasting Dynasties, Now Emerging From Soot”, by Edward Wong in the May 18th issue. Foderaro, writing at the start of a several month long project to clean the obelisk which is a Central Park landmark, notes that the lasers being used to remove surface deposits will be much more gentle on the stone than the scrapers used when the monument was last cleaned in 1881. Wong, writing at the end of a multi-year project to clean the statues in the Yungang Grottoes and remove the sources of air pollution that were destroying them, notes that this project is seen as a model for future preservation projects in other parts of China. Both projects incorporated extensive visual documentation. A third article published in May 2014—“Scanning a Slice of Queens”, by Nicholas Hirshon (The Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2014)– describes the use of 3-D laser scanners to document the dire condition of the New York State Pavilion, a relic of the 1964 World’s Fair.
It is a fun game to play, but is it desensitizing us?
In the May 21, 2014 issue of the Hyperallergic Newsletter (http://hyperallergic.com), Jillian Steinhauer reports that Grayson Earle has created an online game called “Ai Weiwei Whoops!” (http://aiweiwhoops.net) in which you are invited to drop and break vases whose digital images look like Ai Weiwei’s painted Han Dynasty urns. When you enter the field of the game, your mouse arrow becomes a vase which a simple click sends crashing to the ground. At that point another vase pops up. When the vases hit the floor, they make a shattering sound and send pixels flying. For each broken vase, you rack up “approximate property damage” of somewhere between $900,000 and $1.1 million. While this game is fun and cathartic (I tried it), is it desensitizing us to the tragedy of the willful destruction of works of art?
It doesn’t have to be published in The New York Times to be useful for conservation outreach
I recently saw the profile of textile conservator Sandra Aho that was published in the Manchester Extra section of the Hartford Courant (“She Gives Old Textiles New Life”, by Michael Walsh, April 17, 2014) and it made me think about the role of local media in conservation outreach. A well thought out and well written article related to conservation in a major national or international newspaper like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal is always a welcome and valuable outreach tool. However, because of its personal connection to the readers, might a profile of a local conservation project in a local newspaper not have a greater impact on the people who see it?
Imagine how much we would know if every museum had a scientific research program like that of the Art Institute of Chicago
On April 22, 2014, The New York Times published in its Science Section an article by Kenneth Chang titled “How This Renoir Used to Look”. The article discussed the changes in color of the background of the Art Institute of Chicago’s 1883 Renoir painting, “Madame Leon Clapisson” since it was completed, explaining that the cochineal which gave the background a scarlet-purple color had faded. This study is just one of many undertaken by the Art Institute of Chicago’s conservators and scientists during the past few years. Imagine how much greater an understanding of artists’ materials and intentions we would have if every museum had a scientific research program like that of the Art Institute.
You can only be in one place at any one time
When one lives in New York City, she is sometimes faced with the choice of which of a number of conservation related events taking place at the same time to attend. Tonight was one of those times. On lower Fifth Avenue, the Salmagundi Art Club was hosting a program on “Investigating Authenticity in Art: Scholarship, Scientific Analysis and Connoisseurship”, while on upper Fifth Avenue, the Institute of Fine Arts was hosting a program on “Cultural Heritage in Troubled Times: War Damage, Pillaging and Saving the Monuments”. I chose to attend the IFA program. I wonder if I made the right choice.
The confusing (to the art buyer) vocabulary of art production techniques
In his discussion of insider art vocabulary (“Do You Speak Art?”, The Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2014), Daniel Grant highlights the difficulties that art buyers have understanding the meaning of the terminology used to describe contemporary print, photograph and sculpture production techniques. Perhaps before spending their money, mystified buyers should consult with conservators who understand the language .
If not for Faye Wrubel, we’d be lacking in our understanding of Gustave Caillebotte’s relationship to Impressionism
According to an article by Kyle Macmillan in the April 18, 2014 issue of The Wall Street Journal (“An Impressionist is Unmasked”), in October 2013 Faye Wrubel, a paintings conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago began a routine cleaning of Gustave Caillebotte’s “Paris Street: Rainy Day”. Her discovery through testing and research that underneath what turned out to be a layer of later yellow overpaint was an airier, bluer, more atmospheric sky led to the understanding that Caillebotte was an Impressionist in his approach to the depiction of specific atmospheric conditions.
One of the best things to come from the “Monuments Men” movie
(I apologize for the lateness of this post. Sometimes life gets in the way of blogging.)
In the special “Museums” supplement to the March 20, 2014 issue of The New York Times, there was an article by Carol Kino titled “Monuments Man in War, Conservationist in Peace”. Leaving aside the grating use of the word “conservationist” instead of “conservator”, this is a brief but well-researched(thanks to consultations with Francesca Bewer, Joyce Stoner, Sarah Staniforth, and Jerry Podany ) look at George Stout’s life and work. Presenting the real Stout to thousands of readers, this article may be one of the best things to come as a result of the “Monuments Men” movie