Author: Rebecca Rushfield

Two articles which appeared in major newspapers on Friday July 19, 2013—one about Diana Widmaier-Picasso’s attempt to compile a catalogue raisonne of her grandfather’s sculptures (“A Picasso Heir’s Epic Hunt”, by Kelly Crow, Wall Street Journal) and the other about the likely destruction by burning of seven paintings that were stolen from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam (“Romanian’s Tale Has Art World Fearing Worst”, by Liz Alderman, The New York Times)—provide a glimpse into the work that museum scientists do. Those investigators can analyze the composition of a group of sculptures “to see if they contain enough of the same elements to confirm they indeed were made from the same metallurgical recipe and therefore cast by the same foundry at around the same time—and not years later” and they can determine that the ash found in a wood burning stove contains “material that classical French, Dutch, Spanish and other European artists typically used to prepare canvases for oil painting as well as the remains of colors like red, yellow, green, blue, gray.” If you were reading these articles and didn’t already know what else they can do, wouldn’t you want to find out?

According to an article in the July 1, 2013 issue of The New York Times (“Trumpeting a Michelangelo (Cue the Trills of Dissent)” by Elisabetta Povoledo), at a meeting in Florence organized by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure on June 24-25, 2013, the restored sculpture of the young St. John the Baptist that was housed in the Holy Chapel of the Savior in Ubeda, Spain where it was badly damaged during the Spanish Civil War, was presented as a work of Michelangelo. Assuming that this claim of authorship– which was first proposed and shot down in 1930—is correct, the sculpture as it exists today is 60% restoration. How much or little original material must a work of art contain for it to be considered from the hand of the named artist?

On the front page of its June 10, 2013 issue (“below the fold” where the human interest pieces go), The New York Times published an article by Melena Ryzik (“When Artworks Crash: Restorers Face Digital Test”) about the issues and ethical problems that arise when digital or Web-based works of art need restoration. The catalyst for bringing the subject to the world’s attention was the Whitney Museum of American Art’s treatment of Douglas Davis’s work, “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence”.
While it is true that a great deal of innovative work is taking place in the field of electronic media, conservators who specialize in other media face exciting challenges too. If there are current projects in the more traditional arts which would lend themselves to front page rather than Arts section coverage, perhaps this is the time to build on the momentum of Ryzik’s article and bring them to The Time’s attention.

On Tuesday May 28th, The New York Times published a long article by Carol Vogel, “A Pollock Restored, a Mystery Revealed“, about the Musuem of Modern Art’s study and conservation of Jackson Pollock’s “One: Number 31, 1950”. Discussing what was done to the painting and what was discovered about its materials and construction, this article could have been a wonderful lead-in to the topic of this year’s AIC annual meeting– “The Contemporary in Conservation”. Yet, not a word was mentioned about the meeting which was to start the next day. How can we get media coverage of the activities of the AIC along with coverage of the field of conservation?

The May 14, 2013 Arts section of The New York Times features an article (“An Artwork Turns to Mush, All According to Plan”, by William Grimes) about the work of the artist James Grashow and a documentary that Olympia Stone, daughter of the art dealer Allan Stone, filmed about it. When Grashow’s papier mache sculptures were ruined after being left out on Allan Stone’s lawn for six months, he decided to accept the ephemeral nature of his materials and make work that would “embrace its own destruction”. Thus he made “Corrugated Fountain”, a multi-figure cardboard sculpture that in 2012 was displayed out of doors for six weeks at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT) and then taken to a dumpster and disposed of. What would have been the ethical course of action if someone had taken the remains and brought them to a conservator for treatment?

According to The New York Times (“ Inside Art: Venice Plans to Evict ‘Boy With Frog’”, by Carol Vogel, May 3, 2013), Charles Ray’s sculpture, “Boy with Frog” which was commissioned four years ago by Francois Pinault for the tip of the Punto della Dogana in Venice is to be removed and replaced by a reproduction of a 19th century lamppost. The artist knew from the start that the permit for his sculpture had to be renewed several times a year and Pinault has offered to install the sculpture in the Palazzo Grassi where he has a museum, but Ray insists that the sculpture belongs in the location for which it was designed. Petitions have been circulated and criticisms have been flung. This incident raises the large question of whether a site specific sculpture has been damaged when it has been removed from its site.

The May 12, 2013 “Lives” page of The New York Times Magazine features “Object Love”, an essay by Paul Gordon, a technician for a Los Angeles-based sculpture conservator which expresses so well the seductive qualities of art—- those qualities which led so many of us to choose conservation as a profession as it allowed us to hold and touch works of art. One wonders how many young people reading Gordon’s phrases like “there’s real magic”; “as I moved to the arch of her back, my stroke turned to a caress”; “only a fool could fail to feel the desire, the spirit inside such beauty”; and “I have witnessed the miracles. I have seen them happen under my own hand” will be drawn to conservation.

The Spring 2013 issue of Chemical Heritage contains a fascinating article (“Quest for Permanence”, by Augustin Cerveaux and Even Hepler-Smith) about Maximillian Toch (1854- 1946), industrial chemist and pioneer in the use of science– particularly x-radiography– in the authentication of art. In 1923, Toch who later warned of the deterioration of “Cleopatra’s Needle” following its installation in Central Park (New York City), was brought in by art historian John van Dyke as a scientific consultant in a dispute to establish authorship of the then fifteen “Rembrandt” paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection. This was forty-five years before the Rembrandt Research Project attempted to do the same thing for Rembrandt’s corpus.