According to an article in the December 2012 Wall Street Journal Magazine (“Preservation, Italian Style”, by Christina Binkley), Italian luxury fashion brands have seen that the sponsorship of the preservation of the cultural heritage is a good business move as “high-culture deeds burnish the luxury brand”. Ilaria Borletti, Chair of the Italian national trust (the Fondo Ambiente Italiano) is working hard to get new companies on board. While an American luxury brand has occasionally underwritten a preservation project—Ralph Lauren’s sponsorship of the conservation of the “Star Spangled Banner” comes to mind— in the United States, such relationships are not as common or as not as publicized if they do exist. Perhaps an article like this will encourage some American brands to follow the Italians.
Author: Rebecca Rushfield
Galleries Need Disaster Plans Too
The destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy to many Chelsea area art galleries described in recent issues of The New York Times (“Where Creations Faced Destruction”, by Allan Kozinn, November 1, 2012) and the Wall Street Journal (“Cultural Community Suffers Losses”, November 2, 2012) points up the need for art galleries, like museums, to have disaster plans. Of all the gallery directors quoted in the articles, only two had made any (albeit inadequate) preparations for flooding—one moved works from the basement to the first floor and the other used waterproof storage containers in basement storage.
Eating Near Monuments Banned, Italians in Uproar: Perhaps it should have been posed as a means to preserve the cultural heritage
According to an article in The New York Times (“Buon Appetito, but Not Next to the Monuments“, by Elisabetta Povoledo, October 24, 2012), this month Rome instituted a new municipal ordinance outlawing eating and drinking and camping in areas of “particular historic, artistic, architectonic and cultural value”. The ordinance has been met with great opposition by Romans who have formed flash mobs with food on the steps leading to City Hall. The ordinance has been posed as a matter of civility and decorum. Perhaps opposition to it would be less if the ordinance had been posed as a means of preserving the cultural heritage of Rome since we all know that food and beverages can be destructive to stone, metal, wood, and other materials.
If we didn’t know who did it, would we think it was vandalism?
Today, the exhibit “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” opens at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Among the pieces on view are “Dropping a Han Dynasty Vase” and “Coca-Cola Vase” in which Weiwei reinvents ancient Chinese vases by defacing or destroying them.
If a conservator were presented with a neolithic vase that had been painted over with a Coca-Cola logo and knew nothing of the context of the overpainting, would that conservator believe that he or she was dealing with vandalism that must be undone?
A Connection to Conservation is Good for a Company’s Image
Credit Suisse, the international financial services group, has a new print advertising campaign which focuses on how the company has helped its clients achieve their goals and ambitions since 1856. One of the ads highlights Maccaferri Flood Control Systems which “are helping to preserve Canaletto’s Venice”. Credit Suisse hopes to burnish its corporate image by linking itself to a preservation effort.
Don’t They Know We Exist?
[With thanks to Walter Henry who told me about this movie]
“Framed“, a made for television movie first aired on BBC One on August 31, 2009 (and released on PBS Video on January 11, 2011), is based on a children’s book by Frank Cottrell Boyce which tells the story of a young boy in the poor Welsh village of Manod whose life is changed when a convoy of trucks containing the masterworks of the National Gallery (London) arrives in his village. The National Gallery has flooded and the works are to be stored in the mines outside of town where they were sent for safekeeping during World War II. The man in charge of the operation is Quentin Lester, a curator and not one of the National Gallery’s many conservators.
Did neither Boyce nor the producers of the movie know that the National Gallery has had a Scientific Department since 1934 and a Conservation Department since 1946?
With proper maintenance, this could have all been avoided
Much has been written about the eldery Spanish woman who, distressed by the condition of a 19th century fresco in her local church in Borja near Zaragosa, repainted it with the knowledge of her local clergy (The New York Times, August 24, 2012, “Despite Good Intentions, A Fresco in Spain is Ruined“, by Raphael Minder).
It is not clear whether there would have been such an uproar if the decendants of the artist had not recently proposed making a donation for its upkeep, bringing the repainting to wider attention. This incident highlights both the need for widespread public education about how conservation should be carried out and the necessity for institutions which are guardians of works of art to have continually replenished maintenance funds.
An unexpected source of information about conservators
The Weddings/Celebrations pages of the Sunday New York Times might be one of the last places one would expect to serve as a source of information about conservation. However, the August 26, 2012 “Vows” column writeup of the wedding of Joseph Godla, Chief Conservator of the Frick Collection and Charlotte Vignon, Associate Curator of Decorative Arts at the Frick informed countless numbers of people who may have been unaware of conservation that conservators have a passion for their work, do such things as crawl beneath pieces of furniture to examine their construction and determine authenticy, and have many, varied skills.
Are there others?
Peter Carey’s most recent novel, The Chemistry of Tears (Faber, 2012), is set in the fictional London Swinburne Museum of clocks, watches, automata, and wind-up engines. It focuses on Catherine Gehrig, a conservator who is mourning the death of her colleague and long-time secret lover. To help her get over her grief, Catherine’s boss gives her the challenging project of restoring a 19th century mechanical duck. Catherine’s project is based on the real life conservation of a silver swan automaton undertaken by Matthew Read of West Dean College.
We have all heard that Daniel Silva’s character Gabriel Allon is very loosely based on conservator David Bull. Are there other, less well-known instances of fictional conservators who are based on real conservators or of fictional conservation projects that are based on real conservation projects?
The forger learned the forensics of paintings while working for a conservator
Ken Perenyl, who for almost thirty years painted hundreds of fake 18th and 19th century paintings before he changed to painting reproductions of masterpieces, is quoted in The New York Times (“Forgeries? Call ‘Em Faux Masterpieces“, by Patricia Cohen, July 10, 2012) as saying that he learned the forensics of master paintings by working for a restorer and a frame maker when he was in his twenties. What a sobering thought for the conservator who takes interested young people into his or her studio that one of them might be preparing for a career as a forger rather than for graduate school.