Author: Rebecca Rushfield

When it and four other works by Wassily Kandinsky in the Guggenheim Museum’s collection were sent to the Harvard Art Museums’ laboratory for examination in preparation for an exhibit, “Sketch I For Painting With White Border” (1913) revealed a secret. Underneath Kandinsky’s composition was another composition which had been painted by his lover Gabriele Munter. This discovery may turn out to be but one of many as the Guggenheim is in the process of examining its entire collection– something that will be much more easily facilitated when the Museum’s new conservation laboratory opens in 2012. (from The New York Times, October 23, 2011)

According to The New York Times (October 28, 2011), following heavy October rains which led to the collapse of a supporting wall at Pompeii, the European Union pledged 105 million Euros (ca. $148,000) for a four year project to preserve and monitor the site. As the Italian government has long been criticized for not doing enough to maintain the site, this is an encouraging development.

The Walters Art Museum has just opened an exhibtion which focuses on a 10th century copy of Archimedes’ writings, the parchment of which was scraped and reused for a prayer book in the 13th century. The October 17, 2011 issue of The New York Times contains an exhibit review by Edward Rothstein which plays up the exotic elements of the story ( presenting it as a tale worthy of Dan Brown) while not forgetting to mention the twelve year study of the volume by an international team using the most advanced imaging technology and the treatment by Abigail Quandt, the Walters’ senior conservator of manuscripts.

The Artists Documentation program founded by Carol Mancusi-Ungaro has received a $195,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that will enable it to make the recordings of interviews available through the Menil Collection website( per The New York Times, October 14, 2011).

According to a short piece in the “Antiques” column of the October 14, 2011 issue of The New York Times, the anaylsis and treatment of Alfaro Siqueiros’ mural, “American Tropical” is nearing completion and an interpretive center for the mural will open next fall. Due to its controversial political subject matter, the people who commissioned the mural had it painted over immediately after it was completed.
Siqueiros had said that his mural should never be restored as the evidence of censorship was part of its history. How should/do conservators proceed in situations in which the work they are hired to do is in contradiction to the desires of the artist?

Conservators (particularly those who work with contemporary art) know just how complicated it can be to fabricate, install and maintain an oversized work of art. An article in the October 8, 2011 issue of the New York Times, titled “How Do You Move a 340-Ton Artwork? Very Carefully”, provides the public with a glimpse into the logistical decisions and manpower requirements necessary to bring Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass” to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

On October 5th, architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron unveiled their design for the restoration of the Park Avenue Armory. Their concept involves the excavation of the layers of paint, plaster and wallpaper which have built up since 1881– to quote Herzog, to “explore the very act of transformation, the evolution of an important structure as it is seen and used and worn down by one generation after another”. The $200 million restoration is in progress and will not be completed until 2015. One interesting fact about the project that was published in The New York Times on October 6th, is that 280,000 Q-tips were used in the cleaning of one of the rooms.

The Sunday October 2, 2011 arts section of the New York Times reproduces four photographs of x-radiographs that David Maisel took during a residency at the Getty Research Institute. The photos, part of a project entitled “History’s Shadow”, were produced by a process that involved manipulation of the tones and colors, and are presented as works of art in themselves rather than as aids to understanding the works that were x-rayed. They are quite beautiful and may inspire conservators to look with different eyes at the x-radiographs they encounter in their work.

An article in the September 12, 2011 issue of The Wall Street Journal (“Virginia’s Slim Pickings for Smokers”, by Betsy McKay) describes the trials and tribulations that artist Xu Bing went through to obtain the 500,000 cigarettes he needed to create an installation in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Cigarettes are still commonly available –at least in small quantitites– and Xu’s work, “Tiger Carpet” is to be burned, so a conservator some years from now will not have to worry about finding replacement cigarettes. However, Xu’s problems are a reminder for conservators that common materials can one day be difficult to come by.