Author: Rebecca Rushfield

The February 9, 2017 issue of The New York Times contains an interesting article about the plans to move and restore Atlanta’s cyclorama, “The Battle of Atlanta” ( “On a Mission to Save Atlanta’s Civil War Cyclorama”, by Alan Blinder). The article notes that in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the cyclorama underwent a major restoration which bought it “more time before the painting’s quality and appeal began to wane again”. I’m old enough to have been around in the field in 1979- 1981 when Gustav Berger worked on the painting. What a big (and expensive — $11 million) deal that project was! Now, thirty-five years later, it’s time to do it again.

According to an article in the January 30, 2017 issue of The New York Times (“George Washington Plotted Here”, by Judith H. Dobrzynski), after years of planning and conservation work the tent that George Washington used as his office and living quarters during the Revolutionary War has finally been erected in the soon-to-open Museum of the American Revolution . Having spent hundreds of hours readying the tent for display, textile conservator Virginia Whelan is one of the heroes of this project. The other hero is Alex Stadel, the structural engineer who designed the base on which the tent is supported.

An article about Barbara Jatta, the new Director of the Vatican Museums and her plans for the institution in the February 1, 2017 issue of The Wall Street Journal (“An Innovator at the Vatican”,by Francis X. Rocca) devotes good number of paragraphs to conservation. Not only are there eight laboratories and more than 150 full-time and part-time conservation personnel, but the Vatican Museums are at the forefront of the green and sustainable conservation movement, taking steps such as replacing toxic synthetic substances with natural materials. The Vatican, which one associates with tradition, is innovative.

According to an article in the Saturday January 21, 2017 Arts section of The New York Times (“A 1979 Sculpture’s Vanishing Act”, by Randy Kennedy), a 5 foot 2 inch tall sculpture by Pat Lasch which was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in 1979 as decoration for its 50th anniversary celebration, sat for years in the museum’s storage facility where it deteriorated beyond repair and it was eventually discarded. Ms. Lasch who spent months creating the sculpture found this out when she contacted the museum hoping to borrow the piece for her retrospective exhibit at the Palm Springs Art Museum. If the piece had been commissioned after 1990 when the Visual Artists Rights Act was enacted by Congress, whether MoMA would have had the legal right to discard what it purchased as ephemeral decoration and what Lasch considered a work of art would have been a more complex issue.

In the January 19, 2017 issue of The New York Times, Nina Siegal wrote about the discovery using materials analysis that a painting sold by Sotheby’s New York in 2012 was a modern fake and not a work by Parmigianino (“Second Old Master Painting Is Fake, Sotheby’s Says In Lawsuit”). Sotheby’s was required to return the purchase price to the buyer and is suing the consigner for the money he received from the sale . With the new attribution, the painting has lost its monetary value. But has anything changed aesthetically? This incident brings up the difficult question of whether the value of an artwork resides in the name attached to it or in the image

The January/February 2017 issue of AARP Bulletin (a publication for people ages 50 and older) contains an article titled, “10 Jobs Retirees Should Check Out”. The jobs described are fairly realistic and include tax return preparer, ride-hailing driver, and dog walker/pet sitter. A sidebar with the heading “Where the jobs are. The percentage of positions occupied by workers age 55+ in these growing fields” is quite astonishing. Among the fields listed is “museum technicians and conservators” (35%). While the reason why such a large percentage of the conservation work force is older than 55 may be because conservators love their work and don’t want to retire, or it may be because conservators do not make enough money to retire. But it definitely isn’t because a lot of middle aged and older people are entering the field.

At the end of 2016, William L. Hamilton, noticing the many gilded works of art exhibited around New York City looked into the process for creating gilt bronze. He spoke with a number of artisans and attended a meeting of experts held at the Frick Collection on December 12, 2016. He shared some of what he learned in a December 23, 2016 article in The New York Times (“Our Midas Moment” ). His final words on the subject however ignore both the fact that gilded bronze requires conservation maintenance and that gilt objects have often been destroyed for their materials. They are: “If you want your name to rule forever, make it in gilt bronze”.

The Tuesday, December 20, 2016 Science section of The New York Times contains a front page article by Milan Schreuer on a multi-year project to study and restore the “Ghent Altarpiece” (“Uncovering a Master’s Strokes” ). The article discusses how macro-x-ray fluorescence analysis, a technique developed at the University of Antwerp which allows one to observe the paint surface in 3D and see how the layers are structured, is being used to differentiate overpaint from original paint on the panels. It’s a huge, expensive, transformative project. The kind we love to read about and the kind which generates excitement—hence the front page story. But do articles about such projects give the public a distorted picture of the work that the average conservator does?

According to an article by Alina Dizik in the Mansion section of the December 9, 2016 issue of The Wall Street Journal (“The $110,000 Etching in the Bathroom”), as master baths are becoming larger and more important rooms in homes, more people are displaying art in their bathrooms —- including $110,000 etchings by Damien Hirst. While some interior decorators advise their clients to put their art in protective enclosures and some owners install extra ventilation, this trend is likely to create more jobs for conservators as works suffer from the effects of variations in heat and humidity.

“The Factory of Fakes”, a long report by Daniel Zalewski in the November 28, 2016 issue of The New Yorker on how digital technology is being used to create perfect copies of fragile, threatened, or destroyed works of art has already been mentioned in many blogs and Facebook pages. It is a fascinating article that provides a glimpse into an alternate future for conservation. Zalewski writes about a project in which two copies are being made of the Polittico Griffoni, an altarpiece completed in 1473 and dismantled in 1725 and dispersed. One copy will bring together the panels as they are in their present disparate physical states. For the other copy, each panel will have been been digitally restored in such a way that all are in the same condition. He says, “Such a project might be the strongest challenge yet to the idea of physical restoration. If you can create a replica that effectively relays a curator’s hypothesis about what an art work once looked like, why make possibly damaging physical alterations to the original?” If one day all restoration is digital, what will this mean for the education and skill set of conservators? Will conservation training then have only two subject areas: environmental monitoring and control and the manipulation of digital data ?