Author: Ryan Winfield

The MET’s “Portrait of Philip IV” by Velazquez: A year of study and conservation lead to an affirmation of the attributi

A front page article in The New York Times,“Restored, Then Reconsidered, A Met Velazquez Is Vindicated”, discusses how, after a year of study and treatment, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Portrait of Philip IV” has been reattributed to Velazquez almost four decades after it was downgraded to the work of an assistant or contemporary follower. The portait, which was in terrible condition with many layers of yellowed varnish and extensive repaintings, is thought to have been painted by Velazquez as one of several replicas of an official portrait. An acetate tracing of another of these replicas(collection of the Meadows Museum) was used by conservator Michael Gallagher when he positioned and repainted a missing eye.

A detail of the hand after cleaning and before inpainting

10 Tips for Becoming a Conservator

Tip #4: Begin assembling your portfolio early on
I think the term “portfolio” can be confusing to beginning conservators because all of the graduate program websites refer to your portfolio as a collection of studio art (paintings, drawings, etc.). You will need to have photographs of your artwork and/or original pieces to bring with you to interviews, but in addition to that you will be required to create a comprehensive binder showcasing all of your conservation experience: before and after treatment photos, copies of treatment proposals and reports, and documentation of any other preventive conservation projects and research. Altogether, this is what you should think of as your portfolio.

Oftentimes pre-program students will not see a single portfolio until attending the open house of one of the graduate programs; this was the case for me, so I really appreciated the opportunity to flip through ten very different portfolios, and ask the students why they organized them in a particular way. This is one of the reasons I highly recommend attending the open house days. Each school posts on their website when the next open house/portfolio day will be, and you can also email the department administrator to have your name put on the invitation list.

Examples of open houses, from 2010:

UCLA

Buffalo

Winterthur (photo at right)

If you’re unable to make it to an open house, ask your supervisor and other co-workers if they have a portfolio that you can look at—current or not—just to get an idea of what is included as well as how it is formatted. More and more people are posting their portfolios online too, so try googling ‘art conservation portfolio’ and check out the ones that come up. These past students from the UT Austin program were ahead of the curve in posting their portfolios before the program closed.

One thing that makes a portfolio great is visual appeal. Before and after treatment photographs are necessary as documentation, but be sure to also take lots of photos of objects during treatment and of YOU while working. Conservators are used to building portfolios, so they should be more than willing to assume the position of personal photographer for you if you ask nicely.

And remember throughout the whole pre-program process to stay organized so that when you finally get ready to put your portfolio together, you won’t have to scramble to copy reports or find out the names and dates of every piece you’ve treated! It helps to make copies of all written documentation involved with the projects you’re working on as you go along.

Finally, don’t worry about spending a lot of money on the materials for your portfolio; ultimately, the content is what will get you accepted into school or chosen for a job.

Internship at Northwestern Library

Internship at Northwestern

Conservation Intern
Northwestern University Library

Part-time up to 18.75 hours per week, Monday-Friday 8:30am-5:00pm
Temporary position for 3-6 months

Salary: $8.75/hour

Northwestern University Library is offering a pre-program
conservation internship for a period of three to six months. The
Conservation Internship provides practical experience in a busy
academic library conservation lab and is designed to help prepare
applicants to Master’s level training programs in conservation. The
internship is also an ideal opportunity for a Northwestern
University student interested in learning more about the
conservation profession.

The Conservation Intern will develop an understanding of the
functions and responsibilities of a research library conservation
lab working with a variety of library and archival materials.
Through the completion of specific internship projects, the
Conservation Intern will gain bench experience, develop skills in
treatment decision making, and participate in a broad range of
preservation and conservation activities.

The Conservation Intern reports to the Conservation Librarian and
works closely with other Preservation Department conservators
depending on the nature of assigned projects. Internship projects
will include the conservation treatment of a collection of
scrapbooks from University Archives and assisting with an item-level
survey of the Arabic Manuscripts Collection from the Herskovits
Library of African Studies. Treatments are likely to include
surface cleaning, humidification and flattening of paper, mending
paper and filling losses (including aesthetic compensation),
creating appropriate housings, and other treatments. The complexity
of treatments and level of decision making will increase as skills
develop. At the end of the internship, the intern will be required
to produce a written report or presentation of their work.

Qualifications:

Candidates will need to demonstrate hand skills and attention to
detail.

Previous experience in conservation is preferred, but not
required.

Applicants must be U.S. Citizens or eligible to work in the
United States.

Candidates must be enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program or
have completed a bachelor’s degree.

The application deadline is January 31, 2011. The internship will
begin in February 2011. Candidates should indicate desired length
of the internship in their cover letter. Interested candidates
should send a resume and a cover letter to:

Tonia Grafakos
Conservation Librarian
Northwestern University Library
t-grafakos [at] northwestern__edu

AIC Committee for Sustainable Conservation Practices seeking new members

The AIC Committee for Sustainable Conservation Practices is seeking two new professional members to serve on the committee for a 2- year term beginning in May 2011. CSCP provides resources for AIC members and other caretakers of cultural heritage regarding environmentally sustainable approaches to preventive care and other aspects of conservation practice. We provide resources via electronic media, workshops, publications and presentations. Professional members meet approximately once a month via telephone conference to discuss progress of their shared ongoing tasks including editing the AIC Wiki Sustainable Practice Page, research, presentations, and writing articles .

Please submit a statement of interest and your resume to Sarah Nunberg at snunberg [at] aol [dot] com by January 17, 2011.


The Mariners’ Museum conservators restore USS Monitor’s steam engine

NEWPORT NEWS – When Navy divers and NOAA archaeologists recovered the USS Monitor steam engine from the Atlantic in 2001, the pioneering Civil War propulsion unit was enshrouded in a thick layer of marine concretion.

Sand, mud and corrosion combined with minerals in the deep Cape Hatteras, N.C., waters to cloak every feature of Swedish-American inventor John Ericsson’s ingenious machine, and they continued to envelop the 30-ton artifact after nine years of desalination treatment.

Just this past week, however, conservators at The Mariners’ Museum and its USS Monitor Center drained the 35,000-gallon solution in which the massive engine was submerged and began removing the 2- to 3-inch-thick layer of concretion with hammers, chisels and other hand tools.

Working slowly and carefully to avoid harming the engine’s original surface, they stripped off more than 2 tons of encrustation in their first week of work alone, gradually revealing the details of a naval milestone that had not been seen since the historic Union ironclad sank in a December 1862 storm.

….Read the full article as it appears in The Daily Press., with video.

Conservators play a role in the reattribution of art

In “When Overlooked Art Turns Celebrity”, Michael Kimmelman uses the recent reattribution to Pieter Bruegel the Elder of the painting “The Wine of St. Martin’s Day” as a starting point for a discussion of why attributions affect people’s judgement of works of art. In his recounting of how the reattribution of this particular painting came about, Kimmelman notes the examination by conservators which provided the information about materials and techniques which enabled the painting to be linked to Breugel.

[ A detail of the painting

10 Tips for Becoming a Conservator

Tip #3: Take advantage of online resources

If you’re reading this blog then you’re already on the right track! Blogs are generally written as editorials, but contain valuable resources like researched articles, interviews with conservators, or links to other useful sites. And if readers add their own comments (hint hint), you can build a great dialogue between a diverse crowd. Here’s a sampling of some blogs worth visiting: Art:21 Blog, Brooklyn Museum, Dan Cull Weblog, Indianapolis Museum of Art, June and Art, Jeff Peachey.


Social networking sites are wonderful resources for organizing information in one place. Even if you don’t feel like connecting with friends, you can use Twitter and Facebook to network with other professionals or simply check the pages for conservation articles, current news, and links to blog postings. Both sites do more or less the same thing—bring you updates from a variety of people and institutions—but some conservators prefer to tweet than share, or like instead of follow. On either site you will find up-to-date reports from ICCROM, IIC, the University of Delaware and more!


AIC also produces an online news bulletin, on top of the quarterly newsletter sent out by mail. Even if you’re not a member, spend some time perusing the AIC site. You can watch tutorials on chemistry, register for workshops and online courses, and watch a video or two.


Finally, be sure to subscribe to the Conservation Distribution List. Each week an email is sent out listing events, job postings, conservation questions, and general conservation news. Like all of the other websites mentioned, the distlist provides up-to-date information, but it’s all compiled nicely into an email and sent to you. Sign up here.


The greatest thing about all of these resources is that they are open forums that allow you to participate; you can share a link on Facebook, comment on AIC news, or even post your own article on the ECPN blog—and I hope you do!

The Midwest Regional Conservation Guild

If you’ve been reading our 10 Tips for Becoming a Conservator, you know how important it is to get involved with professional organizations. The Midwest Regional Conservation Guild (MRCG) is a great example of a regional group that has a lot to offer, and it exists to benefit conservators like you! I asked the current president, Laurie Booth, some general questions to get an idea of what the MRCG is all about:


1. When and how was the guild founded?

The guild was founded 30 years ago by a group of professionals in the Midwest who felt it was time to form a regional group in order to facilitate a dissemination of information and to represent the needs of Midwest conservators to organizations like the AIC and Heritage Preservation. Our last meeting was dedicated to a history of conservation in our flagship cultural institutions as well as a history of MRCG itself.


2. How many members does the guild have, and who is membership available to?

Membership fluctuates from year-to-year, but ranges from about 70-120 members. The Midwest is loosely defined in our case. We have no restrictions on memberships vis a vis location of our members. We have members from Colorado, Tennessee, New York, Pennsylvania, etc.

We are working on an official discount for student members – please refer to the wiki site where we will post more information on the discount (for meeting fees) when they become formalized. The actual discount will probably vary from meeting to meeting. 3-4 students are given discounts to each meeting but are expected to assist with registration and other duties in exchange.


3. What are the benefits of becoming an MRCG member?

Membership fees include receipt of our semi-annual newsletter and inclusion in the official directory. We have one meeting a year in the fall, sometimes associated with a special workshop that is occasionally opened to allied professionals, but only members are typically allowed to attend meetings, which involve separate fees.

Our meetings are designed to be low-priced and are usually offered at cost to our membership. In the last few years we have begun to offer workshops on such topics as museum storage, art in transit, the conservation of contemporary art, mastering fills, and similar subjects.


4. Does the MRCG have a website?

Our wiki site, set-up by Richard McCoy, objects conservator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, is excellent and provides just about everything you need to know about the Guild and how to join.


5. Finally, what is the most special thing about your guild?

We pride ourselves on being open, friendly, convivial and an excellent place to meet fellow professionals. At our meetings (which tend to be small, typically 30-60 participants) we share information in a multi-disciplinary format that is not readily available at AIC conferences as most specialty group sessions run concurrently. Regional guilds are a great way to get a taste of the various disciplines available to the budding professional and to effectively network with conservators working at the various regional cultural institutions as well as those in private practice.


Thanks, Laurie, for that introduction to the MRCG! I hope our readers will take advantage of your website and contact you if they have any more questions!

NYT reports on the treatment of the Dyer Library & Saco Museum’s ‘moving panorama’ by Williamstown Art Cons. Center

From the New York Times, Dec. 2, 2010:

Victorian theatergoers packed halls to watch canvases roll past. Entrepreneurs would ship paintings of exotic scenery hundreds of feet long to theaters nationwide, and stagehands, as if anticipating animated movies, would slowly reveal section after section of the “moving panoramas.” Pianists supplied uplifting music, and actors’ voice-overs explained the plot.

One of the more successful productions, “Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress,” started making the rounds in 1851. Artists as prominent as Frederic Edwin Church and Jasper Cropsey had designed the images, based on John Bunyan’s 1678 didactic Christian allegory about a family confronting angels and demons at the edges of abysses and castle walls.

Reviews of the panorama were ecstatic. In Charleston, S.C., “the pleasure of witnessing it was enlarged by the presence of about 130 of the Orphan House children, with their shining, happy faces,” a local newspaper reported.

By the 1860s, however, Bunyan’s somewhat ponderous tale of journeys through the “slough of despond” and “valley of humiliation” had gone out of fashion, and a theater owner in Maine let crates of the rolled-up muslin molder in storage. The Dyer Library and Saco Museum in Saco, Me., inherited them in 1896 and rediscovered them a century later. For the last year, restorers at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center in Massachusetts have been working on about 800 feet of fabric stretched out in the hallway and driveway.

“Benign neglect allowed it to survive,” said Thomas Branchick, the center’s director.

The restorers sometimes wore socks to avoid leaving footprints while removing dust, creases and signs of water damage known in the trade as tide lines. Lower portions of the paintings have been left slightly scraped, as evidence of countless unrollings.

“The bottom edge would have dragged on the stage floor,” Mr. Branchick said.

Saco financed the restoration partly with a $51,940 Save America’s Treasures federal grant. The muslin will be shipped home in a few weeks. Digital photographs, taken from a camera on the ceiling, will be spliced together to create a panoramic reproduction that the museum will use in live performances.

Read more here.