Author: Victoria Book Lupia

Excerpts from The Oregonian.

After a lifetime in Italy (except for 15 years at the Louvre in Paris, where she was taken in 1800 as booty from the Napoleonic Wars), [Titian’s “La Bella” has] crossed the ocean from her luxuriant quarters in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence for a brief tour. Following stops at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, she’s taken up lodging through Jan. 29 at the Portland Art Museum, in a second-floor gallery that is ordinarily given over to the display of ancient and classical objects and art.

In the 16th century or the 21st, La Bella is beautiful. For many visitors, that will be enough. For historians and other scholars, who want to know everything about the past and are dauntingly aware that much, probably most, of it will forever be a mystery, the stakes seem higher.

… Titian used this model, or this invented idea of beauty, in several paintings. The face of “La Bella” is also recognizable in his famous reclining nude, “Venus of Urbino,” at the Uffizi in Florence, from 1538; in the bare-shouldered and bare-breasted “Woman in a Fur Coat,” at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, from 1536; and in the same year’s “Woman With a Plumed Hat,” at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

One of the reasons “La Bella” is visiting the United States for the first time is to show off her most recent conservation, which has literally put the blush back in her cheeks.

Titian’s portrait has had the good fortune over the centuries to be cleaned both regularly and carefully — “rather than being subjected to complicated and invasive restorations, the painting has instead been the object of constant maintenance,” Gabriella Incerpi writes in the exhibition catalog — and that meticulousness has made things easier for modern conservators, who seek the least obtrusive ways to strip away the dulling effects of decades of varnish and restore a painting’s original brightness and tones.
The process can be controversial, as the uproar over the gleaming new colors in the Sistine Chapel suggests: In cleaning an old work of art, do conservators also eliminate its history? As Ferriso puts it: “You don’t want to strip away the pigment. On the other hand, you do want to be able to see the painting.”

You can see “La Bella” — beautifully. And, despite the restored brilliance of her colors and the immediacy of her presence, in no way as if she were born yesterday.

Up close, you can glimpse the painting’s craquelure — the tiny patterns of cracking in the oil paint as it gradually shrinks on the canvas — but not overmuch. It ages but does not dilute the painting, which with its restoration has become not so much new as revivified, showing its age in the best possible light.

Whoever she was, “La Bella” has aged well. She’s still a looker.

Excerpt from AJC:

Recently conserved after almost a century-long hibernation in storage, [a mummy] is the star of and impetus for the museum’s “Life & Death in the Pyramid Age: The Emory Old Kingdom Mummy.” Egyptologist Peter Lacovara conveys the historical, religious and geographical context for the prized artifact through tomb objects from the Carlos collection — many acquired with this show in mind — loans, large-scale photographs and informative texts.

The exhibition designers created a particularly dramatic tableau by transforming a gallery doorway into the entrance to a tomb. The visitor walks through it, just as an ancient Egyptian bringing an offering for the deceased would have done, to reach the offering plate (one of the new Carlos acquisitions), which sits in front of an actual “false door” door of a tomb.

Off to one side, a wooden sculpture — a repository for the tomb-owner’s soul — “watches” the proceedings through a backlit slit in the wall.

The video about the mummy’s conservation, definitely a highlight, recounts the lengths to which a multidisciplinary team went to reassemble and secure the severely deteriorated mummy — a prospect a daunted conservator described as the equivalent of piecing together a bag of crushed potato chips.

In some respects, conservation was uncharted territory. The mummy represents a period in which Egyptians were still experimenting with the process and conventions of mummification — before they arrived, for example, at the stiff prone position to which we are accustomed.

It’s fascinating to see how creatively Carlos conservator Renee Stein and colleague Mimi Leveque solved structural problems inherent in putting a 4,000-year-old Humpty Dumpty back together, and how they made use of discoveries Lacovara reported from the field during the process. (Hint: ears and mittens.)

Read the full article here.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal revisits the Watts Towers.  We learned last summer that LACMA has a contract to oversee the conservation of the iconic Watts Towers, but this article by Arnie Cooper starts at the beginning, introducing the Towers’ eccentric artist, Simon Rodia, and speaks with conservation scientist Frank Preusser to uncover details about the construction and ornamentation.  The following is an excerpt:

Rodia worked with no plans or drawings and certainly no permits. He didn’t use nails, bolts or even a simple drill. In the 1957 documentary “The Towers,” made by William Hale, Rodia can be seen bending a piece of steel on the nearby railway tracks. According to Mr. Preusser, Rodia used “everything” to build the structure, including water pipes, chicken wire and welded mesh. “He’d put steel bars together, add some wire mesh and tie it to the structure, put cement around it and then add the ornaments.”

Amazingly, though, the towers are structurally sound, as proved during a much-publicized load-bearing test in 1959. A winch truck exerted a 10,000-pound pull on the tower—to no avail. The structures even withstood the 1987 Whittier and 1994 Northridge earthquakes, with only a slight tilting of one tower noticeable.

“Considering its age and the way it was constructed and the materials used, it’s in remarkably good condition,” says Mr. Preusser, who first got involved with the project back in 1984.

Not that the towers don’t need some work. This involves, says Mr. Preusser, “not only restoring Rodia’s original artwork, but also addressing the three major past restorations.”

Rodia used mostly found or “borrowed” objects as structural elements. The shiny green bottoms of 7-Up bottles figure prominently here. And since Rodia was a tile cutter and setter, visitors will note several specimens from the Malibu Tile company, as well as numbered tiles that had once been catalog material. They’ll also encounter china fragments of every possible shape and color, sea shells, cooking utensils, mirror pieces and larger forms like mortar “gardens,” “the ship” and hearts fashioned out of concrete. There’s even a wall made of slag and frit, the raw materials for making glass.

Ms. Anderson draws our attention to the tower floor, which features lacy designs courtesy of the backs of wrought-iron chairs. Thanks to Rodia’s experience with cement, such impressions extended to the walls, one of which includes imprints of Rodia’s simple tools: a set of wire clippers and various hammers, all artfully assembled amid hose-nozzle “flowers” and the artist’s initials.

“Some of these impressions are still pristine,” says Mr. Preusser, pointing to a wall displaying the pattern left by a straw mat. “This is why we’re saying the state of conservation is still remarkable. Rodia knew how to make a good cement.”