Category: Conservation in the News

“The Custodians”, by Ben Lerner (The New Yorker,  January 8, 2016), begins as an article on how the Whitney Museum determines which works of art cannot be conserved and should be replicated, but shortly turns into a meditation on what it means to be a work of art today, how institutions acknowledge their intervention into the life of works of art, and how our inherited perceptions of what works of art should look like influence what is done to them.  Another  wonderful  New Yorker article. It is becoming my favorite place to read about conservation.

According to an article in the December 20, 2015 issue of The New York Times (“Monuments’ Removal Challenged”), a plan to remove four Confederate monuments, two of which are on the National Register of Historic Places, from New Orleans has been challenged by three preservation organizations and the New Orleans chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Although the suit is based on the issue of whether the land beneath the monuments is publically or privately owned, it contends that the monuments are part of the city’s history and should be protected. Many who pushed for their removal see the monuments as representatives of an offensive ideology. If we are being honest we must acknowledge that many much older monuments that we look at and judge primarily on aesthetic terms are representatives of different offensive ideologies. Perhaps what is needed is to send them all to a museum of offensive monuments.

On December 24th, Hyperallergic, a forum on art and culture, reported on an experiment that is being conducted by “Cards Against Humanity” in which 150,000 people who paid $15 apiece for the privilege of receiving eight mystery gifts during the month of December have, as one gift, been given the opportunity to vote on whether they wish to receive a sliver of a Picasso print–the linocut “Tete de Faune, edition of 50– or to have the work donated to The Art Institute of Chicago (http://hyperallergic.com/263915/150000-people-will-vote-to-preserve-or-pulverize-a-picasso/). If the majority wish to say that they own something by Picasso, then the print will be divided into 150,000 pieces using a laser. While this experiment may be legal, is it wise?

I only read The New Yorker on the subway. Since I haven’t spent much time on the subway recently, I’ve been behind on my New Yorker reading and only just saw John Seabrook’s article, “The Invisible Library” from the November 16^th issue. In it, Seabrook discusses how digital technologies like computerized tomography, x-ray fluorescence imaging, and x-ray phase contrast XRPC) imaging are being applied to the reconstruction of the texts of badly damaged manuscripts, focusing on attempts to have a carbonized papyrus scroll excavated at Herculaneum (in the collection of the library of the Institut de France) brought to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble for XRPC examination. The scroll has not yet been “virtually unwrapped”, but if this is accomplished one day, imagine what amazing possibilities could open up.

A brief note in The New York Times (“A Digital Substitute for a Stolen Caravaggio”, by Elisabetta Povoledo, December 12, 2015) and a longer post in The Daily Mail Online (“Painting Stolen by the Mafia is Resurrected”, by Gian Volpicelli, December 11, 2015) present the news that a team of conservators, computer experts and artists utilizing digital scans of both a photo of that painting and other paintings by Caravaggio, have recreated Caravaggio’s “Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence” which was stolen from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo in 1969. As we welcome the technology (I am sure that each of us can think of a number of works of art for which it could be applied), would I be a cynic to take note of the fact that the reproduction was commissioned by the Sky Television Network which will broadcast “Mystery of the Lost Caravaggio”, a documentary about the process, in 2016?

In the arts section of the November 15, 2015 issue of The New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote about her visit with Museum of Modern Art sculpture conservator  Lynda Zycherman and what she learned from Lynda about the conservation research that preceded the opening of MoMA’s Picasso sculpture show (“Art ‘CSI’: Of Beauty Beneath Picasso”). Smith wrote about seeing “how a professional thinks through a work’s being, tracks physical clues and subjects them to forensic scrutiny and scientific testing, with results that potentially yield new art historical knowledge”.  All in all, Smith presented conservation in a wonderful light. However, while discussing how MoMA’s conservators try to recreate artists’ works to better understand them, she wrote, “chief conservator Jim Coddingham had also tried to recreate Pollock drip paintings—which made newly clear why many forgers start out as conservators”—a statement I find false (at least for American conservators) and insulting to the profession.

In the November issue of “W Art”, a supplement to “W” fashion magazine, there is a feature on women who are transforming American museums (“Who’s Who”, photographed by Peter Ash Lee). Each woman is pictured with a quote. The quote for Anne Pasternak, Director of the Brooklyn museum is: “Every day on the job is a day of discovery. I mean, who knew one of the original Monuments Men was the first conservator.” While her quote makes conservators sound exciting  and any positive mention of conservation in a mainstream publication is a good thing, it’s a shame that she didn’t mention Sheldon Keck by name.

In an interview in the November 2015 issue of Harper’s Bazaar (“The Private World of Patti Smith”, by Joan Juliet Buck), the composer/musician/poet/author Patti Smith spoke about visiting Assisi in 2012 while she was composing “Constantine’s Dream”. “…so I went to Assisi, and the monks took me way up high inside the basilica where they were restoring some of the Giottos. I had to wear a hard hat. They were working on the sky, and they gave me a brush and some paint and said, ‘Please.’ I said, ‘I can’t touch Giotto’s painting.’ They said, ‘It’s watercolor.’ I said, ‘I’m so sorry, Giotto. It’s not my fault…’” Not having heard at the time of this conservation encounter, I checked the contemporary news accounts and saw photos of Smith brush and palette in hand. Smith was sincere in her trepidation about touching the work and this sounds like it was done to gain publicity for the project. Ultimately, was it a wise thing for conservation to imply that a non-professional can be brought in at a moment’s notice to help restore a work of art.

In a long article about how construction projects in Istanbul have been held up for years because of the spectacular archaeological finds that have turned up during the initial excavations (“Letter from Turkey: The Big Dig”, The New Yorker, August 31, 2015), Elif Batuman writes: “In Yenikapi, I visited the makeshift lab where all of these objects are processed by the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. In one trailer, a group of conservators, all women, were restoring small wooden objects.” This all-female conservation lab is far from unique. Where are the men who could be/used to be working in conservation?

According to The New York Times (“Eyeing DNA as a Tool to Ensure Art’s Authenticity, by Tom Mashberg, October 13, 2015), the artist Eric Fischl is one of about three dozen artists, foundations and museums who are advocating an art authentication system that uses specks of synthetic DNA to tag and identify works of art. While this system could be quite useful for works created from here on in, the authentication of older works will still have to rely upon provenance research, subjective expertise, and knowledge about and analysis of materials.