Category: Conservation in the News

In the wealth management section of the September 21, 2015 issue of The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Grant provided a brief primer on what an owner of works of art should know about damage and restoration (“The Delicate Restoration Dance”). Working from the proposition that “…when it comes to protecting the value of one’s art, the manner in which a piece was damaged doesn’t matter. What matters a thousand—perhaps a million – times more is how the owner can go about restoring the piece’s value…”, he discussed the assessment of damage, how medium affects the success of a restoration, and how to find out if a potential purchase has been restored. This might be something to hand out to one’s clients.

When reading “Ancient City Faces Destruction”, by Dana Ballout in the October 6, 2015 issue of the Wall Street Journal, the latest of the seemingly non-stop reports of the destruction of ancient monuments and sites in the Middle East by Daesh (the preferred name for “Isis”), I began to wonder what will happen conservation wise should a time come when there is stability in the region and governing bodies that are not threatened by the existence of the visible remains of a multiplicity of cultures. Will these destroyed sites be reconstructed in some way either physically or virtually? Or will the ruins be left as is because their destruction is an important part of the history of the sites?

According to Eve M. Kahn’s “Antiques” column ( “Repairing a Famous Catch”, The New York Times, September 11, 2015), the L.C. Bates Museum’s twelve foot long preserved marlin (caught by Ernest Hemingway in the Bahamas in the 1930s) will undergo conservation treatment in the museum gallery. Conservation is slow and laborious. Many of the processes are not dramatic or even interesting to the uninformed onlooker.  Whenever I hear about a conservation project done in full view of the public, I wonder what understanding of the conservator’s work will the visitor who watches for five minutes or even an hour take away from the experience.
 

In his beautifully illustrated essay, “History Has No Place”, published in the September 23, 2015 issue of T Magazine (The New York Times’ occasional style supplement), Pico Iyer mourns the forthcoming destruction of several major monuments of Japanese Modernist architecture while acknowledging that because Japan has a culture based on impermanence, the Japanese are less attached to things than to values and do not feel the need to preserve them. (He says, “the Japanese are different from you and me”.) Since this is the case, do American and European conservators have the right to promote their value system worldwide through international conservation organizations?

The Wall Street Journal finds conservators interesting. A number of years ago for its “What’s Your Workout” series, it profiled Jim Coddington, head of conservation at the Museum of Modern Art. Recently, as part of its “What’s in Your Bag” series, it profiled Thomas Roby, a conservator of mosaics with the Getty Conservation Institute (“A Mosaic Expert Packs for Ruins in Tunisia”, by Hilary Potkewitz, August 5, 2015). Fortunately for public outreach, Roby carries two bags– one of which holds his tools– and the reader is told how each item in the bag is used in conservation work.

According to Randy Kennedy, writing in the Inside Art column of The New York Times (“Made Not to Last”,  July 10, 2015), this summer a number of New York City galleries are mounting shows of works painted directly on the gallery walls. When the shows end, the works will cease to exist—either painted over or, in the case of the Andrew Edlin Gallery, demolished along with the building. However, considering the high value of art, one suspects that fairly soon conservators may be called upon to try and recover these murals.

In a recent article about the destruction of monuments and cultural heritage sites by representatives of the Islamic State (“Islamic State Destroys More Artifacts in Iraq and Syria”, The New York Times, July 4, 2015), reporters Rick Gladstone and Maher Samaan note that there is some speculation that the photographs posted by Islamist media outlets of destroyed statues from Palmyra, Syria seized from a smuggler may be of fake statue remains and that the sculptures were smuggled by the Islamic State fighters themselves. Is the resolution of these photos good enough for conservators who are experts in stone to determine from the edges and breaks whether the remains in the photos are old and of the type of stone they should be if the real thing?

According to a story by David W. Dunlap in the July 2, 2015 issue of The New York Times (‘Restoring a Lackluster Sculpture, for Legacy’s Sake”), $40,000 of public funding is being spent to restore “Freedom of the Human Spirit”, a bronze sculpture by Marshall M. Fredericks that has been standing in Flushing Meadows Corona Park since the 1964 World’s Fair. A prime example of mid-20^th century monumental sculpture, the work is now out of fashion and favor. Yet, Jonathan Kuhn, Director of Art and Antiquities for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation is quoted as saying about its restoration, “Our responsibilities as custodians transcend our aesthetic proclivities.” These words could be the conservator’s motto.

It takes years to restore one of the painted caves at Dunhuang, China. Even after restoration, that cave will be endangered by the presence of visitors who raise the temperature, carbon dioxide level, and humidity inside of it. Yet, according to The New York Times (“Plan for Theme Park at Centuries-Old Chinese Caves Rattles Preservationists”, by Edward Wong, June 16, 2015), officials from Gansu Province working with a company in Beijing have developed a plan to build a huge theme park near the caves, bringing thousands more tourists to the already overcrowded site. It would seem that the officials have been swayed by the idea of huge amounts of tourist money and are putting that before cultural heritage.

According to an article in The New York Times’ arts section (“Disputed Painting is Declared a Rembrandt”, by Nina Siegal, June 10, 2015), after eight years of examination and research by its conservators, the Mauritshaus recently declared as an autograph work of Rembrandt its “Saul and David”. The painting entered the museum as a Rembrandt in 1898, but was downgraded to “Rembrandt Studio” in 1969 after the scholar Horst Gerson questioned it. It’s a Rembrandt again and the Mauritshaus has developed an exhibit around the forensic examination of the work.