Category: Conservation in the News

Excerpt from the LA Times, by Christopher Knight

“Mural,” the critically important painting in Jackson Pollock’s development as a major American artist, has arrived in the conservation lab at the J. Paul Getty Museum. A visit Wednesday to see the monumental 1943 canvas, which is in the collection of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, shows why conservation work is imperative.

What the artist called “a stampede” of shapes, lines of force and rhythmic colors across the canvas had a profound effect on American art, sweeping away the nativist ethos of his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton.

But a pronounced sag can now be seen in the center of the painting at the top. Unframed, “Mural” is roughly 8 feet tall and 20 feet wide. The downward weight in the middle is pulling up the bottom edges of the canvas at the right and left. Rather than a wide rectangle, “Mural” is showing modest but clear signs of a broad, downward curve.

What caused the sagging? At some point, a new lining on the back was added to reinforce the canvas. Re-lining, a common procedure, employed a wax adhesive. Given the picture’s size, considerable weight was added to the painting.

Museum conservators will work with scientists at the Getty Conservation Institute to determine how to rectify the problem. They also plan to remove a layer of varnish from the painting’s surface, apparently added in the 1970s, which creates a slight sheen.

Tests will also be done to catalog the paints Pollock employed. It might even be possible to figure out whether the legend that says Pollock painted “Mural” in a single day is valid. Drying times for paint layers, many of which are visibly crisp and clean and plainly were not painted wet-on-wet, might yield clues.

Read the complete article in the Los Angeles Times here.

Excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

We are introduced to van Aelst by what must be one of the most ostentatious of “ostentatious still lifes” and, at 6½ by 5½ feet, one of the largest. “Pronk Still Life With Armor” (c. 1651) is a riot of richly embellished, highly polished metal, cascading from table to elaborately upholstered chair to floor, glowing against a dark background. There’s a breastplate, a helmet surmounted by a golden dragon, a sword and a dagger with lavish scabbards, miscellaneous ornate gold serving pieces, a nautilus cup and more, amid a waterfall of gleaming fabrics and a staggering amount of gold fringe. (There’s also a gold medallion with van Aelst’s monogram, spotted by the National Gallery’s conservator Melanie Gifford, that confirms his authorship; previously the painting was assigned to van Aelst’s fellow pronk specialist, Willem Kalf.) No surprise to learn that this astonishing picture was commissioned by a French aristocrat.

Read the entire article here: The Glitter of a Golden Age

Ken Perenyl, who for almost thirty years painted hundreds of fake 18th and 19th century paintings before he changed to painting reproductions of masterpieces, is quoted in The New York Times (“Forgeries? Call ‘Em Faux Masterpieces“, by Patricia Cohen, July 10, 2012) as saying that he learned the forensics of master paintings by working for a restorer and a frame maker when he was in his twenties. What a sobering thought for the conservator who takes interested young people into his or her studio that one of them might be preparing for a career as a forger rather than for graduate school.

Those of us who are of a certain age were taught in school that classical Greek and Roman monuments and sculptures were pure white in color. Thus, despite the fact that we now know that they were painted with bright colors, it is difficult for some of us to change our mental picture of these monuments.

According to The New York Times (“Technology Identifies Lost Color at Roman Forum“, by Elisabetta Povoledo, June 25, 2012), it was recently discovered through the use of ultra-violet visual absorption spectrometry that the menorah on the Arch of Titus was originally painted a rich yellow color to simulate gold. Now, color will have to be restored to both our mental picture of the Arch and to its digital representation in “Rome Reborn, a three-dimensional digital model of the ancient city.

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The June 28, 2012 issue of The Wall Street Journal featured a conversation/interview with Mark Leonard (“Conservator Restored” by Daniel Grant) who has accomplished the very difficult feat of achieving renown in two fields– painting and conservation. Leonard, who begins his new position as Chief Conservator at the Dallas Museum of Art next week can also look forward to the December 2012 opening of an exhibit of his paintings at the Yale Center for British Art.
Due to the responsibilities of his new job, Leonard says that he will “have to be a Saturday and Sunday painter”. It would be interesting to hear how other artist-conservators balance their duel careers.

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