From Annigoni to Banksy: restorers’ crimes against art and graffitist’s crimes against architecture
In cyber-space, a thousand people a day ask: “Is graffiti an art form or a crime?” Edgar Degas, distraught at the handiwork of picture restorers at the Louvre, once threatened to write a pamphlet of protest that would be “a bomb”. Nearly a century later in Britain, a royal portraitist similarly distraught at the actions of restorers, painted a protest on the doors of the National Gallery. Here, the painter Gareth Hawker, taking graffiti as an art form, examines both the motives and the proclaimed “ethical codes” of those who deface/defile buildings and public spaces, and, the sometimes morally ambivalent responses of the public to such actions.
Gareth Hawker writes:
Colin Martindale developed a theory about the way in which art forms evolve. If he is going to get a place in the history books, each artist must outdo his predecessor. He must produce something more exciting; he must strike the imagination more forcibly. Martindale traced this line of development in many areas, not only in painting and in poetry, where one might expect it, but in the development of gravestones in New England and even in the writing of scientific papers. People seem to crave novelty and thrills. So it should come as no surprise to see a similar pressure at work in yet another art-form, that of criminal damage.
When the form was new, it was easy to outdo predecessors, who had been limited to paint-brushes, chalk and charcoal. The spray-can revolutionised graffiti. Simple slogans could be written with great speed. A tradition emerged. This tradition developed rapidly and soon came to what may be termed its academic stage, where rules were formulated which became widely recognised and accepted amongst practitioners.
I learnt from a television programme that the rules were as follows: 1) The paint cans must be stolen (‘nicked’). 2) The paint must be applied freehand (i.e. without stencils). 3) The surface must be hard to get to – the work must demonstrate that a logistical challenge has been overcome. The artist must show that he is a daring sort of character. 4) The artist should break the law. He should not have permission to spray the surface, whether a wall or the side of an underground train. 5) The work should not incorporate another artist’s work. 6) Painting over another artist’s work may be acceptable, but is generally considered to show “disrespect” and is likely to be frowned on. (The fact that the graffiti artist is himself showing disrespect to the wider community does not seem to figure in these considerations.)
The main purpose initially was to mark out and lay claim to a territory. (“Like a dog pissing on a lamp-post”). The placing of an elaborate signature (tag) could demonstrate that an area was now controlled by the graffiti writer and his pals, not by the police or by the local community. The cleaning off of graffiti was a vital element in the “zero tolerance” approach which police adopted in New York, and which ultimately proved successful in reducing the number of murders in that city. This aggressive cleaning made it clear that the police and the local community now controlled the area, not the graffiti writers and other hoodlums.
However the art form did continue to develop elsewhere. Artists had to find ways in which to make their productions more arousing. In Paris one man [“Blek le Rat“] started to use stencils. This meant he could prepare relatively complicated images at home, in the safety of his own studio, and then use his stencils on site in order to apply complicated images with extreme rapidity. This meant his images were far more interesting to look at than the simple lines and colours which had been used previously.
When Banksy copied this approach in the UK it incensed traditionalists. He was cheating. This is similar to the outcry when Caravaggio started to use big contrasts of light and dark – chiaroscuro. His pictures were more eye-catching than anything before, but the big contrasts of tone made it impossible for the viewer to see the construction of the figures as easily as in previous work. In art there is rarely a gain in one aspect of style without a loss in another. In the case of graffiti art, the gain in recognisability, complexity, humour and wit was matched by an equivalent loss in rhythm, clarity and spontaneity.
Banksy seems to have broken all the rules: 1 His paint is not always stolen (‘nicked’). 2 He uses stencils (cheating). 3 Although he does paint illegally, his work is worth so much that some councils protect it with perspex. As a quasi-acceptable part of the local community, he becomes unacceptable amongst the traditional graffiti writers. In practice, his work is hardly illegal at all. 4 By using stencils he reduced the amount of time he would have had to spend on site if he were to produce an equally complicated image. He was playing safe, not taking as much risk as his predecessors. 5 His work is collected by hedge-fund managers and celebrities who pay high prices. These new clients are the very people whom graffiti was originally meant to scare. Pleasing them represents a complete failure according to the old standards. 6 He partially painted over the work of a predecessor, a classic work of the genre. This shows total disrespect and is extremely offensive to traditionalists. (They seem to see no irony in their position. They are vandals who are furious to see their work vandalised by another vandal. They feel proud to break rules, but hate someone who breaks even more rules than they do. It is an example of very strict honour amongst thieves.)
Graffiti artists are prosecuted from time to time: some of their greatest works are destroyed. Why should Banksy be allowed to get away with it? The man in Camden whose task it is to decide what should be removed and what should be allowed to remain, said he has to make a judgement about how far the graffiti “adds value”. In other words, if the work was by Banksy it might be worth thousands of pounds, but if by another artist, it might be worth less than nothing. It may be worth spending money to get rid of it.
The arbiter in Camden wisely kept away from a discussion about whether graffiti was art. As Gombrich pointed out, many unproductive discussions about the definition of art may be avoided if one substitutes for “art” the word, “skill” – which is the original meaning of the word “art”. The man in Camden has to think about money, not philosophy.
Banksy seems to get away with it because his works are like newspaper cartoons, they raise a brief smile. People seem to be able to accept a great deal as long as there is some humour involved. How far will the public allow this sort of thing to go? Witty old criminals appear on chat shows on the radio, as if they are lovable old rogues, even though they have been convicted of torture and murder. Presumably the same spirit applies to graffiti. People will forgive a rich man many things, particularly if he makes them laugh and is not too close to home. He can get away with a lot more than a poor man who is boring and lives next door.
What would you do if Banksy sprayed your wall? Naturally you would want to cash in, just as if someone stole your expensive paintings you would be prepared to pay a ransom to get them back. But this would only encourage other graffiti artists to paint other people’s walls, and other thieves to steal yet more paintings. Is it reasonable to let a criminal off just because he makes you smile and because you might profit from his crime?
Not all of us find the jokes very funny anyway. I myself like plain old walls undistorted by graffiti. The brick walls seen from the train on the way into Liverpool Street Station used to have a lovely colour and patina – a sombre grandeur. Their intact surface was ruined by graffiti. This was eventually painted over in one solid dense colour. This is better than graffiti, but its surface is dull and unresponsive to the light compared to that of the old brickwork. Cleaning off graffiti can never bring back the original surface. “Something is always lost,” as Nicholas Penny once said of cleaning paintings at the National Gallery (where he is currently in charge).
If the issues are serious, it could be argued that breaking the law can be morally justifiable. When, in 1970, Annigoni wrote MURDERERS on the front of the National Gallery, he was not laying claim to territory, nor was he making a joke. He was trying to draw attention to the destruction wrought inside that building. His protests, and those of other eminent artists, had been ignored and he was desperate. And again his protest met with silence. Annigoni’s graffito had failed. The destruction continued, as the gallery’s own before and after restoration photographs demonstrate.
(For the artist’s earlier, entirely law-abiding but unavailing protest – Letter from Pietro Annigoni published in The Times, 14 July 1956 – see the “Appendix” of our 20 April post.)
Gareth Hawker
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Dicing with Art and Earning Approval
Since Monday the Goyas and the Canalettos of the National Gallery’s rooms 38 and 39 have received half of their previous levels of surveillance. Warders are being made responsible for two rooms instead of one. The gallery contends that its rolling programme of reductions will improve surveillance, on a belief that perambulatory warders will be more alert and effective as “policing” presences than ones who combine sedentary supervision with opportunities to congregate and chat at the ends of their respective galleries.
The fact remains that halving staff coverage halves the quantity of surveillance in galleries whether or not its quality improves marginally or even significantly. The most alert and attentive persons cannot be in two places at once. They have only a single pair of eyes. They cannot see through walls or screens. Despite such intractable realities and inevitable “incidents” (on the expectation of which conservation staff are on permanent stand-by), the Gallery has claimed an endorsement of its arrangements from the National Security Adviser who works for the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives). Soon after the National Security Adviser had approved the National Gallery’s reductions, a double act of vandalism occurred. On July 16th (as we reported on July 20th, and the Guardian today discusses), two Poussin paintings were attacked and defaced in a room where the warder was also responsible for the adjacent gallery. Apart from a terse National Gallery statement, near silence has been maintained.
We also cited an artist visitor to the Tate who, on complaining to a warder about people standing in front of paintings while having their photographs taken, was told that this is now allowed because staff cut-backs make it impossible to enforce gallery rules. If that is the case – and a second source now reports the same disturbances at the Tate – does this new arrangement also have the approval of the National Security Adviser? When in July 1994 the Tate lost two Turner paintings loaned to a gallery in Frankfurt that shared its premises with a music college and had no perimeter defences, it issued a self-exculpatory press release:
“The Tate and other British national collections have previously lent works to the Schirn Kunsthalle without incident… Built in 1984 the Schirn Kunsthalle is fitted with modern alarm systems to detect both intruders and fire. It is approved by the National Security Adviser for loans from British galleries…”
On the day of that apologia (29 July 1994) the Tate’s Director of Programmes, Sandy Nairne, visited the gallery and was promptly told by the Frankfurt police “Your pictures have been taken hostage”. He soon learned that Serbian gangsters had employed thieves to take the paintings and that Frankfurt has a Serbian mafia which runs the city’s red light district and associated crimes. He learned that the theft was an inside job with masked men overpowering the night guard just after he had shut the front door as fourteen security staff (employed by a Frankfurt security firm) had departed and just before he was due to turn on the alarm systems. Nairne ruefully retraced the guard’s steps from the door:
“I saw the onward route taken by the guard, surrounded, so it appeared to me, with places where thieves might hide after closing time – the back stairs? Behind partitions on the mezzanine? An entry point from the sister institution, the music school? Any of these seemed workable as places from which to launch an internal attack. It was already clear that this theft was of a kind known as a ‘stay-behind’. ”
Whether or not the National Security Adviser evaluates buildings’ interiors in such an attentive manner or does so on paper submissions alone, the possibility of “stay-behinds” will likely be present in National Gallery minds: one of the paintings which this week became subject to NSA-approved semi-surveillance – Goya’s portrait bust of the Duke of Wellington (see Fig. 1) – was a victim of a “stay-behind” theft at the gallery on August 3rd 1961 while left hanging on a screen facing the main entrance.
The Goya was held for four years, the Tate Turners for six and eight years respectively. The recovery of the first Turner was kept secret and the painting was hidden to be produced at a Good News press conference on the (expected) recovery of the second painting. Learning of an imminent newspaper story on the recovery of the painting from Serbian criminals, the Tate produced a press statement, in the name of the director, which misleadingly implied that no knowledge existed of the paintings’ whereabouts and that no negotiations were taking place. Because the Tate was in fact engaged in protracted negotiations about the mechanisms of buying back the paintings for the full £3.1m ransom demanded by the Serbians, the gallery and the Metropolitan Police pursued a joint policy of secrecy and disinformation. It has been revealed that in the Tate’s “recovery operation” no serious attempt was made to catch the criminals holding the paintings – the aim being to get the ransomed pictures back at all costs. Has the National Security Adviser taken a view on the advisability and security ramifications of a national museum that is a registered charity using charitable monies to pay a £3.1m ransom to criminals? If criminals appreciate that museums are now prepared to pay ransoms at 13.4% of insurance payouts might we not expect an increase in thefts?
Shortly after the National Gallery displayed the recovered Goya at a crowded and joyous press conference on 24 May 1965 it received from the police what its director, Philip Hendy, termed “the very embarrassing news” that the thief had turned himself in and would “probably have to be charged”. The news was indeed embarrassing: how to explain the fact that a single portly northern unemployed man of almost pensionable age was able (on his account) to leave through an open lavatory window adjacent to a builder’s ladder in the back yard, while carrying a framed painting that had just been purchased for the gallery and the Nation at great expense and with enormous publicity and fanfare? The thief was charged and, after a highly newsworthy trial, acquitted of stealing the painting but convicted of stealing and destroying the picture’s frame. (On the theft’s legal ramifications – British theft laws were changed as a result of it – see the current History Today.)
The National Gallery disputed the thief’s claimed time of theft on the grounds that the alarm system was said by its security staff to have been on at the time. It could only have been taken, staff insisted, during a very brief period before the alarm had been activated. If so, that too would likely have been an “inside job” as well as a “stay-behind”. Nonetheless, the gallery learned its lesson and increased the numbers of warders. It has not (so far as we know) had another theft since. Odd corners that had carried pictures were no longer allowed to do so and screens used to carry additional pictures were removed. Moreover, the director admitted that even if some subsequent misdemeanours appeared to have been “incited by irresponsible press men, the Press as a whole is doing no less than carrying out its responsibilities in reporting crimes and anti-social acts”.
The theft was reported in the gallery’s 1962-64 and 1965-66 Annual Reports which, by coincidence, contained news of two then recent purchases that were both to suffer catastrophic damage at the gallery: Beccafumi’s panel painting “Marcia” (see right), and Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Cartoon – his working study for the Louvre’s painting “The Virgin and Child with S. Anne and S. John the Baptist”.
In the 1962-64 Report the director spoke of pressures to lend the gallery’s Leonardo drawing – “the costliest and at the same time the most delicate of it acquisitions”. That now more than five centuries old drawing is to be subjected to needless risks in an act of inter-museum horse-trading. In exchange for the Louvre’s newly announced preparedness to lend its version of Leonardo’s “Virgin of the Rocks” to join the National Gallery’s version in the forthcoming Leonardo blockbuster exhibition, the Cartoon will then go to the Louvre to be shown next to the painting for which it was a preparatory study. This swap is celebrated in a National Gallery press release as an historic and “extraordinary collaboration between the National Gallery and the painting department of the Louvre”. No celebratory release was issued by the gallery last September when a Denis Mahon painting, Guercino’s “The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple”, was damaged by a visitor and had to be removed for three days for conservation treatment. No press release was issued three years ago when the Gallery dropped and smashed its Beccafumi panel.
We cannot suppress the thought that this last-minute swap – which adds another Leonardo to the already fate-tempting concentration of his works to be assembled for the forthcoming blockbuster exhibition – might be being hoped to be seen as an endorsement of the National Gallery’s safety record at a time when the new Board of the Princes Czartoryski Museum in Krakow is reconsidering its earlier decision (made against the advice of leading Polish scholars and conservators) to lend Leonardo’s “The Lady with an Ermine” to that exhibition.
In any event, there is a great asymmetry in the relative vulnerabilities of the two loans. The Louvre painting was transferred from its original panel to canvas in 1806. That transfer was performed badly but with the consequence that the surviving paint remains locked into an embrace with the canvas by a permanently too-hard glue. The Cartoon is a work of the utmost delicacy consisting largely of flimsy traces of charcoal and chalk that adhere to the surface of the paper.
No National Security Adviser, no museum curator, no conservator and no art insurance underwriter – can guarantee to works of art either complete safety in transit, or stable environments throughout their multi-vehicle, international travels. Nor can it be assumed that today’s ever-increasing velocity of art trafficking between museums will never produce a catastrophe. Underwriters are already fearful. Robert Hiscox, chairman of Hiscox Ltd has admitted that:
“In insurance underwriting you have to balance your books and there is no way we are getting in enough overall premium income to cover what will one day be an enormous loss when an aeroplane full of valuable art crashes, let alone if it lands on MOMA.”
In 1991 Hiscox put the risks for loaned works as being ten times higher than for works left at home. More recently the insurers AXA put the risk at six times greater. With the irreplaceable and peerless Leonardo Cartoon, the risks of travel should have been judged too horrendous to contemplate by any responsible National Gallery curator. In 1963 an international investigative committee composed of leading conservators, drawings curators, and five National Gallery officials, concluded that this drawing, which is composed of eight sheets of ancient paper glued along their overlapping edges, was “weakened by a highly acidic condition making it brittle and fragile”. Those experts could not “envisage the possibility of strengthening the support to such an extent that the Cartoon will ever be fit to travel.” They highlighted a particular vulnerability:
“Humidity variation is the chief cause of movement within the structure of the Cartoon. Every time the humidity changes, such a moisture-sensitive object expands, contracts or warps; and eventually such movement causes cracking, breaking, detachments of small pieces etc.”
During 1962 the Leonardo Cartoon had been displayed on a screen at the National Gallery while an appeal was made for purchase funds. On June 27th 1962 a man threw a bottle of ink at the drawing. He had a second bottle of ink in a pocket but “before he extracted it he had been seized by an Attendant.” On the 26th of July he was found unfit to plead at the central criminal Court and detained indefinitely. The ink was not spilt but the drawing’s Perspex shield cracked and caused “a chain of scratches about 12 inches in total length and the cutting away of the paper in one very small area.” The Perspex was replaced with a double plastic screen, the first being 1 inch thick.
Since then the work has undergone a major restoration following an attack by an unemployed ex-soldier who entered the National Gallery with a concealed sawn-off shotgun on July 17th 1987. Five minutes before closing time he stood directly in front of the drawing and blasted it with his shotgun, shattering its (by that date) strengthened-glass protection. He, like the man who spray-painted the two Poussins on July 16th, made no attempt to move off or to resist arrest. He was later judged unfit to plead in a court of law, sparing the gallery the embarrassment of a trial. The subsequent restoration of the Cartoon was quietly celebrated in the gallery’s 1989 Technical Bulletin as a miracle of patient technical ingenuity and resourcefulness – which it certainly was – but (characteristically) no attempt was made compare the most damaged area of the drawing after the “restoration” with its appearance before the shooting, and thereby evaluate its artistic as well as its conservation consequences (see right). The most remarkable and eloquent feature of this series of technical studies was the account of the utterly nightmarish fragility of the drawing’s condition given by the then head of Conservation, Martin Wyld. No one who has read his detailed explanation of why it is not safe to undertake even the most otherwise urgent conservation measures, can be in any doubt that this must be the least suitable work in the Gallery to go on a jaunt to Paris – see opposite. We would urge the gallery to reconsider its decision. We expected better of the present director – who has, himself, written eloquently in the recent past of the perils of movement for works of art.
Art and the maintenance of its integrity should be the driver of museum policies. It is wickedly irresponsible of EU bureaucrats to be encouraging inter-museum loans as a means of job-creation, and then to claim of travel-injured works that:
“…in many cases, after the exhibits have been restored, only experts can assess the alteration resulting from the damage. The restored artworks can therefore be exhibited as they are.”
We deceive ourselves if we believe that modern, scientifically assisted restorers can make good any injury that might arise. They cannot, as the best of them will admit. The fifteenth century is not ours to remake – and we should not put what little survives of it at needless risk. This should be appreciated at the National Gallery where Beccafumi’s panel, “Marcia”, was recently dropped and smashed during “de-installation” from a temporary exhibition that had – like the forthcoming Leonardo show – attracted more loans than expected. That panel is now considered too fragile to be loaned outside the gallery – but compared with Leonardo’s Cartoon it is in rude good health. After its recent hasty restoration, it has been relegated to the reserve collection which is open to the public for only a few hours each week. Sad though this, it is a better fate than being on the road – or than being on the floor.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Such variations make more difficult any comparative “before” and “after” restoration evaluations of the area of the Virgin’s breast that was most damaged in the shotgun attack. It is also a matter of regret that the gallery so rarely publishes side-by-side directly comparable records of pre- and post-restoration treatments.
Lucian Freud’s blast against picture restorers, and a fellow painter’s note of appreciation
In his book “Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud”, Martin Gayford reports that Neil MacGregor, when director of the National Gallery, “often met Lucian Freud wandering around there in the evening, and learned a lot from him because he sees as an artist. This is quite different from the angle of an art historian.” Unfortunately, there is one lesson that Mr MacGregor might appear not to have learnt from Lucian Freud.
Few of the artists who enjoy the privilege of being able to visit the National Gallery after hours, alone or with a few friends, have attacked the gallery’s picture restorers publicly, but it so happens that the late Lucian Freud was one who bit the hand that indulged him. We can thank Martin Gayford for putting Freud’s condemnation of the National Gallery’s and other restorers on the record in his account of a visit they made to an El Greco exhibition at the gallery in February 2004:
“It is a slightly eerie experience being almost alone in this place that is usually so packed. LF is struck by the great sense of reality of certain works – the St Louis from Paris, the boy with a lighted coal from Edinburgh, the wonderful portrait from Boston (but not its horrible frame). But overall, he is disappointed. He is particularly upset by the slick, glossy, over-cleaned, over-bright appearance of many of the works (including, sadly, St Martin). ‘I have never seen so many completely fucked-up pictures. Sometimes I feel I could almost name the Winsor and Newton white the restorer has used.’ LF is highly conscious of a painting’s physical constitution. He is already thinking, he says, about how his own works will age through time, and wishes restorers would allow ‘old things to look old’. He was utterly infuriated, years ago, by the effect of restoration on Piero di Cosimo’s Satyr Mourning over a Nymph (c.1495), in the National Gallery, which was previously a painting – with reclining nude, tender mourning faun and attendant dogs – he loved.”
This condemnation is notable for two reasons. First, Freud was demonstrably right (see below and right). Second, as a great modern painter, he gives the lie to the common restorers’ slur that their artist/critics mistake dirt and old varnish for original paint and are romantic traditionalists who cannot adjust their prejudices to the “reality” that old master paintings, when properly scrubbed, are just like modernist paintings – i.e. brighter, cleaner, thinner and flatter. Freud, on any reckoning, was no such creature: although working entirely and un-apologetically as a figurative painter, his means were (in the tense we must now sadly use) both personal and products of no age other than our our own. They were radical and fully cognisant of the wherefores of modernist picture-making – being, as John Wonnacott so perceptively and elegantly describes below, a kind of locally applied “analytic” cubism. And Martin Gayford quotes Freud’s own precise warning that an “excessive reverence for the art of the past would be, I imagine, completely crippling.”
Anyone who possesses a particular couple of books can gauge the error of the National Gallery’s picture cleanings and “restorations”. In 1938 the gallery’s then director, Kenneth Clark, published a fine book of black and white photographs of details from pictures in the gallery (“One Hundred DETAILS from Pictures in the National Gallery”). Those photographs were of very high quality and had been taken for scientific rather than aesthetic purposes. In 1990, the gallery re-published Clark’s book but, this time, with recent colour photographs. In a foreword to the new edition, Neil Macgregor wrote that in 1938 the National Gallery’s pictures were “among the dirtiest in the world”. (There is surely a study to be made of the almost pathological disposition of those commentators who equate evidence of aged materials in pictures with dirt.) MacGregor acknowledges that while Clark complains in some of his commentaries of pleasure lost as a result of the interposition of “discoloured varnish or […] clumsy retouchings”, he remained fearful of “what might be found if the golden veils of dirt and varnish were ever to be removed.” Clark had good reason to be fearful: his then recent cleaning of Velazquez’s full length portrait of Philip IV of Spain (the “Silver Philip”) had – rightly – unleashed a firestorm of criticism and controversy.
Mr MacGregor acknowledges that following the wholesale cleanings that took place at the gallery after the Second World War, many pictures were now “different in critical respects” from the paintings about which Clark had written. It might be tempting to take the phrase “different in critical respects” as a MacGregor-esque euphemism for Freud’s “completely fucked-up”, given that he acknowledged that readers possessing both editions of the book “will decide how much is gain, how much loss” as a result of those cleanings. Alas, from that point onwards, Mr MacGregor seems to have lashed himself to the mast of the Good Ship Conservation and kept private any reservations that he might have had about picture restorations.
Clark’s book paired photographs of similar subjects taken from pictures by different artists and eras. The two details published of the Piero di Cosimo of which Freud lamented, his “A Mythological Subject” (or “Satyr Mourning over a Nymph”), were paired with pictures of Rubens, in the case of Piero’s faun, and Hogarth (a cat from his “The Graham Children”), in the case of Piero’s portrayal of a dog. Clark appended this note on the latter:
“Hogarth enjoyed painting this cat so much that the Graham children look hollow and lifeless beside her. She is the embodiment of cockney vitality, alert and adventurous – a sort of Nell Gwynne among cats. Her vulgarity would hardly be noticeable, were she not confronted by the noble silhouette of Piero’s hound who regards her with the gravity of an antique philosopher. The novelist Paul Bourget, when asked what the English critic Walter Pater looked like, replied: ‘Il ressemblait à un amant de Circe transformé en dogue.’”
To appreciate the changes wrought on that hound and a nearby pelican, see Figs. 1 to 6, right. The colour photographs published in the 1990 edition are here shown in greyscale so that like may be compared with like for the purposes of easier and more revealing comparisons.
Michael Daley
A Reflection on the painting of Lucian Freud by the painter John Wonnacott:
I am told that on the blogosphere, I am yet again misquoted as saying that Lucian Freud couldn’t “compose” a picture for toffee. I am no more interested than was Lucian in rearranging objects to make art. What I actually said to the late Bruce Bernard over a bibulous Soho lunch for the Sunday Times colour supplement some twenty years ago was that Lucian couldn’t “design” a painting for toffee. We were talking only of his great late nudes. By contrast, an early head like the John Minton could hang next to Van der Weyden, with its delicate surface and clarity of design. When Bill Coldstream, Lucian’s contemporary and equal, made a paint mark in response to appearance it was related immediately to every other mark on the surface, leading the eye from edge to edge of the picture; that is, drawing as design. Lucian’s brush marks were related directly only to others within the particular object of his scrutiny. As Bruce Bernard went on to quote me: no one else could paint so intensely and so powerfully within the figure.
Never the less I was wrong.
Lucian, as Martin Gayford records in his book the “Man with a Blue Scarf”, always worked standing up so that he could dart backwards and forwards from his easel to subject particular objects to closer observation. In the grandest of the late images, different areas of the painting would be created from different viewpoints, different angles, different distances. These areas seem to crash in to each other, along surface fault lines that I at least find visually exhilarating. Whether this is design or anti-design matters not, it is brilliant and original.
I have been asked to compare Lucian Freud’s approach to painting a Royal Portrait with my own. When I was commissioned to paint the Royal Family I virtually lived in the Palace for a year, trundling my easels and materials, Spencer-like, from the “artist studio” right round to the White Stateroom where Lavery had made his equally large 1913 painting, of George V and family. I drew and redrew the room as the central subject of my design, only occasionally meeting my Royal sitters, about seven hours with each, on different sittings, allowing their figures to grow from and into my design. In Martin’s book we see Lucian standing some two metres from the Queen with a tiny canvas on a simple radial easel. He had the courage to deal with even so eminent a figure just as he dealt with every other human being: to quote his own words, “zoologically”.
Asked what his Royal sitter had thought of John Wonnacott, I regret to pass on the disappointingly minimal – – – – “scruffy”!
John Wonnacott’s magnificent portrait group of the Royal Family is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, where, since the arrival from the Tate of Sandy Nairne, as director, it has been consigned to the reserve collection. It can, however, be viewed on request.
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Attacked Poussins at the National Gallery
As Donald Rumsfeld might have said, in even the best and most conscientiously administered museums and galleries, “incidents happen”. When the incident is an assault on a work of art, museums have traditionally sought to play down the event for (legitimate) fear of triggering copycat attacks. In an age where every other museum visitor owns a mobile phone with a camera, that is no longer an option. The Observer’s apparently exclusive report on the spray-paint attack on two Poussin paintings at the National Gallery on Saturday generated instant and world-wide coverage (see Fig. 1). Some British art commentators unhelpfully responded by spelling out how vulnerable paintings are at such locations in the National Gallery. One over-heated newspaper art critic blogger effectively commended the location in the gallery to would-be vandals wishing for a quick unobtrusive exit. A blogger from a west end gallery then echoed and highlighted this vulnerability with a diagram showing the gallery layout and the warding point. The art historian and Poussin specialist, David Packwood, responded more judiciously on his blog Art History Today and pointed out that:
“Sadly, this isn’t the first time this painting [“The Adoration of the Golden Calf”] has been the target of vandals. In 1978, a lunatic slashed the canvas with a knife, and this serious damage resulted in restoration. I’m just wondering if this nutter knew of the earlier attack and wanted to replicate it, albeit with a different weapon.”
In a May 1998 visit to the National Gallery we discovered that many paintings had been removed from a wall that bore large water stains in the then new French rooms (see Fig. 4). A phone call to a newspaper established that no word had arrived of the incident (an overnight downpour that had overwhelmed the gutters). Although one blogger reproduced a statement issued by the gallery on last week’s Poussin attack, last September an (accidental) injury to another important religious painting went, so far as we know, un-reported.
The National Gallery is presently reducing warding coverage because of funding cuts and is doing so in an age of growing visitor numbers and declining standards of public behaviour. We understand that the room in which the Poussin attack occurred was unusually busy because of heavy rain last Saturday and that the warder responsible for it was also responsible for the adjacent gallery. It should be said that although there is opposition within the National Gallery to the policy of doubling up the number of rooms warders must supervise, this problem seems to extend beyond the gallery. We learn that the day before the Poussin attack, an artist visitor to the Tate who complained to a warder about people standing in front of paintings while having their photographs taken, was told that this is now allowed because staff cut-backs make it impossible to enforce the gallery’s own rules.
What makes the recent attack a matter of especially acute sensitivity for the National Gallery is the fact that in November an unprecedentedly large group of borrowed Leonardo paintings are due to arrive for a temporary exhibition. As described before, the loan of one of these paintings, the already air-miles rich “The Lady with an Ermine” (see Fig. 2), has been and is being vehemently opposed by leading scholars and conservators in Poland and we have responded to their appeal to help draw international attention to their opposition (see Fig. 3).
We have also recently reported that in the European Union, a great increase in such loans is being sought by restricting insurance cover to the time that paintings are in transit, on the contention that once pictures arrive at their loan destinations, they are as safe as they would be if left undisturbed at home. But, that ignores the risks run during hectic exhibition installations and the even more hectic “de-installations”. Again, as we have reported, it is only three years since the National Gallery’s own Beccafumi panel “Marcia” was dropped and smashed when being removed from a temporary exhibition at the gallery (see Fig. 6). Insurance cover was not involved but the consequence of the accident was that after repair and retouching, the picture and its undamaged sister panel (“Tanaquil”) were not returned to the main galleries but were instead consigned to the gloom of the gallery’s reserve collection which can be accessed by the public for only a few hours each week.
That accident was disclosed on the gallery’s website and, after we covered it in our journal, a copy of a report on the incident and photographs of the smashed painting were made available to us. There was no cover-up, but the damage done is forever. Any movement of a fragile Renaissance panel constitutes a risk. Unnecessary movements constitute unnecessary risks. Unnecessary movements that are made in defiance of the best and most responsible expert curatorial and conservation advice (as with Leonardo’s “Lady with an Ermine”) constitute reckless and irresponsible risk-taking. To send that painting to London and then to Berlin and then to Madrid would be to triplicate irresponsibility with a jewel of a proud nation’s patrimony.
Notwithstanding the European Union’s madcap money-crazed ambitions to shuttle an ever-increasing stream of artworks around the continent, the continuing risks are fully recognised by the people who insure the works. The already high insurance cost of loans threatens to become higher – and for a chilling actuarial reason. In the context of two Turner paintings that were stolen in 1994 for a princely multi-million pounds ransom by a gang of what the former Paymaster General, Geoffrey Robinson, described as “particularly nasty Serbs” when loaned by the Tate Gallery to a museum in Germany, the art insurance underwriter, Robert Hiscox, recently admitted to the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Sandy Nairne, that:
“In insurance underwriting you have to balance your books and there is no way we are getting in enough overall premium income to cover what will one day be an enormous loss when an aeroplane full of valuable art crashes, let alone if it lands on MOMA.” (See Fig. 7.)
ArtWatch has appealed in the past to the authorities not take unnecessary risks with irreplaceable and fragile historic works of art – whatever the profits and temporary benefits. We have yet to be heeded but not many years ago museum conservators’ advice against loaning fragile pictures was acted upon:
“Our primary responsibility is to act as the guardians of the paintings we buy or are entrusted with by gift or loan. Masterpieces should not be put at unnecessary risk in the temporary interest of policy (as when the French Government sent the “Mona Lisa” to America and Tokyo, or the Vatican dispatched the Michelangelo “Pietá” to New York), profit, patriotism, scholarship or pleasure… stimulated by increased knowledge of the dangers involved in movement and changes of light and humidity, our attention has been focussed more sharply than ever in the last decades on the vulnerability of works of art.”
That eloquent testimony was published in 1975 in the annual report of…the National Gallery. The example of Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” (- see Fig. 8 ) proved prescient: it was disclosed only recently and half a century after the event that the painting had been drenched overnight in an undetected incident when a faulty sprinkler system went off within the otherwise absolutely secure vault of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Incidents really do still happen.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Leonardo, Poussin, Turner: Three Developments in London and Krakow
There have been extremely dramatic developments this week in connection with two of our campaigns. On 13 December 2010 we supported an appeal (see Fig. 2) from scholars and conservators in Poland who opposed the lending of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” to a forthcoming blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery in November 2010 to February 2012. (We published a photograph of a National Galley painting that was recently dropped and smashed when being taken down from a special exhibition at the National Gallery – see Fig. 3. Today, the Observer reports the vandalism of a Poussin painting yesterday at the National Gallery – see Fig. 4. The Poussin was attacked at the gallery in 1978. The National Gallery, we understand, is presently considering reducing the number of its warders.) That appeal from Poland and our support for it, was reported in the Observer of 12 December 2010. We were subsequently attacked in personal and organisational terms by Count Adam Zamoyski, the board chairman of the Czartoryski Museum, which owns the Leonardo. To those attacks (and almost identical ones made by the Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones) we responded in a post of 29 December 2010.
On Thursday this week (14 July 2011) it was reported that, “in order to improve the functioning of the Foundation of the Czartoryski Princes and to assure the correct collaboration with the National Museum in Krakow,” Prince Adam Karol Czartoryski, heir to the collections of the world-renowned Czartoryski Museum, has approved the dismissal of the enterprise’s entire management board, including its chairman, Count Adam Zamoyski.
Last Monday (11 July 2011) we reported the electrifying disclosures contained in Sandy Nairne’s forthcoming book on the recovery of two stolen Turners (“Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners”). Today, the Independent on Sunday examines the deal by the Tate and the insurers of its stolen Turners that was brokered by the then Labour Government’s Paymaster General, Geoffrey Robinson (“The stolen Turners, the Serbian underworld, and a £24m insurance job”). As the paper’s Matthew Bell writes, the deal was one “in which the Tate received a £24m payout but then kept most of the money” when the paintings were recovered, in order to help the funding of Tate Modern.
It is further reported that the insurer, Robert Hiscox, describes that payout (a “£22 million bonanza” according to Geoffrey Robinson) as having been a “good deal for the country, but a terrible deal for us”. Admitting that he had acted out of his love of art and a wish to help the Tate, Mr Hiscox (quite sensationally) claims that at the time the help was given, “We knew who had the paintings”. Can that be the case?
Mr Hiscox has explained that although this knowledge had been gained, the insurers had believed that the paintings “would be in a rotten condition by now” when, in fact, as a Tate press release of 20 December 2002 (“Tate’s stolen Turners are recovered”) put it, both paintings were “in good condition” when recovered.
In his forthcoming book Sandy Nairne claims or implies that Geoffrey Robinson had been in error to contend that the two Turners were known to been stolen by “a group of particularly nasty Serbs”, and to have “misleadingly (indeed mistakenly)” stated that the insurance money had been needed for building Tate Modern. This would seem to be another very finely nuanced grey zone because, on Nairne’s own forthcoming account, the Tate (on the initiative of its Director of Finance and Adminstration, Alex Beard) had sought to unlock the “dormant” stolen Turners’ insurance £24m payout, precisely so as to “enable building projects to proceed in connection with Tate Modern and the galleries at Tate Millbank.”
As the Independent on Sunday reports, Mr Nairne publishes a press statement drafted in November 2000 when one of the paintings had already been recovered. It read:
“There has been much speculation over the years about the whereabouts of the two paintings by J. M. W. Turner stolen in Frankfurt in 1994. And like the authorities in Germany, the Tate has always been interested in serious information which might lead to their recovery. But currently there is no new information, nor are there any current discussions being conducted. Of course I remain hopeful that one day the paintings might return to the Tate. – Nicholas Serota, Tate Director.”
Matthew Bell writes “Sir Nicholas’s office denies that he had misled journalists, adding that the draft statement was never released to the press.” The Tate director’s office explained that:“At the time this statement was drafted the recovery was at a critical stage, which is why the wording in this draft was deliberately obscure”; and added, “As with all press statements it would have been reviewed and revised in response to specific questions received from a Journalist.”
A spokesman for Mr Nairne is reported to have said yesterday:
“After eight years of not being able to talk about the operation to recover the Turners, Sandy just really wanted to get it off his chest.”
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Questions and Grey Answers on the Tate Gallery’s recovered Turners
In a doomed attempt to persuade us that, if properly looked at, black can be white at the Tate Gallery, Sandy Nairne has performed a considerable public service. His forthcoming book “Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners” (which we review in the September/October Jackdaw magazine) will prove an important, landmark work. Ironically, had the Tate’s long-serving director, Nicholas Serota, not passed over his loyal deputy, Nairne, when appointing the first head of Tate Modern, the book would not have been written and we would not have gained so electrifying a glimpse into the workings of the Tate’s controversial management culture. In Nairne’s remarkably frank and informative account of his own central, eight years-long role in the recovery of the Tate Turner paintings which had been stolen in 1994 from a German museum (on the day when they had been dispatched without a Tate courier – see Figs. 2 & 5), we learn, for example, of “Nick” [Serota’s] confession that most of the Tate’s “positive” press stories are not real news but what he himself admits to be “merely promotional material”. On their recovery, the theft of the Turners was seen as an ill wind that might serve some institutional good – and not just because Tate had managed to possess both the works themselves and most of their insurance money.
We see how, in hope of achieving for once a Genuinely-Real-Good-News-Story on the recovered Turners, attempt was made to thwart journalists who might spoil the party by pressing questions about the “recovery operation” which had already generated open scepticism and suspicion. It was felt that the museum’s press/public relations offices might need reinforcement to cope with a forthcoming barrage of criticisms and, “On Nick’s advice”, a formidable press consultant, Erica Bolton, was hired. She and the Tate’s press team groomed the gallery’s executive top brass (see Fig. 5) on how to answer or deflect journalistic probing by providing specimen questions and optimal, easily remembered answers.
We learn that the requisite answer to the first of eight dangerous questions (“How much has this operation cost Tate?”) was thought to be:
“The combined costs over eight and a half years including insurance, travel, legal fees and investigative expensive expenses [sic] accounts amounts to just over three and a half million pounds. Tate took on the additional costs for the investigation when it acquired the title of the two works in 1998. ”
This cost breakdown has already met with fresh expressions of journalistic incredulity in recent interviews Mr Nairne has given in connection with his pending book. On June 26th in the Sunday Times’ Magazine (“Curator of the Lost Art”), the paper’s art critic, Waldermar Januszczak, published the following exchange with Nairne on the large sums of Tate insurance monies that had been demanded by the criminals holding the stolen Turners and which had been given to their German lawyer by the Tate, expressly, to hand over to them in full (- the lawyer being remunerated separately by the Tate for his go-between services):
“This money was not a ransom, insists Sandy. It was ‘a fee for information leading to the recovery of the picture’. Sandy is extra careful to spell this out to me. Did you get that Waldemar? ‘A fee for information.’ Not a ransom. Well yes, I get it. But I don’t buy it. It’s legal. But it’s a grey area, right? ‘No. It’s grey as you go into it, but you have to find a way out of it that becomes clear’.”
Januszczak’s account failed to convince Dr Selby Whittingham of The Independent Turner Society. In a letter to the Sunday Times (“Recovery of stolen Turners was mishandled”, July 3rd) he wrote:
“In his account of the theft and recovery of two Turners, Waldemar Januszczak misses the key issues, dodged no doubt by Sandy Nairne, the author of a book about them. The pictures should never have been lent to Frankfurt in the first place in contravention of Turner’s wish for them to be part of a permanent display in London. When lent, more consideration should have been given by the Tate to the security issues, and the insurance money paid out for them to the Tate should have been used for Turneresque purposes, as the Charity Commission originally opined, subsequently changing its mind after confidential exchanges between itself and the Tate. These remain secret in disregard of the requirement that justice should be seen to be done, and the fact that the Turner bequest is the property of the public and not the Tate or the National Gallery.”
In an interview Nairne gave to Martin Bailey (“My life as an undercover negotiator”, The Art Newspaper, July/August, 2011), the reporter proved more outspoken than the Sunday Times’ art critic, saying, of a Tate press release carrying the Tate director’s outright denial that one of the two pictures had been recovered (when it had been recovered and was being concealed not only from the public and the press but even from most of the Tate’s trustees – see Fig. 2), that “This was simply untrue”. The untruth was, as it was intended to be, highly effective and it killed off a threatened Sunday newspaper article – which the Tate thought likely to have been informed by a senior Scotland Yard officer. With this throttling of a story, Nairne’s “fears about further investigative pieces, with imputations about ‘Serbian criminals’, receded”.
To the anticipated question 2 (“Did you pay a ransom or a reward?”) a flat one-word denial – “No” – was advised. This, too, was untrue. Nairne (fairly) acknowledges that:
“Following the recovery of the Turner paintings, Michael Daley of ArtWatch, and some members of the Turner Society, felt that questions went unanswered when the two paintings were put back on display on 7 January 2003. In the background was a potential lack of trust in the governance and management of the Tate, although the specific question was whether it had pursued the paintings in the right way. Was active pursuit even the right course of action? This writer and the Tate, contends that there was an institutional as well as a moral duty to use all means available to get the paintings back – but questions about methods and means were inevitable.”
Well, questions do indeed become inevitable in museum cultures where officers feel morally licenced to use “all means available”. Nairne, again fairly, acknowledges the anxieties of others such as Vernon Rapley, the Head of the Art and Antiques Squad until 2010, who explained:
“As a police officer I have a very clear view – if you offer a reward for the return with no questions asked, effectively you are available for a buy-back of the commodity, and you will fuel further crime.”
Nairne cites our own letter to the Daily Telegraph on 12 November 2005, which read:
“You reported (November 5th) that, in the BBC programme Underworld Art Deal, the man who supervised the Tate’s recovery of its two stolen Turners, Sandy Nairne (now director of the National Portrait Gallery), admits: ‘We knew in all the different stages of the investigation that a reward would be necessary, that a reward would be involved, that a reward initially offered by the insurers might need to be enhanced. I think that was clear from very early on.’ Not clear to the Tate’s Board of trustees, it would seem. In January we asked the present chairman, Paul Myners, to say ‘by what means, if any,’ Tate trustees had been assured that ‘no part of the £3.5 million payments might fall into the pockets of the thieves’. In reply, he wrote: ‘You will appreciate that details around the recovery operation have to remain confidential. However I can confirm that the Tate did not pay a ransom or a reward.’ The leap from the £180,000 for ‘intelligence’ originally offered by the insurers to the now reported £3.3 million reward to underworld figures is indeed a worthy subject for investigation. How shaming it is to the arts that such an investigation is carried out by a television company.”
When we had put directly to the Tate’s chairman Paul (now Lord) Myners (see Figs. 3 & 4) the discrepancy between his own and Nairne’s comments on the very large reward paid to criminals holding the Turners, he responded through the Tate’s “Head of Legal”, Jacqueline Hill, in a letter of 10 May 2006 which comprised yet another set of questions and answers, the questions being repetitions of mine to Myners. Thus, in answer to my question to the Tate’s chairman:
“You have continued to insist – even after Sandy Nairne’s disclosure that a reward had been paid – that no reward had been paid. You say that you do so on your own ‘reading of the [Tate’s Court] file.’ Perhaps you and I have been reading different files. I cannot, on the material I have read, imagine what might have caused you to draw such a conclusion. On what grounds do you discount the testimony of Mr Nairne, who headed Tate’s recovery operations from start to finish?”
there came dissembling pedantry, evasion and repetitious assertion from the Tate’s Head of Legal:
“Mr Nairne gave an interview for a television programme, he did not give a ‘testimony’. We consider that his words have been taken out of context. As stated above, the DM10m payment was neither a ransom nor a reward.”
To my question to the chairman:
“Are you not aware that the Court File makes clear that all parties privy to the payments, understood that a special dedicated account was set up into which DM10m was to be deposited by the Tate, precisely in advance payment for the (hoped for) ‘hand over’ of the paintings?”
the Tate’s Head of Legal countered:
“The Court File makes clear that Tate’s actions were sanction [sic] by the relevant British and German authorities and the Tate acted as it was entitled to do.”
To our question:
“Are you not aware that Mr Liebrucks [the lawyer acting for the criminals holding the paintings] was expressly given to understand that he was to be playing no part in a law enforcement operation – that, to the contrary: 1) he had been given immunity from prosecution by the German police authorities; 2) that he need make and did make no disclosure of the thieves’ identity, and, 3) that as Mr Nairne disclosed in his April 2000 affidavit to the High Court, the police authorities themselves were endeavouring along with the Tate’s officers to ‘establish a degree of trust’ with Liebrucks and his (claimed) clients?”
the Tate’s Head of Legal replied:
“Mr Myners is aware of this. The information is in the Court files.”
The criminals were never caught despite their eminently traceable links to the lawyer who received their money. If this might seem like negligence of the part of the Frankfurt police, it should be said that Nairne reveals that the Frankfurt police had been kept in the dark about the money/paintings transfers by the German prosecutors with the knowledge and support of the British police authorities:
“Keeping the final stage confidential remained paramount. The Prosecutor’s Office was prepared to keep the Frankfurt police away from the detailed arrangements, while Scotland Yard officers remained involved as advisers.”
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Brighter than Right, Part 2: Technical Problems of Protection, Health and Safety at St Paul’s Cathedral
On June 15th the BBC news website reported that a £40m 15 years long restoration of St Paul’s cathedral by “state-of-the-art conservation techniques” had recovered Sir Christopher Wren’s “original vision” and left the building “as fresh as the day it was completed”. Major restorations invariably generate breathless accounts of recovered original glories made by vanquishing the “grime of centuries” – but grime only ever dates back to the previous restorations. At St Paul’s these were in the early and late twentieth century and the proposals for this last restoration explicitly declared that far from returning the interior to Wren’s original painted scheme, it would be stripped to a never-intended, never encountered state of bare-stone whiteness – see Part 1. As for the operation being “state-of-the-art”, consider these defensive/confessional remarks by David Odgers, of Nimbus Conservation, in 2005 just after the remains of Wren’s paint had been stripped: “Being completely inexperienced in the use of the material at the beginning, the learning curve was steep and problems of protection, health and safety issues and night time application had to be addressed”. This is the story of that learning curve.
The method used for cleaning the St Paul’s interior was novel and experimental but as such it was unproven. In both its composition and its effects it earned censure from leading conservation experts (see below). The cleaning agent was an adapted, commercially available, latex rubber poultice laced with a mix of chemicals that were said to comprise an agent tailored to be similar to the mild alkalinity of Portland stone – a special version of the “Arte Mundit” water-based paste manufactured by the Belgian company FTB Restoration. The instigator/director of the restoration, the architect and the 17th Surveyor to the Fabric at St Paul’s Cathedral, Martin Stancliffe, admitted (at a lecture on October 21st 2003) to having slim knowledge of matters chemical and of having devolved – “entrusted” – responsibility for the application of the new paste to the Nimbus conservators (who were learning on the job while the cathedral remained in full commercial and ecclesiastical use).
This state arose despite Mr Stancliffe’s boast that Nimbus had been selected as contractors after “the optimum formulation of the material had been achieved.” In practice, Nimbus, being entirely unfamiliar with this supposedly thoroughly researched and tested material, found its application by hand to be “slow, messy and to leave a streaky appearance on the cleaned stone.” Thus, when this multi-million pounds single-sponsor restoration was approved and underway it was discovered that: a) the result would look awful; b) it would take forever; and, c) it was leaving a terrible smell (of ammonia) throughout the cathedral.
With the restoration in full progress, the manufacturer went back to the drawing board and radically changed the paste’s approved composition and method of application. It has not been made clear of what the chemical changes consisted or whether approval for them was obtained (see below). With thousands of square metres of stonework to be cleaned, FTB Restoration devised what Mr Stancliffe and Mr Odgers described as “a method for spraying on the material using compressed air with a specially designed pump and nozzle”. This enabled each restorer to apply in “only a few minutes” up to 3.5kg of chemically laced latex paste per square metre (See Figs. 1,2,3,4 & 5). The industrial speed of application – between 50 and a 100 square metres a night – and, with it, the wider commercial prospect of buildings remaining open to business during interior restorations, caused great excitement in the upper tiers of heritage administration. With 2m visitors a year to St Paul’s and admission charges then at £6, now at £14.50, closing St Paul’s during the interior restoration would likely have lost something in the region of £50-60m, but, as we will see, the technical “solutions” to the initial unanticipated problems created serious consequences of their own.
Approval for the Arte Mundit cleaning method had been given by The Cathedrals Fabric Commision for England in November 1999 following claimed earlier approvals by a bevy of heritage watchdogs: English Heritage; SPAB – The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings; The Victorian Society; and The Georgian Group. It is not possible to establish the precise chemical basis on which formal approval was given by the CFCE because, in breach of good conservation practice, the three technical parts of the eight parts submission document have been withheld on grounds of commercial confidentiality. For information on technical matters we must rely on the cathedral’s own fluctuating (and self-contradicting) published accounts, on our correspondence with Mr Stancliffe (which was terminated by him in March 2003), and on documents obtained by cathedral employees whose health was affected by the restoration (see below).
In December 2002, Mr Stancliffe and Mr Odgers gave a joint account of the ongoing restoration in Conservation News. They explained why the Arte Mundit poultice method had been adopted and why the so-called “Mora Poultice” method had been rejected. It might be noted that the latter is a cocktail of thixotropic paste, sodium bicarbonate, ammonium bicarbonate, detergents and the aggressively powerful chelating agent EDTA – ethylene diamine tetra-acetic acid. That poultice had been designed for cleaning marble buildings and was used experimentally on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes to disastrous effect (see our post of April 1st). By 1992 research had shown that the brightness produced was not a product of marble surfaces having been cleaned but of their being etched by the EDTA into dissolved irregularities which scatter light in all directions.
It was thus known before this restoration began that consuming stone is a consequence of EDTA levels being either too high or left too long on the surface. The Mora poultice was also rejected because the copious amounts of water needed to remove it would have turned St Paul’s Portland stone brown when, as we saw in Part 1, Mr Stancliffe’s ambition was to produce white stripped-stonework in defiance of Wren’s original warmly toned oil painted decorative scheme.
Mr Stancliffe and Mr Odgers reiterated in their joint Conservation News article, that the chemical composition of their Arte Mundit paste had been “specifically formulated” after a great deal of research (but by then the research seemed to have run into the restoration itself). While it had been found necessary at the outset to add EDTA to the latex paste, they said, this had been done only “at a concentration of 2000mg/kg (0.2%)” precisely to avoid injuries to stone when used at solutions of 11% in the Mora poultices. Before discussing the hugely varying EDTA levels seen to have been used at St Paul’s, consideration should be given to Arte Mundit’s initial principle cleaning ingredient – the pungent alkali ammonia.
Sprayed applications compound the health risks associated with hazardous chemical products. Although Mr Stancliffe and Mr Odgers admitted “the downside of using compressed air is that the Arte Mundit is applied as a fine particulate and releases ammonia into the atmosphere”, they seemed to regard this as a nuisance rather than a threat to health. Until then, as they put it, the paste had “contained ammonia” but, because “St Paul’s is visited by thousands of people each day, it would be inappropriate for the Cathedral to smell of ammonia.” They added that “Recent developments have meant that the concentrations of ammonia have been significantly reduced in the Arte Mundit so that potential risk has been minimised.” It was not there said of what the “developments” consisted or to what figure the ammonia had been reduced, but it was admitted that atmospheric concentrations of ammonia (which is generally detectable at 4ppm) had reached 10ppm in the cathedral. Needless to say, reducing the smell of the most pungent chemical ingredient is not the same as eliminating or reducing the risks presented by all the chemicals present in the sprayed paste.
Sand blasting the interior surfaces had been rejected partly because installing absolutely airtight isolation to retain airborne dust would have been too expensive (see Figs. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9). In April 2003 a Health and Safety Executive officer (who was under the impression that the only change made to the Arte Mundit paste had been a reduction in its ammonia content and who seemed unaware that EDTA had been incorporated even though it was listed in the manufacturer’s safety data sheet to which she referred – see Figs. 10, 11 & 12) reported, in a seeming counsel of ineffectuality, that “In order to clean a large, old cathedral it is expected that dust will become airborne and it may be that this is contributing to the respiratory problems [of staff members]”. Despite not finding any trace of what she termed “EDA” anywhere in the cathedral, she had “asked the contractor to improve the ventilation in the work areas during the cleaning process.” (See Figs. 3, 4 & 5.) Quite mystifyingly, she added that this EDA, “was not a separate substance within the mixture but we wished to ensure that it was not produced as a by-product.”
When in October 2002 a member of the cathedral’s staff who had suffered severe skin afflictions requested a copy of the manufacturer’s material safety sheet (Figs. 10, 11 & 12), she discovered that the paste was then containing EDTA at up to10% – which is to say, almost the same as in the discredited (and rejected) Mora Poultice, and therefore at up to fifty times greater than the figure shortly to be claimed by Mr Stancliffe and Mr Odgers in the December Conservation News.
That safety sheet was no rogue document. In March 2003, when declining to answer our questions on inconsistencies in the official accounts, Mr Stancliffe produced certain “fact sheets” which, he averred, “answered all potential questions which you or anyone else may have on this aspect of our interior cleaning programme.” The sheets (entitled “The Arte Mundit Fact File”) were models of un-clarity and consisted entirely of questions jointly put to the restorers and to the Arte Mundit manufacturer by themselves, along with the answers they gave to their own questions. Thus, to “What controls are in place to ensure that the application and removal of the Arte Mundit is competently handled?” (their question 23), Nimbus/FTB replied “The contract has been entrusted to a company run by and employing accredited conservators.” This circular defence would suggest that the restorers, even while learning on the job, were judged capable of monitoring their own performance as well as the performance and the safety of their untested and still evolving methods.
These “fact sheets” contain contradictory material. They give an account (in answer to their question 16, “Has the formulation been changed?”) of the manner in which Arte Mundit’s composition had been changed after the 1999 approval of its “optimal” formulation: “In the first fifteen months of using the material the concentration of ammonia was less than 0.5%. Further development of the product allowed to [sic] reduce the level of ammonia, which is now less than 0.005%.” This account prompts two concerns. First, the reduction of ammonia to one hundredth of its original levels is not confirmed in official restoration documents (see below). Second, in answer to question 16 it was also stated that, regardless of the claimed dramatic reductions of the ammonia level, “The level of EDTA was not changed and the efficacy of the product remained identical.” This beggars belief: there are two cleaning agents in the paste, one an alkali, the other an acid – ammonia and EDTA. If the former was reduced to a hundredth of its original level, how could the efficacy of the whole not have been diminished on the one hand, and slewed in its pH composition, on the other? And, for that matter, what is the level of the EDTA? There is no confirmation in the “fact sheets” of Mr Stancliffe’s and Mr Odger’s joint claim in the December 2002 Conservation News that EDTA was used at 0.2%. In answer to question 4 (“What are its [Arte Mundit’s] constituents?”), EDTA is mentioned as a component but no figure is given for it. In answer to question 7 (“Are there different types?”), it is said: “Yes there are five different types, Arte Mundit I, II, III, IV and V. These are similar except the concentrations of EDTA differ with the lowest concentration (less than 2.5%) being Type II and the Highest concentration being Type V. Arte Mundit I contains no EDTA.” So what type was being used at St Paul’s? To find an answer we must turn to question 15 (“What type is used at St Paul’s?”) where it is revealed that: “After tests carried out at St Paul’s Arte Mundit V was formulated by Dr Eddy de Witte to address the specific conditions found at the Cathedral.” But on this answer we learn that the type of Arte Mundit which contains the highest levels of EDTA (at up to 10%), Type V, was the very one that had been specifically developed for St Paul’s – so from where does the figure 0.2% derive? Had EDTA been required only at the Stancliffe/Odgers claimed level of 0.2%, it would surely not have been necessary to develop a special type of Arte Mundit at all, because the already existing Type II, containing EDTA levels of up to 2.5%, would more than have sufficed?
When a cathedral worker whose station was next to a cleaning area complained to the Clerk of the Works on May 13th 2002 that strong smells were affecting her throat, he prepared a report (see Fig. 13) on May 17th saying that he had asked Nimbus to “get details of material, and improve ventilation”. On that day, she fell sick and was off work for a fortnight with a blocked nose and a bad chest having reportedly been told by the Clerk “Don’t worry, whatever they were using has been banned, they shouldn’t have been using it”.
In the following August a Health and Safety Executive COSSH ASSESSMENT (Control of substances harmful to health – see Fig. 14) identified the main active components of the Arte Mundit paste as: “EDTA (<30%); ammonia (<0.5%)”, which is to say with ammonia still at its original (and not the claimed massively reduced levels) but with EDTA levels then at up to an astounding 150 times higher than Stancliffe and Odgers were to claim publicly in December 2002.
The consequences of exposure to the EDTA-laced Type V paste, as stated on FTB Restoration’s own Material Safety Sheet of August 16th 2001, (where EDTA levels were already put at 10% and not at the later claimed figure of 0.2% – Figs. 11, 12 & 13) were said to be: “irritating to eyes, respiratory system and skin”. The primary route of exposure was: “Skin and eyes contact. Vapours inhalation.” The symptoms relating to use were: through inhalation – “Sore throat. Cough. Shortness of breath”; by skin contact – “Redness”; by eye contact – “Redness, pain. Tears”; by ingestion – “Abdominal pain, nausea.”
The staff member who had requested the safety sheet had recorded her own afflictions as they occurred. They made disturbing and progressively grimmer reading (– see Fig. 13). Because that member of staff had previously suffered from skin ailments, a specialist medical examiner who had been hired by the cathedral and who, (like the HSE inspector mentioned above) had accepted the claim that “the only change that was made [to the Arte Mundit] was to reduce the level of ammonia from 0.5% to 0.005% because of ‘the slight smell of ammonia that was present after the initial application’”, contended that her afflictions could not, “on the balance of probabilities”, safely be attributed to airborne chemicals in the cathedral. Nonetheless, he admitted that his decision might have to be reconsidered were “compelling further evidence in favour of occupational causation to be adduced”. This staff member had not been alone in her afflictions. In January 2003, a Press Association article (“Cathedral staff ‘have symptoms of chemical poisoning’”) reported that:
“Staff at St Paul’s Cathedral have been falling ill with symptoms of chemical poisoning, it emerged today. The Health and Safety Executive is sending investigators to the London landmark after staff reported suffering chest pains, respiratory problems and skin complaints. Chief suspect is the substance being used to clean the stonework of the historic building as part of a £40million restoration project. Arte Mundit, a cream paste that removes stains and dust on most surfaces, is being sprayed on to the fabric of the building. It contains ammonia, the smell and intensity of which has prompted the cathedral authorities to carry out all spraying at night. The man in charge of the project, surveyor to the fabric, Martin Stancliffe, was not available for comment today…Another substance in the cleaning mixture that might be causing the health problems is latex – it can cause skin allergies, sneezing, throat irritation and asthma…St Paul’s Cathedral registrar John Milne said that 20 out of 150 people working at the Cathedral had reported conditions which might be related to the restoration…”
In the March 2003 Conservation News, the St Paul’s/FTB Restoration method (as described there by Stancliffe and Odgers in December 2002) was challenged by conservation specialists. Professor Richard Wolbers, conservation scientist and solvents expert at the Winterthur Museum and Gardens, University of Delaware Art Conservation Department, charged the authors with appearing “not to understand very well the chemistry of the materials they are using” and of seeming to “resort to what I would call several common (and spurious) arguments to rationalise the ‘safety’ of their cleaning systems over other methods cited.” For example, he wrote, “EDTA is one of the strongest chelating materials one could bring to such a surface.” It would certainly dissolve “any calcium carbonate beneath it in the stone substrate that it may come into contact with…It is almost as if they simply adopted a commercial material that was easy to obtain or apply without considering what specific chemistry they were bringing with it to the stone surfaces or how it might affect the other constituents they might be adding.”
Professor Wolbers was highly critical of a number of other technical features of the programme but reiterated his fear that the authors “seem to have taken a poorly characterised material, a latex paste, and modified it with the addition of a considerable amount of EDTA (largely as an adaption in their minds, I suppose, of one of the main ingredients in the Mora’s AB57 cleaning system).”
John Larson, Head of Sculpture and Inorganic Conservation at the Conservation Centre, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, said that applications of moulding materials had contributed so much damage over the past 200 years that museums around the world “have now banned” their use, and that the application of liquid latex by brush or spray “has a dramatic effect on porous material such as stone…as it dries latex shrinks and clings tenaciously to the surface.” The effect of pulling it off the stone “exerts strong mechanical forces on the surfaces when the stone is carved and deeply undercut, as shown on the cover of Conservation News.” (See Figs. 1 & 2.)
Seemingly in the face of such attacks, accounts of the St Paul’s/FTB Restoration method shifted once more. In the May 2003 Conservation News Mr Stancliffe and Mr Odgers ignored Prof. Wolbers’ criticisms, which, they said, would be answered in a future article not by themselves but, instead, by the man who had developed Arte Mundit for the Belgian firm, Dr Eddy de Witte. Having said in December 2002 that “The original oil paint [of Sir Christopher Wren] is found to soften and can then be removed with water and scrubbing and this is both acceptable and desirable, as it is removing an unwanted and dirty paint layer”, Stancliffe and Odgers now insisted that Arte Mundit “is certainly not a paint stripper.” Apologising for having “misled” readers on the point, the pair claimed that when they had said “original oil paint” they had not been referring to the original oil paint but to “subsequent distemper applications and not to the original paint.” The distemper “is indeed softened by the latex”, they added, “as it would be by soaking with water”. At this point they admitted that the paste contained EDTA but gave no indication of whether it was at solutions of up to 0.2%, 10% or 30%.
A key concern of conservationists facing such methodological discrepancies was whether or not the EDTA migrated into the stone during the periods of curing after being sprayed as a water-bound paste on to porous surfaces that had already been attacked with caustics and abrasives by previous restorers. With regard to Prof. Wolbers’ fear that Arte Mundit’s EDTA would have the time and the opportunity to invade and damage the stone yet another set of Stancliffe/Odgers claims was revised. In their May 2003 account, they claimed that the latex solution was sprayed to a depth of only 2mm and left for only “two or three hours” when in December 2002 they had said that the curing lasted “usually 24-48 hours”. In May 2002, Conservation News reported that the latex was removed after “one to four days”. In April 2003, the BBC reported that the latex was left on the stone surfaces for between “One to four days [depending] on the thickness and temperature”.
In December 2002, Stancliffe and Odgers had claimed that after removal of the Arte Mundit paste and subsequent washing and scrubbing, the stonework “still retains a patina”. In May 2003 they admitted that John Larson had rightly pulled them up for their “inappropriate use of the word”. Today the surface of the stone can be seen to have been left porous, susceptible to invasion by pollution, and chalky. Its weakened surface can now be rubbed away with a wipe of dry cloth – see Figs. 15 and 16.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
The member of St Paul’s staff who asked for the Arte Mundit Material Safety Sheet kept a log on her own ailments until her early retirement on June 12th 2003 because of her declining state of health. Her notes began on October 1st 2002:
“01/10/02: Became very hot and itchy. By end of day a red rash covered my arms and chest. The itching was intense and I could not sleep. 03/10/02: Rash extended now to back. Went to GP – also saw nurse. Given anti-histamine pills and steroid cream – went to work for the rest of the day. 04/10/02: After work, went back to GP as rash still spreading fast and felt very ill. Given another type of pill plus different creams and a blood test. 07/10/02: First day of duty. Felt very unwell, cancelled a visit to my mother and went to GP once more. Again, they are very worried and put me onto steroid pills. I could not sleep at all at night due to the constant irritation which was now causing me major distress. 10/10/02: While on my days off duty, I had started to feel better – lot less hot and itchy. However, this is my first day back on rota and start to itch and become very hot and unwell. Went to see […] our personnel manager. She was on her way to a meeting, but promised to get back to me later in the day. This did not happen. 11/10/02: After an unbearable night, went into work despite feeling very unwell. Went to see the registrar, John Milne and asked that he contact Health and Safety, as by now other members of staff had… 14/10/02: Saw doctor at hospital. She was very concerned and asked if it were possible to obtain a detailed list of constituents of the cleaning agent, as the COSSH assessment we were given was of little use. The rash was too active to allow any tests to take place…11/11/02: Went to GP. Actual allergy now seems unlikely. However, it seems I have been rendered extremely sensitive to the cocktail of toxic chemicals used at work, resulting in a severe attack of industrial dermatitis, which has left my skin in a very damaged condition…”
The conservator John Larson (see left) had warned in the March 2002 Conservation News that “Anyone who has worked with care on the conservation of historic stone surfaces will be aware that there are always hidden weaknesses and cracks that will often only be revealed when pressure from cleaning systems such as water, abrasives and steam are applied. To use a technique that subjects a historic surface to unnecessary pressures (as with Arte Mundit) cannot be described as conservation or innovation…With all stone cleaning it is sensible to avoid the introduction of extra chemicals which can cause irreverisble damage.”
Mr Larson cited the cautionary example of Glasgow where a rash of chemical cleanings caused a rapid growth of salts which turned the affected buildings green. He added: “The damage was so bad that a moratorium was called on all stone cleaning in Scotland.“
Brighter than Right, Part 1: A Modernist Makeover at St Paul’s Cathedral
“I’m the 17th surveyor to the fabric after Sir Christopher Wren and am responsible to the Dean and Chapter for the care and conservation of the cathedral”, the architect Martin Stancliffe told Fiona Campbell of the Financial Times Magazine (“Lord of all he surveys” January 10th 2004) and, he added, “If there was anything I could ask Sir Christopher Wren it would have to be what his intentions were for the interior of the building.”
We were startled by this apparent admission of ignorance about the original condition of the interior at a time when the cathedral authorities were over three years into a most radical and experimental restoration of it. Two years earlier the stripped stonework of the cathedral’s newly cleaned south transept had been presented to the press (and widely accepted) as a “recovery” of Wren’s proper original condition. It had specifically been claimed in a press release (“Restoring the glory”) and press interviews that by “returning” the interior stone to its natural state, Wren’s intentions were being shown “for the first time”. (For the post-cleaning state of the stone, see Figs. 4 & 5.)
As the final stage of the building of St. Paul’s was reached in 1709, Wren ordered the interior to be coated three times with oil paint. His son later said that this was not just “for beautifying, but to preserve and harden the stone”. That there is much evidence for what Wren had considered to be beautifying was shown by the art historian Florence Hallett in two articles in the ArtWatch UK Journal (“Cleaning St Paul’s Cathedral”, No. 17, Autumn/Winter 2002, and “The supposedly ‘model’ restoration of St. Paul’s Cathedral”, No. 18, Spring/Summer 2003). In essence, Wren’s aesthetic purpose had been to unify the interior surfaces by suppressing all arbitrary blemishes and irregularities (see Figs. 4 and 5) that had arisen during the building’s thirty-five years long construction, so that his own finely adjusted architectural forms and decorations would read at their best.
Analysis of surviving sections of Wren’s paint was only undertaken – we discovered – after the stripping began. It had established that, in addition to lead white, ochre and black pigments had been included to produce a warm “stone colour” and not a pure white finish. This was precisely the warm effect found in other Wren churches and the effect recorded in early paintings of St. Paul’s’ interior (see Fig. 1). Had these findings been available before the cleaning programme began, would its aims and methods have been different?
Mr Stancliffe has disclosed that prior to 1999 a “comprehensive repainting of the interior” had been considered in order to return it to the true state at which Wren left it, and “to unify the interior”. This was rejected on two grounds. First, it would “result in a finish which, to modern eyes, would seem bland and perhaps inappropriate”. (Perhaps this trumping of historical authenticity by modernist aesthetic sensibilities had been a hangover from Mr Stancliffe’s own early career spent with the modernist firm Powell & Moya?) Secondly, because it would “undo the work so carefully and laboriously executed in the 1870s to strip Wren’s paintwork”.
One might have thought that an architect charged in the 21st century with protecting the fabric and artistic integrity of an ancient cathedral would have felt more loyalty to the original architect’s (painted) creation than to a 19th century predecessor Surveyor’s misguided and botched attempt to undo it. There are grounds for concluding that, as with 19th century church-stripping restorers before him, imposing whiteness and brightness on an originally coloured decorative scheme was Mr Stancliffe’s own and primary objective in this restoration. After stripping the interior, he told the Guardian (“Interior of St Paul’s – brighter than even Wren saw it”, June 10th 2005) that: “During the 35 years of its original building the architect had the Portland stone painted in several thick layers of oil and paint to protect it from the elements before the roof was put on, so it never was as white as now.”
This was misleading. While it was true that no one had ever seen all the stones in the cathedral as if simultaneously quarried and dressed, this was because by the time the construction of the cathedral was finished, the first laid stones had been exposed to the elements and London’s pollution for over a third of a century. Wren’s 1709 instruction to have the interior painted “3 times in oyle” was made 34 years into the construction when the roof was in place and it was far too late for the paint to act as weatherproofing. Moreover, in the cathedral’s own1999 proposal for treatment, it had been tacitly acknowledged that Wren’s paint served aesthetic not weatherproofing purposes because it had been applied late to “cover the uneven effects of the new stone inserted where the supports to the dome had cracked” and to “unite and brighten” the whole interior.
To unite, certainly, but brightening, we should be clear, was Mr Stancliffe’s idée fixe not Sir Christopher Wren’s. In a programme note (“How the glory of St Paul’s was restored”) to a service held at the cathedral on June 1st 2005 in honour of the restoration’s donors, Mr Stancliffe declared that “the heart of my vision for the interior [was] to clean it and relight it” – even though Wren had not brightened the interior to a state of whiteness and the cathedral was not being “relit” to original levels but lit to unprecedentedly high ones. Further, Mr Stancliffe had specifically boasted in the Times of June 10th 2004, of his own “pretty controversial” intention to introduce “six huge chandeliers” to flood the interior with artificial light. A year later he told the Guardian “we have installed new chandeliers and more lights”. Also in 2005, Mr Stancliffe expressed satisfaction on “seeing our initial vision gloriously realised.”
Thus, by courtesy of the banker Robin Fleming’s generosity, the cathedral’s 17th surveyor has been permitted by the church authorities (and by architectural heritage watchdog bodies) to have his own way with Wren’s great, once-painted interior, which now resembles a plaster cast of itself that is lit to department store levels (see Fig. 3, right). As well as being historically false and aesthetically/spiritually inappropriate, the present vulgar fix of whiteness will prove transitory. No surface is harder to maintain and keep free of dust, grime and finger marks than a white, porous, (and now) highly chemically reactive one in the fluctuating environment of a tourist thronged building.
Coda: Mr Stancliffe had sought an even whiter finish. It was his intention to lime-wash the stripped stone surfaces. Ironically – and much as critics among conservationists had predicted – his chemically invasive cleaning method has left the now exposed raw stonework chemically vulnerable. Trial applications of lime-wash kept turning brown. Research that is reported in the conservators’ own house organ, ICON NEWS, (May 2011 issue, p. 30) discovered that humic acids within the stone were being drawn to the surface by the water-based lime applications. For centuries Wren’s oil paint had rendered the stone surfaces hard and impervious and thereby provided a barrier against disfiguring chemical interactions and migrations. Mr Stancliffe has been hoist with his own petard.
In part two, we will examine the controversial and health-threatening chemical means by which Mr Stancliffe’s whiteness and brightness were achieved.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
John Singer Sargent and how something ‘really filthy’ comes off in the conservation studio, time and time again
When accused of damaging old master paintings picture restorers have often retorted: “What you think is my injury to this painting is an earlier restorer’s injury that my cleaning has exposed”. Not a brilliant line, perhaps, but, in the absence of photographic records, it has provided a plausible-sounding defence against artists’ technically-informed criticisms. (For Pietro Annigoni’s classic denunciation of cleanings at the National Gallery, see the appendix below.) However, as more and more modern paintings fall under the swab and the scalpel, the “Not me, guv.” defence can evaporate because with such pictures there are almost always photographic records of previous treatments and, often, of the original state itself. In c. 1885, John Singer Sargent’s finished and framed portrait Madame X was photographed next to the artist in his studio. His similarly seminal 1882 group portrait The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit was recorded in a 1903 photograph when it was only 21 years old and unlikely to have been cleaned and/or lined. Here, the painter Gareth Hawker discusses seemingly irrefutable photographic evidence of restoration injuries that that Velazquez-inspired portrait group incurred in 1983 at the Boston Museum of Art. It is ironic that Sargent’s devoted copy/study of Velazquez’s Las Meninas (shown below) should itself now testify to the horrendous restoration-induced losses that that great work subsequently suffered.
Gareth Hawker writes:
I first saw this painting when it was shown at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1979. The paint exhibited the freshness of touch which is characteristic of all Sargent’s work, and also a certain solidity and firmness, but by the time I saw the picture again, at the Tate in 1998, the paint looked thin, strained, and slippery. I passed by the picture quickly, not wanting the sight of its present state to confuse the memories I had of its earlier state.
A week ago I came across the painting again, this time as a reproduction on the website of the Boston Museum of Fine Art, which has owned the painting since 1919. Those photographs brought back my conflicting memories. (See fig. 5.) With remarkable candour, the Museum shows close-ups of a part of the painting before and after a cleaning. The close-ups record exactly those changes which had so disturbed me in real life. They are attached here so that the reader may have an opportunity to make his own assessment of the degree to which the painting has been changed. (See figs. 1, 2, 3, and 4.) It seems clear that some of Sargent’s paint has been taken off. If so, how could this have come about? Perhaps the conservator had made some unwarranted assumptions about Sargent’s technique?
Sargent is famous as an exponent of the alla prima, or premier coup method of painting. The idea is to start and finish the picture while the paint is still wet – to finish ‘at the first blow’. There is no build-up of paint layers as there might be with, say, a typical Rembrandt. If the painter makes a mistake he will wipe off the paint, or scrape it off, and start afresh. Sargent’s portrait of Vernon Lee (fig. 6) provides a perfect example of this approach. However, as Bernard Dunstan describes so well in his Painting Methods of the Impressionists, Sargent was by no means rigidly devoted to this approach. The attentive student who examines a range of Sargent’s paintings will find many areas where Sargent has allowed paint to dry and has then painted on top.
In fact adhering exclusively to the the alla prima method, while painting a picture as large as the portrait of the Boit girls, would have presented enormous difficulties. In order to cover such a large area ‘at one blow’ one would have to keep the paint wet for many days. Alternatively one might proceed by finishing a section at a time, as with a fresco, but then the completed picture would be unlikely to balance tonally. Following either of these variations of the alla prima method would be extremely problematic, but, even if the painting were to develop perfectly along these lines, the paint would tend to look thin and skimpy, especially if applied with Sargent’s habitual finesse. In a small portrait, such as the one of Vernon Lee, which measures only about 0.7M x 0.65M, thin paint can look perfectly satisfactory. Arguably it can even add to the freshness of the result, but if the same paint quality were to be carried over a large area, such as the 2M x 2M of the Boit portrait, it would start to look thin and meagre. Realising this, Sargent no doubt chose to adopt an approach which would produce a more substantial result than could be expected from painting alla prima.
Sargent was very familiar with such an alternative approach. He had studied Velazquez in Madrid, and made an oil sketch of Las Meninas (see figs. 7, 8, 9, & 10). He would no doubt have observed that Velazquez had begun by painting a representation of the room. It was only later, after allowing this paint to dry, that Velazquez placed his figures on top. (X-rays now confirm this observation.) It is perhaps understandable that Sargent should have proceeded to work on his own very similar subject with similar deliberation.
Consider, for example, the strokes of the pinafore of the girl at our left (fig. 11). They are applied over a dark ground. In this part of the painting the ground is provided by the base colour of the painted wall, not by the white canvas priming which would be typical of Sargent’s alla prima work.
The greatest danger, when departing from the alla prima approach, is that one will be tempted to correct a dry patch of dark paint by covering it with another patch of dark paint, paint of very nearly the same colour. As painters know only too well, dark paint painted on dark paint almost invariably looks dead, dull, and lifeless. Dark paint needs a lighter paint underneath in order to reflect light through it and give it life. This is one reason why house-painters use a brown or grey undercoat when painting a black door.
Similarly Sargent would have painted his initial lay-in (i.e. the big areas of undercoat) in paint which was, in some parts, lighter than the finish he had in mind. It would also have been advantageous to paint this layer in a slightly stronger or brighter colour, so that it would enliven the darker, duller paint which was to come on top. Having made such a preparation Sargent would then have been able to paint with great freedom directly onto the dry paint (as if painting alla prima) knowing that the brighter undercoat would be there to support his colour and give it substance. The result would have had great apparent spontaneity, at the same time as being founded on a solid technical basis. This method would allow Sargent to repeatedly scrape off and repaint areas as he might find necessary in the course of the paintings development.
Years later, when conservation work was considered desirable, a conservator might wipe off darkened varnish. If he then chanced to continue wiping he would find that more dark material would come off, and a paint-layer of a brighter, stronger colour would be revealed. This might seem to him to be the single layer one might expect of a painting made following the alla prima method. Believing that Sargent would have painted only in one layer, the conservator might reason that the dark material he was removing must be dirt, not paint. He might continue to remove it across large areas of the picture. Sargent’s preparatory layer would then emerge, making the cleaned areas appear brighter, stronger and flatter than they had done before. The conservator might take this to be an indication that he had done his job well. He would, perhaps, suppose that Sargent’s single layer had been revealed.
In case this might seem to the reader to be a wild flight of fancy, perhaps I might introduce a personal anecdote: I remember how one of my own paintings suffered in exactly this way. I had left it at a dealer’s in readiness for an exhibition. We had agreed that he would get one of his conservators to give it a coat of varnish. A couple of weeks later he phoned to say his conservators had found some ‘thick, grungy muck’ on the painting and, as a favour to me, had tried to take it off. (Note, though fully qualified in conservation, they had not thought to telephone me first). He said, “someone had put something really filthy on your painting and in the end we had to use a scalpel to get it off. Then, underneath, we revealed some lovely yellow paint.” I have no idea who he thought that ‘someone’ might have been. The painting had never been out of my hands. It was I, the painter, who had put that ‘muck’ on. I had applied it in order to dull down the yellow, which, in turn, I had painted too bright, on purpose, in preparation for my final touches… If this could happen in good faith when the painter was only a phone call away, how much more likely is it to happen when the painter is dead?!
This is what seems to have happened here with the Sargent. It looks as if his carefully prepared finish has been removed by a well-qualified restorer carrying out his work according to the standards of his profession. It appears that in several places the final strokes of Sargent have been removed: we seem to be looking at Sargent’s preparatory work instead. This might explain why the painting now looks so comparatively feeble.
APPENDIX
Letter from Pietro Annigoni published in the Times, July 14th 1956.
“Sir, – A few days ago, at the National Gallery, I noticed once more the ever-increasing number of masterpieces which have been ruined by excessive cleaning. This procedure, which in former times created at Munich a veritable scandal and at the same time a reaction as vigorous as it was beneficial, recommenced at the close of the Second World War not only in England but Italy, France, Germany – everywhere, and was received, alas! with almost total indifference.
“The war did not destroy a greater number of works of art. Such is the power of a group of individuals, nowhere numerous, whose proceedings may be compared to the work of germs disseminating a new and terrible disease. I do not doubt the meticulous care employed by these renovators, nor their technical skill, but I am terrified by the contemplation of these qualities in such hands as theirs. The atrocious results reveal an incredible absence of sensibility. We find no trace of the intuition so necessary to the understanding of the technical stages employed by artists in different pictorial creations, which cannot possibly be restored by chemical means. The most essential part of the completion of a picture by the old masters was comprised in light touches, and above all in the use of innumerable glazes, either in the details or in the general effects – glazes often mixed even in the final layers of varnish. Now, I do not say that one should not clean off crusts of dirt, and sometimes even recent coats of varnish, coarsely applied and dangerous, but I maintain that to proceed further than that, and to pretend to remount the past years, separating one layer from another, till one arrives at what is mistakenly supposed to be the original state of the work, is to commit a crime, not of sensibility alone but of enormous presumption.
“What is interesting in these masterpieces, now in mortal danger, is the surface as the master left it, aged alas! as all things age, but with the magic of those glazes preserved, and with those final accents which confer unity, balance, atmosphere, expression – in fact all the most important and moving qualities in a work of art. But after these terrible cleanings little of all this remains. No sooner, in fact, is the victim in the hands of these ‘infallible’ destroyers than they discover everywhere the alterations due at different times, to the evil practices of former destructive ‘infallibles.’ Thus ravage is added to ravage in a vain attempt to restore youth to the paintings at any price.
“Falling upon their victim, they commence work on one corner, and soon proclaim a ‘miracle’; for, behold, brilliant colours begin to appear. Unfortunately what they have found are nothing but the preparative tones, sometimes even the first sketch, on which the artist has worked carefully, giving the best that is in him, in preparation for the execution of the finished work. But the cleaners know nothing of this, perceive nothing, and continue to clean until the picture appears to them, in their ignorance, quite new and shining. Some parts of the picture painted in thickly applied colour will have held firm; other parts (and these always the most numerous) which depended on the glazes, of infinitesimal fineness, will have disappeared; the work of art will have been mortally wounded.
“Is it possible that those responsible for these injuries do not perceive them, do not understand what they have done? Clearly it is possible; for they are proud of their crimes and often group the paintings they have murdered in special galleries to show their triumphs to the public – a public for whose opinion, in any case, they care nothing. For myself, I cannot express all the sorrow and bitterness I feel in the presence of these evidences of a decadence which strives to anticipate the destruction of civilization itself by the atomic bomb. How long will these ravages in the domain of art and culture continue unrestrained and unpunished? The damage they have done is already enormous.”
Gareth Hawker is ArtWatch UK’s picture analyst.
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Vandalism and restoration ethics: The case of the Dutch “Thinker”
Art restoration is increasingly becoming a culture within a culture. After a century of modernism, the possession of personal artistic skills and of technical proficiency are considered disqualifications in much contemporary art teaching and practice. Today, the preference is for “ideas” and “attitudes” and, in this milieu, even a brazen appropriation of the artefacts and ideas of others is taken as proof of creative potency. Restorers, who have long pig-a-backed professionally on the bona fide creations of past artists and are now hailed as technical wizards vis-à-vis today’s artists, claim a “right” to determine personally how the art of the past should be “presented” to modern audiences. With the art world incapable of producing another Michelangelo or Rodin, restorers lay claim to powers of artistic transformation and resurrection. A “New Michelangelo” has been offered, the acceptance of which would require the rewriting of art history itself. Catastrophic art injuries provide restorers with further opportunities to deploy their embalmers’ “black arts” and theoretical premises – and, with a self-regard that verges on narcissism, celebrate/immortalise their own interventions in portentous television documentaries. An instance of such may have arisen in the Netherlands.
Maaike Dirkx writes:
The American industrialists William and Anna Singer (see Fig. 3) used their wealth to collect art. Their collection is located in four museums, two in Norway, one in the United States, and the Singer Museum in The Netherlands. The Singer Museum in Laren was founded in 1956 by Anna as a small private museum and concert hall. Its sculpture garden housed a fine collection of statues, with as its most prized exhibit a bronze cast of Rodin’s “Penseur” or “Thinker” and Anna Singer always considered this statue the crown jewel of her collection.
In January 2007 thieves broke into the museum grounds and stole “The Thinker” and six other bronze statues with the intent to melt them down for their bronze value. The bronze would have yielded 350 euros when the “Thinker” alone was valued at over one million euros. After a few anxious days the “Thinker” was recovered but it had been tragically mutilated (see Figs. 1, 7, 8 & 9). The six other statues had already been melted down. What had saved “The Thinker” was public exposure: its theft had been widely reported in the Dutch media and the thieves, who later stated they had never heard of Rodin, had panicked and had buried what was left of the statue.
POLEMICS AND CHOICES
Although all concerned agreed that the statue had become a wreck and that Rodin’s original intent and artistic achievement could never be recovered, the insurers were not convinced. They claimed that, after restoration, the statue could still fetch a few tons on the art market. Rob Scholten, Head of Sculpture of the Rijksmuseum, resigned from Singer’s management committee because he was opposed to restoration which, he said, could only be cosmetic.
Another option was to exhibit the ruined statue as “a forceful symbol of art vandalism” as was done at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where a cast of “The Thinker” was damaged by a bomb in 1970 (see Fig. 6). But the Singer case bore no relationship to a “tradition of iconoclasm” and the idea was dismissed. For a small museum such as the Singer there were insufficient funds to buy another cast should one appear on the art market and casting another statue from one of the surviving plaster models was a legal impossibility since the French government, owner of Rodin’s estate, had implemented laws specifying that only 12 casts could be made from each surviving plaster model to ensure the quality of the casts and to prevent the appearance of forgeries (in the form of cast copies taken either from present bronze casts or from plaster models) on the art market.
After twenty months of wrangling a decision was reached: the statue was to be restored. An advisory committee of independent experts* concluded that “by restoring the external shape of the statue, its symbolic function for the Singer Museum can be retained”. Invoking “general principles of restoration ethics”, the committee recommended a restoration method that could be largely reversible and which would restrict the number of interventions as much as it was possible.
PATCHING UP A RUIN
A major problem in the restoration was the missing right lower leg (see Fig. 7). Rodin’s bronzes were sand cast, an exacting method whereby a plaster model is pressed into sand which then retains the shape of the model. In complicated designs, a plaster model is cut into different parts that are cast separately and later joined together. The melted bronze is poured into the sand impression and after the bronze has cooled down, the sand casing is removed and the rough bronze figure is then chiseled, polished and treated to produce a specific patina. The plaster models could be re-used but they would deteriorate over time and through sand casting usage, reducing the quality of the casts.
The Musée Rodin possesses four original plasters for the studio-type “Thinker”. A team of Dutch digitalisation experts with their equipment travelled to Paris where the most likely plaster model used (identified by an abnormality on the big toe of the left foot and a “wart” on the back) was scanned in 3D images. The damaged Singer “Thinker” had also been scanned and by superimposing the two images, the details of the damages (such as the displacement of the left arm and skull) could be charted. The Musée Rodin gave permission to construct a plaster model of the Parisian right lower leg based on the scans, which was then cast by a Dutch casting firm and affixed to the statue.
The dislodged upper part of the head and left upper arm were manipulated back into shape at the Rijksmuseum Restoration Studio, a delicate operation (see Fig. 8). To determine how best to fill in the deep gashes made by the grinder, metallurgic analysis was conducted. The proposed epoxy resin saturated with bronze powder was approved by the consulting committee and Musée Rodin, as guardians of Rodin’s legacy.
It proved impossible to determine the exact composition of the patina: years of outdoor exposure meant that the patina on Singer’s “Thinker” had acquired different light and dark green copper sulphates. To retouch the original patina where this had disappeared as a result of aggressive grinding, a removable acrylic paint mixture was applied.
IS SINGER’S THINKER STILL A RODIN?
The question is a tantalizing one. For one thing, the statue was cast posthumously. Some 50 cast bronzes of this studio-size Thinker still exist in the world: are they mere copies or does each contain an intrinsic uniqueness?
Rodin worked with casters whom he trusted implicitly, such as father and son Rudier. It is believed that the latter, who cast at least five Rodin sculptures in the sculptor’s lifetime and was therefore fully aware of the sculptor’s intent and artistic demands, cast Singer’s impression of the “Thinker” around 1930. Anna Singer purchased the statue, with two other Rodin bronzes, possibly in 1937 when she visited the Musée Rodin.
Not only are plaster models different from each other (as we have seen, it was possible to identify with near certainty the plaster model used for Singer’s “Thinker” from the abnormalities in one particular model), but the casting process, too, yields a slightly different result each time and the applied patina will also be different in each case. It can therefore be argued that each of the fifty “Thinker” bronzes is itself unique in certain aspects or details. They are not uniquely original as works of art, but they are distinguishable and not mere identical copies.
Rodin himself modified the design during his lifetime: “The Thinker” in Melbourne, which is considered the first individual cast of the statue made by Rodin for the art collector Ionides in 1884, still wears the cap of the original “Thinker” on the Gates of Hell who represented Dante. Over the years, “The Thinker” became a synthesis of Dante, Victor Hugo and Baudelaire, representing the “artiste-poète” and later a man who, as Rilke writes in his biography of Rodin (1903) “… sits deep in thought, dumb, heavy with images and thoughts, and his entire strength (which is the strength of a man of action) thinks. His entire body has turned into skull and all the blood in his veins to brain.”
The cultural uniqueness of the Singer “Thinker” lies in the fact that it was bought by Anna Singer: that gave it its added emotional value for the museum she founded. Although the statue was severely damaged, it was still recognizable as the historical version that she had acquired. That it could, therefore, be reconstructed seemed obvious. But what are we left with? Is the sculpture, to all intents and purposes, still a Rodin or is it today more a patched up product of a restoration studio? The symbolic value for the museum and the memory of its founder have been retained and honoured, respectively, but the “restoration” itself convinces only on a superficial level.
*The “advisory committee” (Adviescommissie) consisted of: Drs. Annemarie Vels Hein, Chairman (Chairman of the Museum Committee of the Singer Museum in Laren and former director of the Presentation Department of the Rijksmuseum); Drs. Ineke Middag, Secretary (former director of “museum affairs” of the Singer Museum); Ysbrand Hummelen, senior researcher of the ICN (the Institute Collections of the Netherlands); Robert van Langh, Head of Conservation and Restoration of the Rijksmuseum (field of expertise restoration of metals); and, Dr Louk Tilanus, art historian, Art History Department of the University of Leiden (field of expertise Rodin).
When the restoration proper started, the advisory committee made way for an “accompanying committee” in which two of the above (Tilanus and van Langh) also participated.
Maaike Dirkx is a Dutch art historian and researcher.
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Below, Fig. 10: the “Thinker” after its (insurance company prompted) “restoration” with epoxy resins and “re-patination” with acrylic paints. Fearing – for good reasons – that their epoxy resin “in-fills” might well need replacement at some future date, the restorers made casts of them in tin. Those casts and a cd containing all the data, were placed/immortalised, time-capsule fashion…inside the patched-up and painted remains of Rodin’s sculpture.
Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic – A suitable Case for Treatment?
A director of the National Gallery, Sir Philip Hendy, once joked that the (helpful) consequence of successive picture restorations was the eventual recovery of a perfectly preserved, pristine white under-painting. After several further generations of modernist stripping and purging, even the restorers have taken fright. Now – and perhaps feeling licensed by the indulgencies and frivolities of post-modernism – they are discovering the delights of “putting back” what their (sometimes very recent) predecessors should never have taken off. After a century of pictorial reductionism, the latest pioneering “recoverist” restoration at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Thomas Eakins’s painting The Gross Clinic, has been heavily trailed in the press. In celebrating their own attempts to reconstitute what had been wrongly discarded, today’s restorers seem little aware that they, too, are entering methodological quick-sands.
James Keul writes:
The Thomas Eakins picture The Gross Clinic is arguably the most important American painting of the 19th Century. In spite of – or perhaps because of – this exalted status it has had a difficult and complicated history. Aside from suffering the “theme park” indignity of being relegated to a mock-medical tent when first exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Expo in Philadelphia, and an initial rejection by contemporary critics, it has been humiliated further through its subjection to no fewer than five major restorations in its relatively short existence of 136 years.
The painting has been relined three times – one of which nearly caused it to tear in half. (Why should a modern canvas require relining even once, let alone three times?) It was dramatically altered in 1925 by the removal of dark glazes that Eakins had applied with the specific artistic intention of toning down areas that were meant to recede. As recently as 1961, an overall varnish was applied that has since darkened enough to be used as one of the justifications for the most recent restoration of the painting last year (- but see photograph and caption comments at top right). The days when museums could credibly refuse to admit that paintings were damaged by past restorations have passed and it has become increasingly common to see labels next to paintings admitting such unfortunate occurrences. At the Metropolitan Museum’s 2008 exhibition “The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art”, for example, numerous paintings were accompanied by specific acknowledgements of past restoration-induced injuries. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s decision to restore the Gross Clinic is another example of this new trend – but one, as will be seen, with a crucial difference.
It is almost inevitable that each new generation of restorers views itself as superior to its predecessors. Perhaps restorers today are more cautious than those of a half-century ago and it is encouraging to see that with the benefit of hindsight many earlier harmful practices have been abandoned. With new developments in x-radiographs, infrared reflectography, chromatography and other specialized equipment, restorers certainly have a lot more technical (if not artistic) information at their disposal, but the question remains: what does this mean for the art itself?
In the case of the 2010 restoration of the Gross Clinic, it meant that Mark Tucker, Senior Conservator of Paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a team of restorers, including a Mellon Fellow in Conservation, felt sufficiently confident in this new technology to undertake the task of repainting large portions of Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece in an attempt to bring it back to the way Eakins had intended it to be seen. At best, however, this could only have been a partially realisable goal. Attempting to return a painting to its original condition is, on its own, an area of great debate. With age, paintings acquire patinas and, as with all objects, time takes its toll. What makes this restoration the more troubling is the fact that the latest restorers in the chain are not trying to bring it back to its (supposed) original condition, but rather to a specific condition that is represented in photographs from a period more than thirty years after the painting was completed and after the painting had already been lined with an ironed-on backing canvas – a procedure now widely acknowledged to risk adversely effecting a painting’s appearance.
Our concerns about the questionable nature of this enterprise have been compounded by the explanations that have been offered to us concerning its execution. Mr. Tucker informs us, for example, that, in order to maximize the accuracy of the placement of his own “in-painting”, tracings were made on clear Mylar film from an enlargement of a photograph of the painting taken in 1917. Some of these tracings were cut out, “producing something that looked like a stencil”, and were used to “place small temporary reference marks that were useful in attaining an appearance in the restored damages that is as faithful as possible to the early images of the painting”. [Emphasis added.] Inferring what an artist wanted his work to look like decades or even centuries after it was made is problematic enough, but attempting to recreate one particular historical state of the painting based on black and white photography is problematic to say the least.
In addition to the inherent problems presented by using photography for this purpose at all, because no colour reproductions of the painting exist prior to the 1925 restoration, determining even the proper colours becomes itself a major issue. When asked how the freshly added colours were determined, Mr. Tucker replied that their colour choices were:
“based on a determination of the pigments present in a preserved area of the original surface, on a direct visual match to the colour of the best preserved areas of the passageway, and on close consideration of the relationship between the colours present on the painting and the tones recorded in the 1917 photograph”.
This attempt itself raises concerns. Because pigments vary greatly depending on their source, how can one be sure that the pigments used by today’s restorers will be the same as those used by Eakins? Any artist who has bought raw umber from different manufacturers will immediately notice differences in colour “temperature” and value from one brand to another. If the latest restorers were to say that it does not matter since the colours used were matched to the adjacent colours that had survived on the painting, the question would arise: what, then, was the point of even “determining” the pigments that the artist had originally used?
There would also be a question concerning the reliability of the tones present in the period photograph that was chosen as a point of reference.The restorers have informed us that they also used a drawing made of the painting by Eakins himself as a source of reference. But, aside from questions concerning the level of its accuracy to the original painting, the fact remains that the drawing is a different work of art from the painting and whatever its accuracy might be (see comments right), it is clear that on close examination it differs greatly from the picture today in terms of pictorial/tonal values. To use some combination of the testimonies of a drawing that does not match the painting and a period (1917) photograph whose reliability cannot be assumed, in order to infer some compromise position on the artist’s original intent as a basis for present “in-painting” (- which is, properly speaking, re-painting) leaves a great deal of room for error and artistic interpretation on the part of the restorer, and possible historical falsifications.
On the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) website, under a heading ‘compensation for loss’, the recommended practice states that “If compensation is so extensive that it forms a substantial portion of the cultural property, then the compensation should be visually apparent to all viewers”. Though only a recommended practice, it is indicative of the importance of authenticity. This recommendation was not followed in the case of the Gross Clinic. The “in-painting” on the occasion of the last restoration was an attempt to recover an original condition that had been lost, and to match it perfectly (- that is to say, deceivingly) to the surviving surrounding passages. If a group of school children were to go to the Philadelphia Museum today and look at the Gross Clinic, they would not be able to tell where Eakins’ work ended and where Mr. Tucker’s began.
The video which accompanied the recent Eakins exhibition and which covers the history of the painting by examining the evidence left by its various restorations, states that this is the third painting by Thomas Eakins from their collection that has been “renewed” with repainting (- the other two being his Between Rounds and Mending the Nets). As a society, we must think about what we want to see when going to museums. Is it the image that is important, or is it the authenticity? For sure, the picture will have changed significantly since it was painted (more by restoration than by time), but attempting to bring back something that has been lost is simply not possible. While Thomas Eakins’ painting might look closer to the original now than it previously had, it is by no means an original picture today. Rather, it is a reconstruction of what today’s restorers take to have been its likely original condition, had so many bad things not been done to it by their predecessors. We trust that future visitors to the museum will be fully informed of the eventful “conservation history” of this painting.
James Keul is a painter and the executive director of ArtWatch International
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Misreading Visual Evidence ~ No 2: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling
No single proof of a restoration-induced injury to a work of art could be clearer than the photograph shown here (Fig. 1) of a section of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes. It was taken after the last restoration and shows in its centre section a repair made in 1566 by the painter Domenico Carnevale when a section of Michelangelo’s fresco fell away during settlement of the building (see Fig. 2 diagram). Carnevale had re-plastered the loss and, while the plaster surface was still wet, faithfully painted it to match Michelangelo’s (then) surrounding colours and tones. The repair was a good one and for centuries it remained almost invisible (see Figs. 4, 5 & 6). Ever since the last restoration it has been glaringly evident that Carnevale’s painted section no longer matches what has survived of Michelangelo’s painting (see Fig. 7). As will be shown, on the evidence of these photographs, fair estimation can be made of the injuries inflicted upon Michelangelo’s frescoes during restoration.
The reason why the photographs testify to restoration injury is simple and elegant. Carnevale’s repair was made a fresco in “good” or buon fresco, which is to say, solely with pigments that were painted onto the still-wet plaster and, crucially, without any later additional painting on the surface of the fresco after it had dried. With this method, Carnevale matched the pictorial values of Michelangelo’s frescoes as they were then found, only half of a century after their completion. However, unlike Carnevale’s painting, where the pigments were locked into the lime plaster when it dried, Michelangelo’s own frescoes were completed a secco – that is to say, with much additional glue or size-based painting applied to the surface of the frescoes after they had dried. Against great evidence (see below), the Vatican’s restorers concluded that Michelangelo had painted entirely in buon fresco without a secco additions and, on that (unsound) decision, they contended that it would be perfectly safe to apply a recently developed oven cleaner-like thixotropic cocktail of cleaning agents (in two applications of three minutes duration each, each being washed off with copious amounts of water) that had been designed to strip polluted encrustations from marble buildings and that would most certainly strip all organic material – which in the event would include Michelangelo’s own glue-based painting – from the ceiling’s plaster surface.
Because Carnevale’s own painted repair was not so vulnerable we now see in the repaired (centre) section a better record of how Michelangelo’s own painting had appeared than exists in the surviving sections of Michelangelo’s painting. By properly reading the testimony of this photographic record, we can calculate the scale of loss that ensued when Michelangelo’s own a secco work on the surface of his frescoes was removed.
By that method, Michelangelo had painted shadows onto his figures after the plaster had dried. After the recent removal of those shadows a figure emerged (as seen right) with arms that were apparently depicted flatly and without tonal modulation in a single local colour/tone by Michelangelo on either side of a section by Carnevale where the forms of the arms were fully modelled by dramatic shading. Could that ever have been the case? Would Carnevale have been allowed to conduct a master-class demonstration to Michelangelo on how to render painted forms sculpturally? Those who still defend this restoration – as some British newspaper art critics do – might attempt to offer some credible explanation for this startling visual and plastic mismatch, which presently stands as the largest elephant in the art restoration room.
The crime against art that this restoration constituted was compounded by art historical apologists who claimed that the Michelangelo everyone for nearly five centuries had thought existed, had never existed, and that a new, true Michelangelo who, far from being “essentially a sculptor” was “one of the great colourists of Western Art”, had been uncovered by courtesy of a single cleaning. To justify this historically revisionist and artistically subverting “outcome”, apologists for the restoration were obliged to offer one of the most cockamamie art historical/technical accounts: namely, that what had “deceived” Michelangelo’s own contemporaries and everyone else for nearly five centuries had been nothing more than the effects of dirt and soot that had slowly and imperceptibly accumulated on the ceiling’s frescoes over the centuries.
This deceiving filthy material had, the artistically credulous are invited to accept, artfully arranged itself around Michelangelo’s flat, bright, “colouristic” designs so as to mimic the effects of the very sculptural preoccupations for which Michelangelo was already famed. In due course, it was further suggested, this artful dirt and soot had been set in glue by successive restorers, who, on one occasion, it is said, did so while standing on the top of thirty feet high step-ladders while brandishing glue-filled sponges tied to the end of thirty feet long poles. When the Vatican authorities were challenged on this account (by us) they had to admit that no proof existed of any glues ever having been applied by any restorers. What the Vatican authorities might also have admitted is that a further indisputable technical proof of Michelangelo’s authorship of the glue-painting on the fresco surface had emerged in the 19th century when the Vatican made its own moveable scaffold available to the British painter Charles Heath Wilson – and that this testimony was known to them. On examining the ceiling, Wilson had found that:
“…the frescoes are extensively retouched with size-colour…evidently by the hand of Michelangelo”.
Wilson could not only see this glue painting on the plaster surface, he could touch it:
“The colour readily melted on being touched with a wet finger and consisted of a finely ground black, mixed with a size…The shadows of the drapery have been boldy and solidly retouched with this size colour, as well as the shadows on the backgrounds. This is the case not only in the groups of the Prophets and the Sybils, but also in those of the Ancestors of Christ in the lunettes and the ornamental portions are retouched in the same way. The hair of the heads and beards of many of the figures are finished in size colour, whilst the shadows are also thus strengthened, other parts are glazed with the same material, and even portions of the fresco are passed over with the size, without any admixture of colour, precisely as the force of water colour drawings is increased with washes of gum…These retouchings, as usual with all the masters of the art at the time, constituted the finishing process or as Condivi expresses it, ‘l’ultima mano’.”
In addition to his expert (i.e. artist’s) testimony, Wilson offered two further material proofs of Michelangelo’s authorship that might otherwise have been expected to be considered clinching by today’s “scientific” restorers:
“They [the retouchings] were evidently done all at the same time and therefore when the [original] scaffold was in its place.”
“There can be no doubt that nearly all of this work is contemporary, and in one part only was there evidence of a later and incapable hand. The size colour has cracked as the plaster has cracked, but apart from this appearance of age, the retouchings have all the characteristics of original work.”
It is a matter of record that the ceiling cracked before any restorers went near it. If the size painting cracked with the plaster, it must have predated the cracking – and, therefore, also that of any restorer’s intervention. Or, to reverse the testimony: if the glue had been applied by restorers long after Michelangelo had painted the ceiling and long after the ceiling had cracked, as has been suggested, it would have run into the already extensive cracks – but it was not and it had not. We can thus be in no doubt that today’s restorers removed the final stages of Michelangelo’s own work; that the “New Michelangelo” they had “discovered” was nothing more than the mutilated remains of his original work that they had left on the ceiling; that no part of the ceiling had escaped the consequences of their labours.
The last restorers of Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoes seem not fully to have heeded the cautionary evidence of their predecessors’ mishaps. The warnings – both pictorial and documentary – were clear enough. We see in the photograph of the left hand of God from Michelangelo’s “The Separation of the Earth from the Waters” (Fig. 10) that there is today a great mismatch between the sleeve and the fragment of cuff that had been repaired by Carnivale. Engraved copies of the 18th and 19th centuries (see Figs. 8 & 9) suggest that losses of shading to God’s left arm preceded the latest restoration. Charles Heath Wilson, who complained of the ceiling’s filthy and neglected condition and believed that it would profit from cleaning, nonetheless warned in terms against any watery interventions. Not only had he found Michelangelo’s size-painting vulnerable to a wetted finger, he complained that parts of the ceiling had already “undoubtedly been injured by rude [restoration] hands, suggesting that glazing has been partially or entirely swept away” and that great restoration injuries had previously occurred when the ceiling had been “washed by labouring men with water in which a caustic has been mixed”. (For details of the recent water-based cleaning methods, see bottom right.) The consequences of water injuries had been set out by Wilson:
“Thus great brushes or sponges have been swept over the skies and backgrounds and have not only removed dirt in a coarse unequal way, but have eaten into the colours and destroyed them in a variety of places. The Face, shoulder and arms of the prophet Daniel, various parts of the bodies and limbs of the young men sitting over the cornice and other portions of the frescoes have been nearly obliterated by this savage proceeding. The Injury done is irremediable, for the surface of Michelangelo’s work has been swept away.”
Michael Daley
For a full account of the ceiling’s injuries, see “Art Restoration ~ The Culture, The Business and The Scandal”, London 1993 and 1996, New York 1994, by James Beck and Michael Daley.
For evidence of injuries to the prophet Daniel, see our post of January 23rd 2011.
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Misreading Visual Evidence ~ No 1: David Hockney, an art historian and an x-ray photograph
It was recently claimed that “fresh insight” gained on Caravaggio’s painting technique supports David Hockney’s theory that the artist used a primitive form of photography to create his paintings (“Exhibition sheds new light on the art of Caravaggio”, Daily Telegraph report, March 11th). Diagrams, mirrors and light boxes displayed in an exhibition at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, were said to “show” that Caravaggio “may indeed have” used a camera obscura to project figures on to a canvas so that they might be painted directly, with “extraordinary realism” and without any need for designs or preliminary studies. Showing that someone may have done something cuts no ice when logic, logistics and the laws of art all combine to testify against the Hockney hypothesis.
“Insight” itself is a weasel term and is not the same thing as evidence. The art historian supporting Hockney’s thesis, Dr John Spike, offered the observation that “Gallileo was developing the telescope and they [artists] were all fascinated by optics” as if by way of some circumstantial corroboration. Whether or not they were so fascinated, we should note the absence of evidence and consider the logistical difficulties that they would have faced if attempting to work on the basis of the Hockney Hypothesis.
Are we really to suppose that all the figures and animals, and babies, and flying angels, writhing serpents, crucified men and beheaded victims depicted in Caravaggio’s paintings in arrested moments of extremis, were actually copied directly, literally, from life? More specifically, are we to suppose that various combinations of human, bestial and divine creatures were first assembled and then simultaneously posed in full costume for as long as it took the artist to convert their projected photographic image into his painted pictures? (See illustrations on the right.)
Or should we believe that each figure was individually copied down, in full costume, exactly as seen when projected through a pinhole onto a wall in a darkened room? If so, was each painted figure subsequently “overlapped” and partly obliterated by the next in the sequence? Is there any material evidence of such overlaps? If not, we would have to assume that Caravaggio painted directly onto only that part of the projected image that would remain visible when the next figure was copied in. Timing is an important separate consideration: whether the models were depicted in entire groups or individually, how long would they have been expected to hold their usually animated and dramatically expressive poses (see right) in a compositionally perfect position in relation to other figures not yet posed or painted?
There is another crucial consideration: were Caravaggio’s famously dramatic and theatrical lighting effects copied directly from nature onto the canvas via an image of a multi-figure tableau projected through a pinhole? Consider the exponentially increasing practical difficulties an artist would have to overcome when attempting to work in such fashion. Caravaggio would not only have had to paint at speed to avoid his models wearying and slipping out of pose, he would have had to have done so at a speed that would not allow the brilliant light source illuminating his figures to move – and to have done so when working not in front of his painting but to the side of the image projected upon it so as not to block it with his own shadow. Has any artist in history so handicapped his own labours?
Would the light source deployed on Caravaggio’s frozen models have been the sun? If so, at what time of the day did he work? At noon, with the sun’s all-bleaching brilliant light at its zenith, producing unhelpfully top-lit figures? Or in the mornings and evenings when low, acutely angled, less bright but faster moving and changing? Did Caravaggio not only anticipate photography, but Impressionism too? Or, would his groups have been lit for long periods by a fixed battery of brilliant theatrical lamps?
When it is claimed that Caravaggio had achieved the extraordinary realism of his paintings 200 years in advance of the invention of the camera, on the same logic it should further be claimed that he anticipated and emulated the achievements of the cinema. It took the full resources of modern cinema and means of lighting for Luis Bunuel to be able to compose and momentarily arrest a multi-figured tableau in mimicry of Leonardo’s The Last Supper in his film Viridiana. Is there any evidence that such human and technical resources were available to Caravaggio? Is it believed that Caravaggio had invariably worked in this manner? Or that he did so on some occasions but not others? Has any material evidence been found in Caravaggio’s paintings that reflects such radically different patterns of working methods?
The real problem with the Hockney thesis, however, is not the absence of supporting evidence but the existence of contra-evidence. The Telegraph report is illustrated by a photograph of Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew, and by an x-ray photograph of the two figures at the picture’s right-hand side. Those photographs (see above right) constitute a material record of both the paint that is visible to the human eye and the hidden earlier underlying painting. The caption claims that “x-ray analysis shows the style of the artist and supports the idea that he used a primitive form of photography in his work”. It is hard to see how this might be so. X-rays are notoriously difficult images to read with confidence because while they show all the successive states of a painting simultaneously they do not pick up all pigments and materials equally.
Nonetheless, the x-ray photograph that is shown adjacent to the two figures helpfully permits direct visual comparisons. The most striking feature is that the underlying paintwork exposed in the x-ray is not identical with the paintwork that is visible to the human eye. Had Caravaggio worked in the manner being claimed, an x-ray would reveal no differences – no revisions, no “pentimenti”, nothing other than what was already visible on the picture’s surface. But the x-ray evidence here is doubly injurious. Firstly, it shows major changes to the pose of the figures – Christ’s raised arm is higher in the x-ray than in the painting while, conversely, his hand droops dramatically. Secondly, the image is sufficiently intelligible to establish major discrepancies of artistic style.
In the space of the figure (St Peter) standing in front of Christ, the type of drapery seen in the x-ray photograph is manifestly different from that now seen in the visible paint above it. One observer (Giorgio Bonsanti) attributed the underlying drapery, on the basis of an earlier x-ray, to the figure of Christ – see right. Certainly as drapery it is greatly more accomplished artistically – more “Raphael-esque” – than the comparatively stiff, angular, “bent-tin” draped material seen on the St Peter. Most damagingly of all, this underlying painted drapery is not just finer it is of a type found only in art and never in nature. It is not some literal mechanical transcription of an actual draped garment, but a conjuring of spirited flowing, wind-filled forms that arc around the body and derive from the laws of drapery that were first understood and devised by the God-like artists of antiquity and then later rediscovered and emulated by the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance. The living sculpture drapery revealed by the x-ray could not have been taken down from a static figure because it was an invention, a product of art and imagination that served the great powers of composition, design and expression – it conferred grandeur, grace and dynamism to the theatrical stage-right entrance of Christ. We might reasonably agree with Giorgio Bonsanti (see right) that Caravaggio, having first created this great glory, then opted to suppress his own magnificence of drapery so as to have the secondary, Christ-obscuring figure of St Peter serve as a dull mundanely reproachful foil to the wealthily and vibrantly attired group of figures to his left. On the basis of this clear hard embodiment of artistically purposive thought and revision – to the point of artistic sacrifice – it can hardly be concluded other than that Caravaggio was a great inventive, self-critical self-revising showman of an artist and not some secretive shortcut-taking literalist.
Michael Daley
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“Caravaggio did not arrive at the final version right away, and it is important to remember that even compositions that appear to have been born in an instant are the fruit of a long preparatory study. X-ray analysis has proven absolutely indispensable in revealing to our later vision forms and figures that the artist, after sketching them on the canvas, believed would remain concealed from all eyes, including his own, beneath the final version. Thus, in an early version of the Calling of St Matthew, the figure of Christ stood alone and was not covered, as in the final version, by that of St Peter. The latter’s presence involved the accentuation, in the final version, of his role as mediator (he would be the first pope) between man and God. Indeed, we see a sort of division of Christ into two parts, as though two persons have germinated and branched off from the same trunk. This already emphasized Christ’s human and divine nature. Peter laboriously and almost stiffly repeats the gesture of Christ, which in comparison is handled with the greatest eloquence. In addition, we immediately notice the painting’s total independence from the designs of earlier religious painting. From this we may conclude that the artist is not interested in instructing, admonishing or stirring his audience to religious feeling, as the Counter reformation expected art to do. He felt it was not his task. He seems to say, this is what happened. Christ and Peter suddenly came in and made it clear that they wanted to talk to Matthew, while the two youths, taken by surprise, prepared to face an intrusion whose nature they were unaware of; and indeed two other figures, unaware of what was going on, continued counting the money. Matthew brought his hand to his chest, as though to ask if it were he that they wanted. An instant before, the scene had been different; an instant later, it would no longer be the same. If a scene is to be instructive, it must be prepared, planned, and arranged. If it is devoid of this kind of orientation towards a specific end, then the artist is virtually free to shape it as he likes and to change it from one moment to the next, not preparing it, but taking note of it.“
“Caravaggio, who broke with tradition in his representation of this theme, was an unusual exegetist and his imagination produced revolutionary iconographic results. As protagonist of the scene, the painter inserts an angel seen from behind, placing the figure in a prominent position, in the golden section that splits the composition into two parts: the left-hand one, with St Joseph, the donkey, and stones, is dedicated to earthly life, while the right-hand area, which includes the Madonna and Child among living plants, is devoted to the divine world. Even the half-clad angel, for which ambiguous interpretations have forcedly been proposed, corresponds very precisely to the contemporary views put forward by Constantino Ghini in 1595 (the picture, painted at the same time as as the Mary Magdalen, dates from somewhere between 1595 and 1597) and Federico Borromeo, who held that the nudity of angels is a sign of their immunity from any contamination by human misery, just as the bare feet indicate that they are untouched by earthly things…The principal motif of Caravaggio’s Flight into Egypt is that of the music that can be heard on earth, considered by the Fathers of the church to be a copy of music in heaven. The intermediary between these two worlds is the invisible sound, which in art takes the form of an Angel playing music, a divine messenger that stands at the border between material and spirirtual reality. God communicates with men through Angels, who are his go-betweens:'[it is the] Angel who spoke to me,’ says Zachariah and for Ezekiel, the Angel is ‘man dressed in linen,’ just as Caravaggio depicts him.“
“With our Art Laser you can clean any work of art without damaging it” ~ Why professional art conservation is not always a good thing for works of art
Art conservation is not at all like conservation in the real world. If you want to conserve marshland, you don’t drain it. If you want to conserve rich ancient meadows, you don’t plough them or spray them with chemicals. If you want to save rare species you protect their habitats. The essence of conservation in nature is leaving alone and not doing. Art conservation is a different beast: a systematised doing of things to art objects, in exchange for fees or salaries.
Art conservation is now a substantial vested interest, a business with a shifting ideology that serves as self-promotion. Chemical and other manufacturers promote their wares through trade advertisements and fairs ( for examples, see right). There are also substantial educational interests. Conservation training – degrees and doctorates are now given – converts otherwise superfluous arts or science degrees into hard job opportunities. Every last little museum (of which there are thousands) now boasts or craves an in-house conservation department. Sponsorship is easily attained – who would not want to be associated with saving art? For a petro-chemical giant to sponsor prestigious museum art conservation programmes makes particular image-improving sense. Development plans for museums (of which there are many) are virtually guaranteed success if they include a proposed expansion of conservation facilities.
Regardless of conservators’ good intentions, the fact remains that their treatments alter the material fabric and aesthetic appearance of works of art. Alterations are made on promises to prolong life, prevent deteriorations and recover original conditions, when history repeatedly shows contrary outcomes. History also reminds us that much art conservation was formerly called art restoration. Art restoration got a very bad reputation in the nineteenth century when picture restorers were dubbed “picture rats”. Throughout the twentieth century restorers sought to convert public opprobrium into approbation. The International Institute for Conservation (IIC) gives a biennial prize (The Keck Award – see our post of January 8th) specifically for those considered to have best increased public appreciation of “the accomplishments of the conservation profession”.
Even before conservation provided a fashionable gloss, restorers appropriated medical jargon and practices and presented themselves as “picture surgeons”. They dropped artists’ smocks for white coats and they began calling their apprentices “interns”. They x-rayed paintings for “diagnostic” purposes. Such medical airs proved spurious and deceiving. In art restoration there is constant methodological mayhem. There are no agreed methods of cleaning – some favour solvents; some, soaps; some, abrasives; others, lasers. Some advocate total and swift cleanings; some, slow and partial ones. Some favour selective cleanings. There are no universally accepted codes of ethics, no strict rules of professional behaviour, no striking off from registers. There is, as the painter Thomas Torak has regretted, no Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm”.
While there is perpetual talk of conservation ethics, in practical terms this amounts to little more than a hope that one restorer/conservator’s interventions might easily be reversed by the next. If the next restorer can (sometimes) take off what the last left, he can never put back what the last removed or destroyed. Art conservation treatments are cumulatively destructive – which is why the art market places a premium on little restored works and not vice versa – and arbitrary.
In the privacy of trade journals, professors of conservation will admit that if four restorers could restore a painting at the same time, four different paintings would emerge. Some conservators insist that such different outcomes are acceptable as long as they are “safely” executed. The deployment of this non sequitur is a rash – or defiant – move in a profession where untested, supposedly “reversible”, manufactured synthetic materials that were sold as being superior to traditional natural materials, have so frequently proved irreversible and deleterious. Such bad experiences have failed to slow the conservation juggernaut for the simple reason that treatments are not means to agreed ends, but themselves constitute the profession’s raison d’être. When one treatment fails another must replace it, leaving alone, not doing, is not an option.
Criteria of appraisal are moveable feasts. The most egregious unintended outcomes of “treatment” are presented as “discoveries”. To lend credibility to such re-writing of history, picture restorers sport scientific airs. They produce peer-reviewed publications and organise quasi-academic conferences. To bolster this stance, real scientists are employed in conservation departments. Armed with academic respectability museum picture restorers demanded and obtained professional parity with curators. A new discipline, “Technical Art History”, was formed, a mongrel collective of art historians, picture restorers and conservation scientists. Controversial decisions (on restorations or attributions) are now defended/promoted by conservation scientists. This brings immense political advantage to museums because the public is more trusting of “scientific evidence” than of art experts’ aesthetic arguments. Appeals – sometimes cynically made – to the authority of science have trumped criticism and neutralised debate, which practices, in art’s case, should always and properly be considered as being of the essence.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Why is the Metropolitan Museum of Art afraid of public disclosures on its picture restorers’ cleaning materials?
Many museums have mastered the art of presenting their picture restorations as miraculous recoveries that preclude any need for examination or criticism. A few days after our post on secrecy and unaccountability at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Public Relations officer at the museum, in the presence of Artwatch International’s executive director, James Keul, asked television crew members who had just interviewed Michael Gallagher, the Met’s head of picture conservation, not to broadcast his comments on cleaning solvents, any mention of which would “open the doors for critics”.
There are strong – but not good – reasons why a museum might wish to avoid discussions on the materials that restorers use. In hope of prising the Met’s doors, we re-visit the museum’s secret 1971 cleaning of Velazquez’s great portrait Juan de Pareja at Wildenstein and Company. We do so in the light of four documents: an untitled, undated Met booklet; a special conservation issue of the Met’s Bulletin (winter 1993/94); and two accounts given by the Met’s then director, Thomas Hoving, in his books of 1993 (Making the Mummies Dance) and 1996 (False Impressions). None of these identifies the solvents and varnishes used on what had been one of the world’s best preserved Velazquezes.
Restorations take place within general cultures and within local/institutional cultures. Healthy cultures require debate and transparency. Unfortunately the richly-funded, impregnably protected Met sometimes seems to take itself as the summation of Culture. When, in 1971, the museum snatched Juan de Pareja from the impoverished and enfeebled British (who had owned it for centuries), institutional pride was fit to burst. The Met booklet carried entries from the President of the Board, Douglas Dillon; the Director, Thomas Hoving; the Vice-Director and Curator in Chief, Theodore Rousseau; the Curator in Charge, European Paintings, Everett Fahy; and the “Conservator”, Hubert von Sonnenburg. Before the sale, Hoving, Rousseau, Sonnenburg and Fahy had flown to London, Madrid, and Rome – a sort of “boy-gang” playing at spreading rumours like “the disinformation section of the KGB”, as Hoving, (who later claimed to have discussed with Wildenstein’s how to “manipulate the art press and crank up the rumor mill” in a general strategy of “dissimulation and misleading rumors”), put it.
When bought, the picture was not paraded to the Met but “sneaked” into Wildenstein and Company “for secrecy”, partly because funds had been committed without the Board’s knowledge but also because, as Hoving put it, the Board had to remain longer in the dark as “total secrecy” would still be needed to “prepare our public relations stance” and “have the time to clean it.” The deceiving of the public was absolute: for a short period before the restoration, the picture was exhibited to New Yorkers as Wildenstein’s own property. Ignoring back-room machinations, the crucial question is: Why should a miraculously well-preserved, three and a quarter century old unlined canvas, have immediately been subjected to the traumas of a rushed restoration before the Board and the city might learn of the acquisition?
Hoving deferred to Sonnenburg on matters of connoisseurship and artistic technique, and had abnegated all responsibility for deciding whether or not to buy the picture: “back in New York with Chairman Dillon, Rousseau and I were on pins and needles awaiting Sonnenburg’s word. Would it be yes, or forget it? ” When Hoving, Sonnenburg, Rousseau and Fahy assembled before the painting in London, the Met’s conservation oracle suavely predicted a new and different picture that would be liberated dramatically from within a yellowed varnish tomb. Hoving sold those predictions of an even greater artistic glory to the Met’s big-wigs, some of whom had personally pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars. Velazquez’s mixed-race assistant with “dark-brown flesh” would emerge with “rosy” flesh tones and a nice clean “grey” doublet. Thus were the museum’s key players guaranteed a dramatic restoration result that would “present” as a further triumph of their collective perspicacity – and also, by eliminating any trace of Radnor family restorations (restorations that had been posited but nowhere established by Sonnenburg), expunge all historical and aesthetic continuities and make the picture entirely their own.
In such possessive and chauvinistic contexts, admitting the possibility of errors, aesthetic losses, or regrets, becomes unthinkable. This restoration would be – must be – beyond appraisal, reflection, debate or criticism. But given that no artist, writer or musician is above evaluation and criticism, why should a technician, acting on what was by common agreement the finest creative work of one of the world’s greatest artists, have been so indulged? And for that matter, why should every Met restorer be allowed to “touch base” on whatever he takes to be a picture’s bedrock “original” surface? How original can a repeatedly solvent-invaded, swab-abraded surface be?
Sonnenburg, working under intense pressure to complete before any political or journalistic exposure of the secrecy, on a script of his own writing, proved himself right to Hoving’s satisfaction: “the most astounding feature of the work was that there was hardly any color in the picture.” Purging the picture of extraneous “varnishes,” or what Hoving called “gunk” transformed the picture, but at what cost? Looking at the booklet’s now historically precious fold-out spread of three identically sized and printed full colour plates that recorded the restoration in progress (see previous post), it would seem that the original “varnished” state was indeed more, and more variously, colourful.
Sonnenburg’s high reputation as a moderate, risk-avoiding restorer stood on his having spent several years as an apprentice to the most famously cautious, slow-working and aesthetically alert restorer, Johan Hell. In Britain, Hell’s restorations were greatly preferred by artists to those of his fellow German émigré Helmut Ruhemann, who established the National Gallery’s highly controversial in-house restoration department after the Second World War. The President of the Royal Academy, Sir Gerald Kelly, entrusted his own grandest works to Hell’s varnishing technique.
By hiring Sonnenburg in the 1960s, the Met put cultural distance between its earlier troubled restorations and those then raging at the National Gallery, but it did so without anyone fully comprehending Hell’s philosophy or method. For a time, Sonneburg was succeeded at the Met by the British restorer John Brealey who had also studied with Hell. Brealey’s disastrous restoration of Velazquez’s Las Meninas at the Prado (see right) shows him to have been no proper student of Hell’s (– a judgement endorsed to us by Dr Hell’s late widow, Kate). The Met booklet sequence makes clear that, on the great Juan de Pareja, Sonneburg proceeded in outright violation of his declared master’s precepts and practices. By swiftly stripping the picture from one side to the other, instead of first establishing the antiquity of the “varnish” and only then, perhaps, proceeding to clean gradually and equally overall, Sonneburg embraced the practices of Ruhemann and repudiated those of his master (- to whose work we shall return in future posts).
The cover photograph of the Met booklet shows the face in detail. A close-up reveals a system of open and exposed cracking that is more visually disruptive than was ever recorded before or after the restoration (see above right). We do not know how – or with what solvents – the painting had been cleaned before that point. There is no indication of when the photograph was taken. We do not know what steps were taken to minimise the visual disruption of those cracks afterwards. We do know – as Sonnenburg must have – that Hell would never have arrived at that point in a restoration; would never have stripped a picture of all varnish, even into its cracks, for fear of letting his solvents invade the paintwork and attack the exposed paint/ground interface.
There may be irony in the fact that the heavy restoration doors now being slammed at the Met have, for five years past, been generously and most helpfully opened to us at the National Gallery in London.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Discovered Predictions: Secrecy and Unaccountability at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Impeccable condition in a painting is more of a goad than a deterrent to restorers. When the youthful Thomas Hoving was appointed director of the Metropolitan Museum in 1967, he formed a respectful – even deferential – alliance with the (then) head of picture conservation, Hubert von Sonnenburg. Two decades earlier in London, the National Gallery’s director, Philip Hendy, forged a similarly dependent relationship with the German émigré restorer Helmut Ruhemann. Ironically, von Sonnenburg had presented as the heir-apparent to Johannes Hell, another German émigré to Britain who’s mild and gradual cleanings were widely preferred to Ruhemann’s controversially swift “total cleanings”.
Hoving and von Sonnenburg together stalked one of Velazquez’s finest portraits, his Juan de Pareja, which the Met acquired in 1970 for a world record $4.5m. Although, on their own testimony, that picture was in superb condition and had never even been lined, on acquisition it was whisked to Wildenstein and Company, “for secrecy”, as Hoving later admitted. There, Von Sonnenburg secretly “proceeded to discover”, as Hoving put it, “everything he had predicted he’d find”.
It was not unprecedented for a museum director to have a major acquisition secretly restored. Sir Charles Eastlake, scorched by National Gallery cleaning controversies in 19th century Britain, had his acquisitions cleaned in Italy before bringing them to the gallery. Secrecy in conservation can seem systemic: in 1960, when the National Gallery constructed “modern” purpose-built conservation studios, part of one was partitioned by a wall, behind which the chief restorer could work on projects of “particular difficulty or confidentiality”, as a then National Gallery restorer, David Bomford, put it in 1978.
Eastlake made no photographic record of the pre-restoration condition of his acquisitions – even though he happily used photographs for attributing paintings, and must, as president of the Royal Photographic Society, have appreciated photography’s unprecedented testimonial capacities. Fortunately, photographic records of the Sonnenburg/Hoving Velazquez restoration were kept and published by the Metropolitan Museum (in an undated booklet – see right). While these photographs may not be of the highest, digital age, standards, they are nevertheless “of a piece” and permit comparisons between recorded states to be drawn.
Much as von Sonnenburg thrilled over an impeccably preserved, never-lined canvas, he could not resist tampering with it. Two of its edges had been folded over on the stretcher. This fact was presented to Hoving as a “discovery”, even though it had been reported by the Velazquez specialist José Lopez-Rey seven years earlier. The folded canvas strips were opened, flattened and reinforced with new canvas to extend the picture’s format and diminish its subject, shifting him leftwards and downwards (see right). The justification for this compositional “recovery” was that original paint had been applied to the folded strips, but the pictorial testimony of that paint, when first revealed, was not photographically disclosed – see account on the right.
Von Sonnenburg, it seemed, could not resist the urge to “liberate” the painting’s supposed “pure flesh tones” and thereby leave the dark-skinned servant’s face lighter and pinker. By stripping off “varnish” von Sonnenburg also caused previously unified components to detach themselves from each other:
“the rounded shape of Pareja’s forehead, for example, is defined only by a large spot of impasto-crisp in the center, bordered by dragged spurs – applied directly on the thin underpainting. When seen close up, the highlight seems to be floating over the paint in an almost measurable distance…”
This was a classic restoration apologia. Even the emergence of a formerly hidden streak of flesh-coloured paint on the background was presented as an act of liberation and recovery:
“Attention should be drawn to the single dragged brushstroke of light skin colour in the center of the background at the right…Unquestionably, this randomly applied paint is original, and shows how Velazquez chose to try out his loaded brush on the background…Such spontaneity, combined with the greatest subtlety of color and technique make the Juan de Pareja one of Velazquez’s most painterly works.”
Convinced that Velazquez had happily left his own brush-wipings visible on one of his two finest portraits (the second being his Pope Innocent X), and that he had used glazes less than Titian, von Sonnenburg was not dismayed when his cleaned painting betrayed markedly less colouring and reduced to a “predominantly gray color scheme”. His rationale for losses of colour and of spatial and plastic coherence; for the flattening of a formerly prodigiously well-modelled and sympathetically lit head; and for the spatial inverting of a background that formerly receded, was audaciously lame: in 1938 an English restorer, Horace Buttery, had described the doublet as “dark gray”. Despite recognising that the painting had – miraculously – shown “no signs of ever having been abused by solvent action during the past”, von Sonnenburg nonetheless contended that it must have been cleaned and varnished “at times”. On that basis, he speculated that it could therefore safely be assumed to have been so restored by Buttery, and, therefore, to have enabled him, on that occasion, correctly to have read the doublet’s true colour. This hypothetical daisy-chain was presented as a proof, despite the fact that before and after Mr Buttery, the garment had always been described as a “green doublet” – not least by Velazquez’s biographer, Antonio Palomino who in 1724 precisely reported “a muted green for Juan’s doublet”.
After their stripping and repainting of pictures, restorers invariably apply fresh varnishes… which in turn discolour and thereby serve as a pretext for another “restoration”. With successive varnish removals, solvents deplete, embrittle and optically alter paint films. When penetrated by solvents, paint films heat, swell and soften so that even the friction of cotton wool abrades them – as the restorer Caroline Keck admitted. Soluble plastic components of the paint itself are carried off by evaporating solvents. Restorers sometimes claim that because old paintings have so frequently been abused in the past, there is nothing left to extract today – but with the Juan de Pareja, no such claim could be made. At the same time, they sometimes admit that cleaning pictures with thick paint is easier than cleaning ones with thin paint. (If cleaning methods really were as safe as is claimed, it would not matter whether the paint being treated was thick or thin.) When stripped to a restorer’s conception of “clean”, the remaining paint is left parched, absorbent, matt and in need of “nourishment” by varnishes.
When new varnishes (i.e. resins dissolved in solvents) are applied, they penetrate and amalgamate with the parched paint thereby making the next cleaning the more hazardous, and so on ad infinitum. If we are lucky, von Sonnenburg will have used a natural resin varnish. If not, if he subscribed to the Met’s then hi-tech enthusiasms, he will have used a synthetic resin in the confident but erroneous expectation that it would not discolour and that it would remain easily soluble.
In 1966 a restorer at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts deplored the use of untested synthetic materials, judging them “all right for space ships” but not for old master paintings. By 1995 a conservation scientist, Tom Learner, reported that synthetic resins which had “appeared to offer” advantages over natural ones “are now known to be inherently unstable”. In 1998 the Met’s (present) Chairman of European Painting, Keith Christiansen, admitted that synthetic varnishes used at the Metropolitan Museum had turned not yellow but grey and had “cross-linked with the pigments below, meaning that removal is, if not impossible, extremely difficult”.
Dr Christiansen has yet to reply to the question ArtWatch and ARIPA put to him on February 6th, concerning the Met’s intentions towards its new, miraculously well-preserved Perino del Vaga painting.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
An ominous silence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
On February 6th, ArtWatch and our French colleagues in ARIPA sought an assurance from Keith Christiansen, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Chairman of European Paintings, that the museum will resist any temptation to clean its newly acquired and miraculously well-preserved early mannerist painting by Perino del Vaga. Dr Christiansen has yet to reply.
The Met had made a wonderful double acquisition at Sotheby’s, New York annual Old Masters Sale. On January 26th it bought (for $782,500) Perino del Vaga’s stunning drawing The Marriage Bed of Jupiter and Juno, a design for one of a series of tapestries commissioned by Andrea Doria for his palace at Genoa (see right). On January 27th it also bought Perino del Vaga’s very fine The Holy Family with the Infant St John the Baptist for $2.098m – a sum that greatly exceeded auction estimates; that was a record price for the artist; and that surely testified to the painting’s superb, restoration-free condition (see right).
This rare and precious condition was celebrated by Christopher Apostle, Sotheby’s senior vice president and head of the firm’s Old Master Painting Department in a video promotion:
“This Holy Family with Madonna and Child is by Perino del Vaga, one of the most important and elegant painters of the late Italian Renaissance. Despite the way it looks now, it is actually in extremely beautiful condition. It’s under a varnish, which is aged and discoloured over many, many centuries. “It probably has not been restored in the last two or three hundred years, if ever. “Underneath you see wonderful details, wonderful retention of paint and even small flakes of gold. Here, in the hair of the Madonna, in the hair of the Infant Christ, as well as along her collar and along the border of her cloak. It’s an exceptionally elegant picture and one has not seen one like it on the market for many, many years.”
Sotheby’s respect for the condition – and forgoing of any temptation to spruce it up for the market – had paid off handsomely. Not only was the price a record, at $2m it had reached something like five or six times its estimate of $300,000–400,000. By contrast when, in the same sale, Sotheby’s put up Titian’s A Sacra Conversazione: The Madonna and Child with Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria – another painting said to be in fine, rarely touched condition, but which had been restored for the occasion (see right) – it failed to reach its upper estimate ($20m) selling for only $16.9m (or £10.6m). Although even this low price broke a 20 years old auction house record for the artist, it did so when the going “museum rate” for privately sold large multi-figure Titians is about £50m (as with the Diana and Actaeon when recently bought jointly by the National Gallery, London, and the National Galleries of Scotland).
It is possible that certain non-condition factors adversely affected the Titian’s price. A number of newspaper writers noted the distinctly downbeat and opaque circumstances of the sale. The Daily Telegraph’s art sales correspondent, Colin Gleadell observed that:
“Although unquestionably by Titian, some felt there was evidence of the hands of his assistants at work, and there was only one bidder, an anonymous European collector, for it.”
In the New York Times, Carol Vogel also flagged up the curious solitary and anonymous bidder who had got himself up to the new record price by bidding to the bottom estimate:
“The painting, which dates from around 1560, sold to a lone telephone bidder for its low estimate, $15 million, or $16.8 million, including Sotheby’s fees. The auction house would identify the buyer only as ‘a European collector.’ The price was a record for the artist at auction, surpassing the $13.5 million paid at Christie’s in London in 1991.”
The high premium that auctioneers now place on little or un-restored works is, to critics of restoration practices, one of the most heartening developments of our times. Another is the fact that some restorers, even, acknowledge that less has proved more in the preservation of old masters. The New York dealer/restorer, Marco Grassi, has disclosed that of the paintings coming into his hands, the ones enjoying the best condition are those of relatively minor and unfashionable artists. As he concludes, because such lesser works are so often “impeccably preserved, so we have to think something terrible started in the nineteenth century when the painter/restorer trade began.”
We in ArtWatch and ARIPA were hoping that in this new climate and with the widespread delight of art lovers over a particular miraculous survival, the Metropolitan Museum, despite recent signs of hyperactivity in its own picture restoration and up-grades department, might now allow its exciting newly acquired benchmark painting to be enjoyed for what it is by the public and to be properly studied as such by experts. Our hopes are dashed: we see in Carol Vogel’s report of January 27 that she had already ascertained Dr Christiansen’s pro-active intent:
“Though the work sold for more than its estimate, Mr. Christiansen said the museum actually benefited from what he called ‘negative chatter’ about it from dealers. Although the painting is in good condition, he said, it is filthy and will go on view only after it is cleaned. Paintings by this Renaissance master are rare.”
His “reading” of the sale seems eccentric: negative chatter about filth drives prices down, to the benefit of the Met, while driving them up to record highs in the wider world? Does Dr Christiansen not know that “filthy” is the traditional hungry restorer’s term of denigration for any work with an old varnish the removal of which might earn a shilling? Does Dr Christiansen not appreciate that any replacement varnish will also discolour in short order and need also, on his logic, to be removed? Will he not concede that every removal of a varnish layer that is inevitably amalgamated with the underlying paint carries inherent risks?
Of course, if a painting really were “filthy”, then any dirt should be removed from its varnished surface, with mild and safe means. At which point, in this particular painting, the optimal moment would occur for studying what may well be a rare and original final coating that speaks of either the artist’s own finishing procedures or of those that were general to his times. If when so cleaned, an old varnish is found to be an impossibly obscuring accumulation of varnished layers, then, certainly, it might gently, gradually be thinned until a non-injurious transparency is attained. But we can, pace Dr Christiansen, be confident that this particular painting cannot have been in such a dire or filthy condition – for how else might so many people have marvelled at its beautifully nuanced, gradated and harmonised chromatic and plastic relationships, along with its wonderful and clear details?
So far as we know, there has been no public indication or discussion of what Dr Christiansen and the Met’s restorers might or might not be intending to study and report – or intending to remove or suppress – during their cleaning of the picture. While we would have hoped that it is now a universally recognised duty of museums to cherish and study disinterestedly any historically-preserved and artistically intact work without haste or the imposition of personal tastes, we are in this respect disquieted to recall Dr Christiansen’s own somewhat hubristic declaration that “Restoration is interpretation”, and, “in the end, it’s a matter of taste. And I guess I have confidence in my taste.”
Given Dr Christiansen’s continuing silence and declared intention, we can only fear that despite all recent confessions of past errors – Rembrandts wrecked at the Metropolitan Museum; Picassos likewise at MOMA – once again, as an exceptionally fine and intact painting has entered the Met’s Restoration Maw, it will already, just as did Velazquez’s great Juan de Pareja before it, have disappeared into the cleaning tank before the public might have stolen the briefest glance; before artists (see right) and other experts might have examined, reflected, reported and discussed; before any profitable illuminating non-invasive, long-term explorations might have got under way; and before any of the Met’s too-bright, too-flat, too-modernist, overly “conserved” pictures might have been put to shame by the aged but intact condition of the new arrival.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
The European Commission’s way of moving works of art around
In our February 2nd account of the European Commission’s desire to speed the “trafficking” (as it were) of art objects between European museums, through its project “Collections Mobility 2.0”, we addressed the current forms of this politically orchestrated campaign but neglected a rationale for it that had recently been offered by Androulla Vassiliou, the European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, in her introduction to Culture in Motion’s brochure The Culture Programme – 2007-2013:
“I am especially happy to highlight the importance of culture to the European Union’s objective of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. At a time when many of our industries are facing difficulties, the cultural and creative industries have experienced unprecedented growth and offer the prospect of sustainable, future-oriented and fulfilling jobs.”
Michel Favre-Felix, President of ARIPA (Association Internationale pour le Respect de l’Intégrité du Patrimoine Artistique), has drawn our attention to his own study of the earlier and underlying stages of this policy. An account of those researches was published in his article of Nuances 40-41 (2009). We are deeply indebted to Mr Favre-Felix not only for conducting those initial studies so thoroughly and for demonstrating their unsatisfactory – if not sinister – character, but also for presenting them here in summary form.
Michel Favre-Felix writes:
Since 2003, the declared ambition of the European Commission has been to “facilitate”, “encourage”, “promote” and make “easy” the “mobility of art collections” within Europe. To this end, five conferences were held in Naples (2003), The Hague (2004), Manchester (2005), Helsinki (2006) and, Bremen (2007).
The initial premise rested on an arithmetical calculation: exhibitions of international character are presented by only 300 institutions out of 30,000 European museums. Recommendations were issued to stimulate exchanges and loans of works of art within Europe, in addition to existing international travelling exhibitions.
Apart from administrative simplifications, it was seen that the best means of encouraging loans lay in a reduction of costs. With insurance charges comprising on average 15% -20% of travelling exhibition budgets, savings in this area could be achieved by four means: by museums’ extended use of the non-insurance of cultural objects; by waiving certain risks; by waiving costs of depreciation; and by expanding the use of State guarantees.
In the latter, a State takes the responsibility of an insurer, at almost no cost to museums, for the largest part of the values engaged in the exhibition, loan, etc. The minimal part not guaranteed by states, or the “excess” part, is insured by private companies that remain responsible for covering “the first losses”. These are the more frequent and the most tangible (and not having covered these liabilities is the reason why States have had little to pay for damages up to now – which does not mean that accidents had not happened).
It should, however, be recognised that even commercial insurance does not cover all injuries: damages that are not discovered and declared within 48 hours are excluded: the universal rule of “nail to nail” further excludes any deteriorations that manifest themselves sometime after the return of a work. Nor does insurance always cover damages linked to the fragility of an art work in the environment of travel and exhibition as with regard to humidity, temperature, etc. The reasoning is that so-vulnerable art should not have been given permission to travel in the first place, and that the lender erred in permitting it. “Pre-existing fragilities” are specifically a possible exclusion argument. However, these companies do maintain in the process their strong concern with security risks.
A first-step European study, in 2004 specifically acknowledged that:
“Insurance costs serve as obstacles for projects that are doubtful in terms of conservation, for the reason that insurers are not willing to cover particularly high risks. From this point of view, insurance costs are a guarantee against ill-considered exhibition projects. […] Insurance companies have an influence on security measures taken in museums, thus helping prevent damage” [See endnote1].
Nevertheless, the same study and the later EU reports advocate the reduction of insurance and recommend that:
“Museum professionals agree to: -waive certain risks. -consider lending on a non-insurance basis, -cover only restoration of material damage and waive depreciation” [2]
On the possibility of “Non-insurance” the report contends that:
“Essentially, the question is: why take out insurance on objects lent abroad if the object is not insured when it remains on home ground?”
The purpose of the question is baffling: in 1991 the art insurer Hiscox stated that the risks involved were ten times higher for work on loan than when left at home. Sixteen years later, in 2007, in answer to our questions, Axa Art in France estimated the risks in loan venues to be about six times higher than in permanent residences.
Specific European suggestions that lenders should: “not insure works while they [are] at the exhibition venue” ignore the fact that most injuries occur during the time of the exhibition – and especially at moments of handling: mounting/dismounting, unpacking/repacking. In addition to which, environmental stress and risks have sometimes proved higher during exhibitions than during the travelling time.
The admonition to “waive depreciation” means that lenders should relinquish the loss of value after damage. This is a rationale from a mere financial strategy: mathematically, costs of depreciation comprise 80% of the money paid back by art insurance companies. But for ethical and cultural commitments, this strategy is most shocking. Apart from “money value”, waiving depreciation means to ignore, to deny the irreversible loss to the artistic integrity of the work of art when damaged.
Artistic integrity is totally written out of consideration when EU experts specifically advocate that:
“depreciation should not be insured because the value of an object is not important in collection mobility.”
According to this risks/damage management, depreciation should not be a concern, and neither should restoration be a problem, as we see in this incredible statement:
“in many cases, after the exhibits have been restored, only experts can assess the alteration resulting from the damage. The restored artworks can therefore be exhibited as they are.”
This rationale that an injured and then restored work has returned to its non-injured condition – or has returned “enough” to be “re-used”– is not only clearly fallacious, but represents a major fault in museum and conservation ethics. Because restorations may (temporarily) deceive the eyes of the uninformed, restoration is presented as a miraculous mean for wiping off responsibility and liabilities. So, too, may “restorations” that are unnecessary for a work of art in its location, be imposed in order “to enable it to travel”, to endure the constraint of transport and the stress of alien environments. Such thinking might rightly be considered a source of abusive treatments of art objects: because of hasty intervention to meet deadlines or because of losses of their integrity (i.e. by relinings). But EU papers only address this question in terms of financial charges – which are to be kept “to a minimum”.
A most shocking aspect is that there is never any request that the money saved through the proposed facilities be re-invested to enhance security measures. In this strategy of “keeping costs at minimum”, Museums are further counselled to moderate even their demands for increasing safety:
“Museums that are willing to waive insurance coverage of certain risks may want assurances that transport, display, security and climate control are of the highest standard. However, it would be counterproductive [sic] to impose additional demands that again increase costs, especially when the insurance waiver was intended to reduce such costs.”
The “Museum collections on the move workshop” in Naples 2003 advised lenders to “limit as far as possible” extra expenses, and to think twice before asking for accompaniment by a courier [3], although this has proved to be the most effective procedure to secure the object during its whole travel.
All the opposite – increasing the security and safety measures – should have been a central preoccupation of this European project, because, wishing to have more loans and more exhibitions (than those already conducted by the 300 major museums) would, necessarily mean involving a lot of small museums – which are less equipped – and borrowing art works from non-museum sources (i.e. city-owned or various communities collections). It is well known that when the lender is not an informed professional and is not well advised by a professional conservation team, his work of art would not likely receive the safest (more expensive) forms of care and protection. The tragically recurrent abuses of Signac’s largest painting should serve as a reminder. (See illustration and comments, right.) It should therefore be a priority to promote a reinforced ethical responsibility of the borrower, to protect the “little” lenders.
The last point that deserves urgent consideration is the very motivation for such movements of collections. There is a clear interest to gather works of a given artist (though preferably not the most commonly represented ones) on the benefit of this artist first, and of the public and the experts alike. Common sense and museum ethics too, consider that loans of works of art
“should only be granted to exhibitions abroad which are artistically or academically of high quality”. [4]
Specifically to be excluded should be loans assembled for the purpose of festivities, political celebrations, personal or group promotions, etc. European institutions might themselves be supposed to set a “best practice” example in this regard. How then, on what academic, artistic or scientific reasons, were the 27 nation members of the European Union asked to send “a treasure of their cultural heritage”, to be gathered in a single (over-crowded) room of the Palazzo Quirinal in Rome (from March 24th to May 20th 2007) in order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome?
(1) Study No. 2003-4879 ordered by the European Commission to inventory national systems of public guarantees in 31 countries (June 2004) http://ec.europa.eu/culture/key-documents/doc915_en.htm
(2) Lending to Europe Recommendations on collection mobility for European museums (April 2005) http://www.nba.fi/mobility/background.htm
(3) The role of the courier is to act as representative of the lender in ensuring safe handling of the loan during transit, unpacking, packing and, if necessary, during installation and de-installation. Moreover, he would need the presence of an accredited supervisor (extra expense) to look after the loan all the way along to the plane holds on airport freight zones.
(4) General Principles on the Administration of Loans and Exchange of Works of Art between Institutions, Code of practice of the international group of organisers of large-scale exhibitions (Bizot Group).
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The Inspector of Historical Monuments urged “to keep the painting where it is and not to attempt to have it sent again in various exhibitions”.
This was a waste of advice: the painting, although extremely fragile and large, was sent in 1997 to an exhibition in Paris… where it again arrived ripped, without any understanding of “how and when a shock could have hurt the painting while all the precautions have been taken [sic]”.
Who is to blame? The too-confident small city of Montreuil? Or, the self-confident Paris exhibition organizers – who might have declined the loan in view of the painting’s well-known fragility?
Why is the European Commission instructing museums to incur more risks by lending more art?
Given the notorious risks of loaning works of art (see: An Appeal from Poland) and the high costs of insuring against those risks, why should the European Commission now be doing everything in its power to increase the practice throughout all of Europe’s museums?
In 2009 the Commission, through its “Culture Programme of the European Union” (which is funded to the tune of €400m), set up “Collections Mobility 2.0 Lending for Europe – 21st century”. This latter organisation, has itself funded international junkets – already – in Shanghai, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Budapest, Paris, Amsterdam (again) and, for this coming November, Athens. (Why Shanghai? – Is China seeking entry into the European Union?)
The ostensible prospectus for this pan-European project to “set culture in motion”, under the aegis of the 2007 “European Agenda for Culture in a globalising world”, rests on an evident conviction that an ever-greater shuffling around of the stock of art that is housed in Europe’s historical and nationally distinctive museums is a self-evident Good Communautaire Thing. While lip service is paid to “retaining the cultural diversity of the member states” it is hard to see how this might be achieved through a project which by design “contributes to European integration” and aims to bestow “a context” upon the art which is moved. When reading the promotional literature, it is hard not to see an overarching desire to homogenise European cultural life precisely by subverting the richly individual historically-forged identities of national institutions. It is hard to see how, in the real Euro-world of collapsing economies and soaring unemployment, a massive bureaucratized drive to increase inter-museum loans and their attendant risks might be considered other than whimsical and irresponsible.
As if in denial of the inherent risks, Collections Mobility 2.0 has constructed top-down national training programmes to be run in all European member states with the express purpose of encouraging more loans by the imposition of tiers of pre-cooked administrative procedure. All participants on these crash courses are required to:
“…cascade the training programme to other professionals in their own country using the training package that is being developed.”
The targets of this training package are to be:
“…professionals dealing directly with the administration of international loan of artworks as collection keepers, registrars, etc.”
The enterprise itself is dressed in pure dissembling management-speak:
“The Collections Mobility 2.0, Lending for Europe – 21st Century project organises training courses and provides a training package in order to introduce the most recent developments, best practices, concepts, standards and procedures on lending and borrowing of museum collections. ‘Getting practical’ is the aim of the project.”
Getting practical is not the same as “Getting real”. The risks to loaned works are real and the cost of insuring against them is correspondingly and appropriately high. As if to bypass this latter reality, Collections Mobility 2.0 charged a group of experts to examine over 5,000 loans made in five years under state indemnity schemes. This group duly reports that only seven claims for minor damage were made under those schemes. Taking these findings at face value and making no allowance for the under-reporting of travel injuries in the art world, Collections Mobility 2.0 seeks to increase loan traffic volumes by advising museums to insure less, to insure their works only for the specific short periods of travel at the beginning and end of a loan period, and not for the full duration of the loan.
This would greatly compound the hazards. TheArt Newspaper reports (February) that Sandy Nairne, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, has pointed out that loaned paintings get stolen from within museums and not just while on the road. He should know, having been charged when at the Tate with making the arrangements for the recovery of two of its Turners that were stolen when on loan to a museum in Germany.
Mr Nairne’s warning that “Without insurance the Tate would have had no money, nor the paintings”, cannot be gainsaid. What might be said is that by paying a ransom of over £3m to what Geoffrey Robinson, the former Paymaster General, described as “a group of particularly nasty Serbs”, the Tate established a going-rate “reward” of fifteen per cent of a work’s insurance value to obtain a recovery and avoid a full insurance pay-out. Whether such ransoms masquerade as “payments for intelligence” or not, they make art theft an increasingly tempting prospect.
For example, were the Krakow, Czartoryski Foundation’s, Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine, to be stolen during its proposed trips to and from the National Gallery in London, it would, with its current insurance rating of €300m, afford a juicy potential haul of €30-45m to thieves. Were that Leonardo to be insured only during its times of travel, as Collections Mobility 2.0 now urges, the insurance cost might fall “considerably” – but the painting would remain a plump €30-45m target. Were it to be stolen from within the National Gallery, the owners, having acted on Collections Mobility 2.0’s advice, would receive nothing from the insurers. Similarly, if the painting were to be dropped and smashed at the National Gallery during the periods of installation or de-installation (as happened recently to a panel by Beccafumi), the Polish owners would receive nothing from the insurers. Were private insurance arrangements to be replaced by state-guarantees of indemnity, in the event of thefts, states would find themselves in “recovery” negotiations with nasty criminal groups and without the political cover afforded by commercial insurers.
There are no limits to the problems associated with Collections Mobility 2.0. Were the Lady with an Ermine to be loaned by her owners to France instead of, or in addition to Britain (and any or all venues would seem to be on the cards with this painting under its present aristocratic stewardship – in recent years she has been loaned to: Washington, 1991; Malmo, 1994; Kyoto, 2001; Nagoya, 2001; Yokohama, 2002; Milwaukee, 2002; Houston, 2003; San Francisco, 2003; Budapest, 2009) the risks of theft or injury would likely be higher still. The Daily Telegraph recently reported growing concerns that French museums are easy targets for thieves (“Lending works of art to France is a risky business”, 29 August 2010). For the past fifteen years thefts from French museums have run at three a month. In May 2010 thieves broke into the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and stole five paintings valued at £86m.
Two works loaned to France from the Victoria and Albert museum have been damaged in the past two years. An official at Apsley House, London, has said of the museum’s art “We wouldn’t lend that to the Louvre. We don’t know what state we’d get it back in.”
Whether or not one supports the European “Grand Project” to forge a United States of Europe, we should all be clearer about the implicit cultural price of ironing-out nationally distinctive institutions. It is barely over half a century since Hans Tietze, writing in the aftermath of the devastation of the Second World War, said of The Great National Galleries of Europe and the United States:
“The least part of their value lies in the millions they would fetch on the market; their real worth lies in the intellectual labour which they embody and in the spiritual pleasure stored up in them. To create these possessions the nations contended one with the other, and each land has built its own memorial in the Gallery which enshrines its history and its way of life.”
If Eurocrats are offended by these nationally expressive institutions, they should say so openly. Better yet, they might resolve to leave them in peace to speak for themselves. Since we already have the free movement of all European citizens, there is no impediment to their visiting any art – in its own already culturally rich context – anywhere on the continent. Let us cherish Europe’s unequalled and diverse cultural achievements for what they are and avoid putting them to unnecessary risks.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Below: Leonardo da Vinci’s late 15th C. Lady with an Ermine, oil on wood panel, 54 cm x 39 cm. This painting, normally housed at the Czartoryski Museum, Kraków, is presently on show at the National Museum in Warsaw. It has recently been loaned to the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. It is planned to move the picture again to London for the National Gallery’s exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan” exhibition from November 2011 to February 2012.
In an appeal to ArtWatch UK on November 30th November 2010, Prof. Grazyna Korpal, the expert of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in the field of painting restoration, at ASP Krakow, commented:
“The work of Leonardo da Vinci called Lady with an Ermine, from the collection of the Czartoryski Museum is one of the most valuable paintings not only in the context of the Polish collections, but also of the world heritage. Such masterpieces require exceptional protection. Prevention is the main priority. Its fundamental principle is the unconditional restriction of movement and transfer to the absolutely necessary. If you transport a picture panel such as the Lady with an Ermine, even the most ideal methods in the form of modern environmental chambers or special anti-shock frames are not able to sufficiently protect the work against a variety of vibrations, shocks or changes in pressure. By allowing the painting to travel we create yet another serious threat, largely extending the area of possible human error, while increasing the likelihood of the impact of the so-called independent factors.
“Given the technology of the picture, it is necessary to keep it under constant microclimatic conditions, in one place, in a tight microclimatic frame of the new generation, made on the basis of the already proven solutions used for panel masterpieces in renowned museums. Only by storing the picture in a fixed location will eliminate to the maximum such basic threats as unavoidable external pollution, changes in the microclimate, all kinds of shock, vibration, drastic changes in pressure, and reduce the risks resulting from independent factors.
“To sum up the basic arguments put forward for the protection of the painting Lady with an Ermine, I firmly declare that each loan and the associated with it transport are a serious, even reprehensible, threat to the state of preservation and safety of this priceless work of art. I also believe that based on the special immunities provided for outstanding works of art already developed and operating in Austria, Germany or the United States, it is necessary to grant such immunity to the painting from Krakow.“Like every masterpiece the painting Lady with an Ermine has a historical value, and in this value is also included – the Czartoryski Museum, Cracow’s atmosphere and the tumultuous history of the picture during the last century. Each loan ‘strips’ the work of this unique ‘setting’, which while not indifferent to the viewer, should be especially nurtured and protected in the Polish reality.
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How the National Gallery belatedly vindicated the restoration criticisms of Sir Ernst Gombrich
History has repeatedly shown that scholars and art-lovers (no matter how distinguished and mild-mannered) who put themselves between museum picture restorers and their professional ambitions, run high risks.
In 1950 Ernst Gombrich drew attention, in a Burlington Magazine letter, to Pliny’s description of wondrous effects achieved by Apelles when finishing off his paintings with a thinly spread dark coating or “varnish”. How could we be sure when stripping off “varnishes” today, he asked, that no Renaissance masters had applied toned varnishes to their own works in emulation of antiquity’s fabled painter? He received silence.
When he repeated the question in his seminal 1960 book Art and Illusion, his scholarly reputation and position as director of the Warburg Institute at London University commanded an answer. One came from Helmut Ruhemann, the National Gallery’s consultant restorer and author of its notorious “total cleaning” policy. Ruhemann insisted in the British Journal of Aesthetics that there was no evidence whatsoever “for anything so improbable as that a great old master should cover his picture with a ‘toning-down layer’.”
Gombrich returned play in a 1962 Burlington Magazine article (“Dark varnishes: Variations on a Theme from Pliny”). The discovery of a single instance of a tinted overall varnish, he suggested, would undermine the dogmatic philosophy of the National Gallery’s restorers. A dual reply came from the gallery’s “heavy mob” – its head of science, Joyce Plesters (who was married to the restorer Norman Brommelle), and the pugnacious former trustee and collector, Denis Mahon, in two further Burlington articles.
Plesters herself dismissed Gombrich on two fronts: for lacking “technical knowledge” and for displaying incomplete and misinterpreted scholarship. The entire documented technical history of art, she claimed, showed that “no convincing case” could be made for a single artist ever having emulated Apelles’ legendary dark varnishes. The passage from Pliny, she sniffed, was merely a matter of “academic rather than practical importance”. She offered to “sift” and “throw light upon” any future historical material that Professor Gombrich might uncover – should he but present it directly to the National Gallery. Her technical rank-pulling was underwritten (as perhaps was her article in part) by the director, Sir Philip Hendy, who disparaged technically ignorant “university art historians” in the gallery’s annual report.
In reality Plesters was a technical incompetent. It was she who claimed that the Raphael cartoons at the Victoria and Albert Museum were stuck onto “backing sheets” when there are none. It was she who described the large (150 cms wide) panel The Entombment, which is attributed to Michelangelo, as a single massive plank when it is comprised of three boards held by butterfly keys. It was she who counted six boards on the large panel Samson and Delilah, which is attributed to Rubens, when there are seven.
Her errors were products of a then unchecked institutional culture of technical adventurism and gross aesthetic recklessness. Great Renaissance paintings were ironed onto boards of compressed paper (Sundeala board) which today are too unstable to be moved. One such was Sebastiano del Piombo’s The Raising of Lazarus. That painting, originally on panel, had been transferred to canvas. When decision was made to re-attach the canvas to a Sundeala “panel”, technical examination identified three further “backing” canvases. When these three “backings” were duly removed it was discovered that no fourth and “original” canvas existed and that the surviving paint was attached only to a layer of disintegrating paper. But that crisis-of-their-own-making provided the gallery’s restorers with opportunity to play what Professor Thomas Molnar here called “demiurge” and improve upon the artistic content of the painting. In order to stabilise the paint layer which they had left loose and unprotected, the restorers embedded it from behind with terylene fabric attached by lashings of warm, dilute wax-resin cement. Because Sebastiano had painted his picture on a warm-coloured ground and because paint becomes more translucent with age and allows the tone of the ground greater influence on the picture’s values, the restorers decided to brighten things up and give the picture a brilliant white ground (like that of a Pre-Raphaelite painting) by adding highly reflective pigments to their own remedial wax-resin cement applications.
Plesters died in August 1996. Earlier that year, the National Gallery had published a report in its Technical Bulletin on the cleaning of two paintings by a Leonardo follower, Giampietrino. One, his Salome, had clearly suffered the Gallery’s trademark restoration losses of modelled form (see right and below), but his Christ Carrying the Cross was miraculously unscathed. Moreover, that picture was found simultaneously to display an “intensity of colour” and a restrained “overall effect” – precisely the paradoxical combination attributed by Pliny to Apelles but that had been pronounced technically preposterous by Ruhemann, Plesters, Mahon, Hendy et al.
It further emerged that Giampietrino, having first built up an “illusion of relief” with “dark translucent glazes”, had, again just as Pliny had said of Apelles, deliberately “restricted his own range of values” with a “final extremely thin overall toning layer consisting of warm dark pigments and black in a medium essentially of walnut oil, with a little resin”. Sir Ernst, nearly half a century on, had finally been vindicated but the report, inexplicably, made no reference to the dispute of the 1960s – to the very dispute which in 1985 had been described by the Burlington Magazine’s then editor, Neil MacGregor, as “one of the most celebrated jousts” ever. Had the National Gallery, having ridiculed Gombrich in the 1960s, not told him of its own remarkable technical/art historical discovery and of his own vindication? It had not. When we reported the findings in June 1996, Sir Ernst was approaching his 87th birthday. He replied:
“I could hardly have a nicer present than the information you sent me. I don’t see the National Gallery’s Technical Bulletin, and would have missed their final conversion to an obvious truth…”
Gombrich’s vindication proved a double one. Not only had the gallery discovered a technical/physical corroboration of the scholar’s astute original supposition, but the survival of a Renaissance artist’s final toned coating served further to corroborate Gombrich’s general criticisms of the gallery’s over-zealous picture cleanings. Because the two Giampietrino works were restored at the same time in the same gallery, but with the surface of the one being protected from solvent action by an ancient oil-film, while that of the other was unprotected, an unwitting laboratory experiment had been conducted on the gallery’s own “cleanings”. We can now compare the appearance of the restored but protected painting, with that of the restored but unprotected one (see right and Michael Daley, “The Lost Art of Picture Conservation”, The Art Review, September, 1999). As can be seen here, the unprotected painting (the Salome) suffered clear and dramatic losses of modelling and weakening of forms.
For a number of years after the twin Giampietrino restorations, it was possible to examine the two cleaned specimens side by side and to demonstrate the unequal effects of the treatments they had received. That is no longer possible. One of the pair has been relegated to the ill-lit basement of the reserve collection which is accessible to the public for only a few hours a week on Wednesday afternoons.
The relegated work is not the restoration-injured Salome, but the miraculously preserved Christ, the very picture which now arguably constitutes the best-preserved example of a Renaissance artist’s technique in the entire collection. This picture, which might be expected to enjoy pride of place in the main galleries, shares its new dungeon exile with another recent National Gallery Embarrassment – the Beccafumi panel painting Marcia which was dropped and smashed at the Gallery when being “de-installed” from a temporary exhibition. We had hoped and suggested that the Christ might make a return to daylight on the occasion of the Gallery’s forthcoming Leonardo blockbuster exhibition, but it seems that it will not do so – not even to join Giampietrino’s full-sized faithful copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper. (For many years, that Giampietrino mouldered in the Royal Academy’s basement as embarrassing relic of the institution’s former artistic interests.) When the last restoration of Leonardo’s Last Supper got into difficulties, the copy was taken to Milan so that full-size tracings of Leonardo’s figures might establish the limits of the restorer’s own substantial watercolour in-painting.
It seems fitting that last word be given to Sir Ernst, who died on November 3rd 2001. In another letter in 1988 he had recalled:
“I believe it was Francis Bacon who said ‘knowledge is power’. I had to learn the hard way that power can also masquerade as knowledge, and since there are very few people able to judge these issues, they very easily get away with it.”
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Born March 30th 1909, died November 3rd 2001
In Memoriam: Thomas Molnar (1921-2010)
The Catholic philosopher and historian Thomas Molnar died on July 20th 2010. The author of more than thirty books and a survivor of Dachau who then witnessed the communist takeover of Hungary, Dr Molnar was a critic of all “transformative” ideological philosophies of the left or the right. In 1950 he earned a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Columbia University, New York. In 1967 he warned against technological hubris in his book “Utopia: The Perennial Heresy” suggesting that the public forgets:
“…man cannot step out of the human condition and that no ‘universal mind’ is now being manufactured simply because science has permitted the building of nuclear bombs, spaceships and electronic computers.”
He was, with the painter Frank Mason and the cultural historian Arcadi Nebolsine, a force in a tributary/precursor organisation (The International Society for the Preservation of Art, and its Committee to Save the Sistine Ceiling) which joined forces with ArtWatch International when it was founded in 1992. In 1990 he wrote a manifesto on art restoration, which we publish below.
His friend Arcadi Nebolsine contributes this note:
Concerning Professor Thomas Molnar in memoriam:
“I lament an old friend and a great religious philosopher and elegant author of many works. I always admired his brilliance and his humor. There was something 18th century about it since he was always an effective foe of the French Revolution and other succeeding revolutions and their consequences 20th century modernism and ‘Americanism’ (not America!).
A strong proponent of Tradition, he condemned the Vatican II excesses and pseudo-seriousness and sheer silliness. He was the best of Mittel-Europa, very much continental and an inveterate foe of Communism. He lent distinction to William Buckley’s National Review. His opposition to Modernism extended to the arts and architecture – for instance in the sadly failed attempts to save Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.” [Arcadi Nebolsine.]
Thomas Molnar – A Manifesto: Restoration in Art
“In an age when all certitudes are questioned, and Truth and the Good are on the defensive, Beauty still rallies the largest number of enthusiasts. The onslaughts against it – tasteless monuments, concoctions in cement and metal in our parks, puzzles on museum and gallery walls – are violently resented by lovers of art. The latter have also turned their attention to the no-less important area of art restoration where abuses have increased in the past decades.
“We are aware now that the art of the past is vulnerable: to the work of the removal of layers on paintings, the retouching, the search for alleged original lines and colours. Although armed with expertise and good intentions, many restorers are tempted to play demiurge, to ‘know better’ than the work’s creator. The trouble is that misapplied zeal carries them away, they become competitors against the artist whose work they ought to serve.
“A cultural misunderstanding should be dispelled: the Sistine Chapel or Leonardo’s Last Supper are not only the works themselves as localized and dated, they have had a life of their own during the half-a-millennium since their creation. The ‘search for the original’ may be an ill-conceived enterprise in view of the fact that the artist must have foreseen the effects of time and would not today wish to return to the illud tempus, to what his work appeared when he finally put down the brush or the chisel.
“We must think twice about the branch of art called restoration, and resist the modern urge to erase time – in these cases the intervening centuries – during which the work of art has matured. No cause is served when every generation tries its hand at re-doing the masterpieces for the questionable purpose of saving them. A masterpiece today is not what it was in the original creator’s workshop. Nor should contemporary taste, marked by the puritanical penchant for geometry and poster design be so sure of itself as to rush in with the job of cleaning and retouching. Moral prudence should combine with aesthetic reverence in the task of preservation, a more reassuring term and endeavour than restoration.”
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Shifting contours – and other faults with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s photographs
We have had a disappointing response from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Gareth Hawker’s recent comparison of its online photographs of paintings with those of the National Gallery (“The National Gallery, London: The World-Leader in museums’ online provision of photographic reproductions of paintings”).
A curator at the Met with whom we maintain a tense but productive thread of occasional discussions, suggests that it is unreasonable and naïve to expect consistent accuracy in published photographic records of paintings.
All photography, we are advised, should be considered an art not a science. Because light changes constantly and different photographers respond differently to these shifts, accurate or consistent photographic records of paintings in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection cannot be expected. This view, respectfully, we reject.
Although digital photography can be used in many ways to many ends, and provides infinite and easy means of manipulating images, it also now provides the capacity to track all alterations made to a given ‘master’ photographic file. This capacity, combined with the well-established technical procedures and simple optical/physical safeguards described so clearly in Gareth Hawker’s account, absolutely entrenches photography’s near-miraculous capacity to produce objective and verifiable records of how things appear at singular moments under particular controlled circumstances.
Given that the unprecedented testimonial capacities of this new technology are demonstrable, verifiable and replicable, it seems fair to ask why some museums fail fully to deploy it. With the Metropolitan Museum, its response to our post may reflect a wider institutional image-handling malaise.
In March 2006, we asked the Met restorer, Dorothy Mahon, who had last treated John Singer Sargent’s magnificent Madame X, what accounted for certain differences in the picture’s striking profile head that had emerged between all previous photographs and a new image seen in a plate (p.178) of the then current catalogue to the Rothschild-sponsored exhibition “Americans in Paris” (jointly organised by the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in association with the Metropolitan Museum).
Ms Mahon, who had not yet seen the exhibition catalogue, suggested that she “could only assume it is due to wide variations in publication printing quality that is regrettable but not unusual…” The discrepancies, however, were of an entirely different order. They were not the customary variations of hues or tones that have previously be-devilled all printed reproductions, but were of shapes and design within the artist’s own famously distinctive depiction of his physically arresting subject, Madame Pierre Gautreau.
To demonstrate these differences, we sent a greyscale scan (see right) showing the cover of the Met’s own Spring 2000 Bulletin superimposed over the plate illustration in the new catalogue. Greyscale was chosen so as to disregard any variations of colour in printing. I pointed to specific differences in the shape of the hair, to the fact that the bunch at the top of the head was now sharper than before, whereas the curve at the back of the head was blunter, less pointed (see illustrations, right). Of this effective redrawing of an artist’s work, on March 9, Ms Mahon replied:
“…After reviewing the two images you sent I can see for myself the discrepancy which is the cause of your concern. I spoke with Barbara Weinberg, Curator of American Paintings and Peter Anthony, Chief Production Manager, Editorial. They explained to me the process by which the color reproduction of Madame X was prepared for the exhibition catalogue that was published by the National Gallery. Colour proofs that were sent by the Italian printer employed for this project by the National Gallery were sent to New York. Peter and Barbara made color correction notes on the proofs while standing in front of the painting in the gallery. The annotated proofs were sent off to London. How this image may have been altered during color correcting at the Italian printers I cannot say, but sometimes this process involves digitally masking off separate areas. Perhaps this could explain the contour shift in the hair…I can assure you that absolutely no conservation treatment has been done since 1996.”
That explanation disturbed us on many levels. It suggested that technicians can introduce falsifications of images during the reproductive process – and that these may escape the “quality control” procedures of even the grandest museums. Moreover, the Met’s seeming attempted shift of responsibility to the National Gallery for the reproduction of one of its own star paintings precisely highlighted our concerns over the unclear and sometimes conflicted lines of authority that occur in the organisation of institutionally collaborative blockbuster exhibitions – as we have seen more recently to such disastrous effect at the National Gallery.
This all raised further straightforward questions of procedure: did staff at the Met retain copies of the annotated proofs they had returned to London? Did staff at the National Gallery retain copies of the corrected proofs before sending them off to the printer in Italy? Was any supervising member of either gallery’s staff present in Italy during production of the catalogue? Did anyone ever check the catalogue’s plates? Did means exist to establish the point at which the image of a great portrait painting had been corrupted? Have similar corruptions occurred in other catalogues? Why had no one at the Met noticed the changes?
Long after we had demonstrated to the Metropolitan Museum this particular photographic reconfiguring of a major “iconic” work in its collection, no attempt seems to have been made to warn members of the public who bought the expensive catalogue of the serious error within. That presumably (?) still uncorrected catalogue remains on sale. It is hard to believe that curators would permit technicians’ errors of similar magnitude in their own texts to go uncorrected. Why should errors of reproduction be treated less rigorously? Do images of artists’ works count for less than curators’ words?
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
The museum world’s increasing acceptance of virtual-reality “resurrections”
An enthusiastic New York Times report on the discovery of an American 19th century painted rolling theatre backcloth carried a photograph of a restorer using what appears to be a high pressure water hose (see right). This prompts recollection of classic graphic satires on museum picture cleaning methods. More ominously, it marks yet another insinuation of digitally manipulated photographic imagery into contemporary museum restoration and display practices.
The muslin backcloth – the “Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress” which bore the work of artists of the calibre of Frederick Edwin Church – first appeared in 1851 to rave reviews but by the 1860s the excitement had subsided and the backcloth had been rolled, crated and stored by a theatre owner. That material, inherited in 1896 by the Dyer Library and Saco Museum, has recently been uncovered.
Discoveries present rich restoration opportunities. This particular 800 feet of fabric prompted a restoration aided by a grant of $51,940 from “Save America’s Treasures”. It is being carried out by Williamstown Art Conservation Center.
As if in assurance of advanced restoration precautions, New York Times readers are informed that 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.” However, this work is not being “restored” to its former original function but to provide a means for making a photographic facsimile of itself:
“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.”
A synthetic fabric with a heft and texture similar to the original muslin has been identified and Jessica Swire Routhier, the director of the Saco Museum, thrills: “Things print well on it, and it’ll be incredibly durable”.
When Inigo Jones’ Queen’s House at Greenwich was restored in the decade before last, original ceiling canvases by Orazio Gentileschi that had been removed to another building were replaced by full-size photographic facsimiles’ printed on vinyl. Because the original canvases had been cut down in places to fit into their new home, the Gentileschi images were digitally extended by cutting and pasting bits of the surviving imagery on the computer screen before being printed and fixed to the ceiling of the historic building.
When, in the same decade, the National Gallery restored Holbein’s The Ambassadors on-camera for a BBC film, the famous anamorphic skull in the foreground was (as discussed here) repainted to a new design, not according to the contemporary laws of perspective, but after a computer-generated distortion of a photograph of an actual skull. That unprecedented imposition of “virtual reality” onto an old master painting was specifically justified on the grounds that “modern imaging techniques” offer more “scope for exploring possible reconstructions” than do the 16th century perspective-al conventions by which the artist’s image had been produced. Had the repainted additions been left identifiable as such, gallery goers might have appreciated that the painting now contains an a-historical hypothetical reconstruction. But instead, as those who viewed the BBC film of the Esso-sponsored restoration will appreciate, the newly added paint was tricked up to give a “deceiving” visual match to the neighbouring original paint by the imposition of painted black lines that mimicked age cracks.
A further development in the realm of virtual restorations emerges at Harvard where more old canvases have been recovered from storage. In 1964 a suite of five Mark Rothko murals were installed in a sunny dining room at Harvard University. The works swiftly faded and progressively suffered damages, graffiti and foods splatters. They were removed to storage in 1979. No means exists for restoring them physically. Undaunted, conservators at Harvard’s Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art and Strauss Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, in conjunction with “The Massachusetts Institute of technology’s Media Laboratory, and Switzerland’s University of Basel Imaging and Media Laboratory, propose to apply computer-controlled lighting that is intended to impose the original hues and appearances upon the now irrevocably degraded canvases.
The proposal constitutes a perfect ethical/aesthetic conundrum. On the one hand, this would be an ideal “restoration” in that there would be no physical or chemical or other intervention on the works themselves. On the other hand viewers would be led to believe – or asked to believe – that they were experiencing the work just as it was when new, as if they were themselves time-travellers, as if works of art – especially modern ones – never age, when they would in fact be witnessing wrecked works of art altered, as if by a theatre lighting designer’s skills, on an hypothesis extracted from a combined chemical analysis of the paintings’ degraded pigments and an optical analysis of old colour photographs. The chances of this project hitting the target on each of the variously placed canvases at every moment of the day’s changing lights must be estimated at zero. The public would be being deceived.
That so revered, serene and “spiritual” a modernist (Rothko’s Harvard canvases were based on his reflections on the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ) should be considered an appropriate candidate for conversion into some speculative virtual after-life, might itself suggest that nothing in art may now be considered an unsuitable candidate for virtual treatments. This proposed treatment itself runs in defiance of central museum world celebrations of the “authenticity” of museum objects. The recently retired director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, argued in “Whose Muse – Art Museums and the Public Trust” (page 153), that “it remains vital that the objects visitors come to see be original… Reproductions, no matter how good, cannot and will not ever replace originals.”
There is irony in this situation: it has been known for years within the conservation community that the effects of aging yellowing natural varnishes can be “virtually” eliminated simply by compensating increases of colder, bluer gallery light. If such appearance-altering practices are now to be considered legitimate and acceptable, then it will be tacitly conceded that many of those traumatic, destructive and bitterly contested solvent-sodden assaults of yesteryear on the vulnerable fabrics of unique and irreplaceable historical objects might never have been necessary. Even if the most restoration pro-active museums today were to contend that it would never have been practical to tailor individual lighting to all works in a large collection, another awkward question would hang: Why is it that museums did not, at least, adjust the lighting on individual works that were about to be restored? Had that been done as routine, photographs that better recorded the undistorted values of a painting at a precise point in time would have been available for comparison with the material results of restorations. Such comparisons would swiftly have established benchmarks of performance for restorers. Are there good reasons why such a beneficial methodological check was never routinely pursued?
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
The National Gallery, London:The World-Leader in museums’ online provision of photographic reproductions of paintings
Gareth Hawker, ArtWatch UK Journal’s Picture/Photography Analyst, makes his living as a portrait painter. In order to reproduce some of his paintings he has taken a keen interest in large-format inkjet (giclée) printing. To this end he has learnt both how to take photographs which are highly accurate in colour and how to print them with comparable accuracy.
Gareth Hawker writes:
Museum websites now provide an unrivalled resource for the student of paintings. Images may be called up with a speed and ease which would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. But how accurate are these images, and how far can they be relied upon? You might imagine that museum websites would all be offering an answer to these basic questions, that they would be proud to explain why the visitor should have confidence in their images, but the only museum I have come across which does so is the National Gallery, London. It provides thorough information about its images on this page:
http://www.nationalgalleryimages.co.uk/ImageInfo.aspx
If you want to know the colour of any area of paint on a painting from the National Gallery you can find it out very simply. Download a free colour reader like the one called Pixie (http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.php). Place your cursor on the spot which interests you, and read its colour specification. (See fig.1) This specification is expressed in terms of an internationally recognised scale of colour. But what if your screen is inaccurate? For example it might make all the colours look too red or too green. No need to worry, the inaccuracy in your screen affects what you see, but it does not affect the readings. They will always be accurate no matter how wrong your screen may be. Even with a monochrome screen you can take accurate readings. If you wish, you can compare them with readings from other paintings which have also been accurately photographed.
If your screen is correctly adjusted (calibrated) you will be looking at almost exactly the same colours as if you were in the Gallery itself. However this would be an unusual situation. Even full-time colour professionals, who spend considerable sums on screen calibration, are unlikely to have a screen which is totally accurate. You still need to see the real paintings if you want to experience the colour with total accuracy.
In principle, you could also display the colour very exactly by printing the digital file on your colour printer. However setting up a printer for accurate colour printing is a very onerous task indeed – one which very few people, even professionals, do correctly. So, even though the colours may be accurately specified in the digital file, they are rarely seen as accurately when they are displayed in print or on screen. Also the colours in the digital photographic file can never be absolutely correct. They are only accurate within certain tolerances. The webpage mentioned above deals with these tolerances in detail. None of this detracts from the value of such a substantial improvement compared with the old film and plate methods of recording paintings. These readings are far more accurate.
In contrast to the National Gallery’s site, most museum websites show photographs which, regarding colour, are little more than rough approximations. Many museums seem not even to be fully aware of what such accuracy involves, and often make a beginner’s mistake. If the colour of a photograph looks wrong when a photographer examines it on his screen, he will make adjustments in Photoshop until what he sees is acceptable in his judgment. This is useless as far as objectively accurate colour is concerned. However this practice, known as ‘visual editing’, is widespread:
http://www.cis.rit.edu/museumSurvey/documents/Benchmark_Final_Report_Web.pdf (p57)
It is far preferable to adhere to international colour standards. Accuracy does not then depend on personal judgement, but on objective measurement. This means that each time you photograph the painting you need to photograph a standard colour chart next to it.
In order to check the photographed values you can read them with a colour-reader (like the Pixie mentioned above), then compare them with known values. These known values are published. They are readings taken direct from the original chart using a spectrophotometer (- a light meter which splits light into bands of different wavelength, then measures the light intensity at each wavelength band).
If the values match (within defined tolerances), this means that the photograph of the painting is as accurate as the equipment can produce (fig. 2).
There are immense practical difficulties in photographing a large collection, so perhaps it is not surprising that other Museums have not caught up with the National Gallery in this respect. Most of the pictures on the website of the Metropolitan, New York, come as a disappointment if you arrive having just seen those on the National Gallery website. Not that New York is lacking in expertise. Some of the most advanced museum photography in the world is being carried in the USA. The high standards which characterise this work are exemplified in the following pdf which is concerned with photography at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC:
http://www.art-si.org/PDFs/TechnicalReportNGA_low.pdf
This high-quality work has not yet had a major impact on US museum websites. For example, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, offers no statement comparable to the one on the National Gallery website – no claim that its colours are accurate.
The amount of detail, too, on the National Gallery’s site is far superior. When you zoom in you see more detail, whereas, when you zoom in on pictures on the Met’s site, you often see no more detail, just the same, low-resolution image enlarged and blurred (fig. 3). (A number of museums have developed zoom systems for their websites. These merit separate discussion, but it may be worth mentioning one of the most impressive, Birmingham’s Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource. There is also Google Earth, which has produced a spectacular zoom representation of 14 paintings in the Prado. However, downloading the free Google Earth software and learning how to use it does take some time.)
The National Gallery’s full-screen zoom certainly lives up to its publicity and must count as one of the easiest to use:
http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/painting+%26+drawing/art70531
Is the National Gallery’s virtual gallery perfect? No. Some imperfections are inevitable given the limitations inherent in the medium. For example the range of colours available on a normal computer screen is not large enough to display very strong colours correctly. This question is discussed on the Gallery’s own webpage mentioned above.
Perhaps the most striking imperfection is that there is a limit on the number of pixels which may be used to display a single painting. This means that a large painting cannot be shown in as much detail as a small painting.
There are limitations, too, in the level of proof offered that the photographs are accurate. The National Gallery Company Online Picture Library will supply digital files, but these include only the Kodak Colour Control Patches and the Kodak Greyscale reference charts which are intended to help printers. More colour patches would provide a stronger demonstration of accuracy. But the webpage does assure the reader that, “Each image has been individually calibrated using the Gretag Macbeth 24-patch colour rendition chart.”
When considering these imperfections, it is easy to forget what an extraordinary achievement this virtual gallery represents. Think of all the glossy colour art reference books, all the reproductions made for hanging on walls, all the posters. Not one of them is as accurate as the images on the National Gallery website. Even if, by some remote chance, one of those reproductions elsewhere did turn out to be accurate, it would be extremely difficult to verify its accuracy. All sorts of complicated measurements would be needed – with light meters, spectrophotometers and so on. In contrast, if you wish to verify the National Gallery colours you can order a digital file which includes an image of the painting with Kodak colour patches alongside it (fig. 4). You may then place your cursor over the patches and check whether your readings match the published values. If they do, this proves that the photograph of the painting is accurate in colour (within specified tolerances). No previous photographs, from a public gallery, have come close to this level of colour objectivity nor been so available for scrutiny.
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