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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ArtWatch UK has always pressed for access to picture restoration records and photographs, without which evaluation and criticism are greatly hampered. Reports of restoration treatments are of great value but are invariably written by the restorers themselves. More valuable are photographs taken before, during, and after restorations. These are (within the limitations of the medium) effectively disinterested. Being simple mechanical records of how much light was reflected from a particular surface at a given moment, they permit like to be compared with like. As such they are indispensable because, after a restoration, only the post-treatment picture survives – and that can never be compared directly with its previous self which no longer exists having been supplanted by the newly altered self. This is why restorers’ claims to work in “reversible” manners are specious – going back is never an option. (Leaving alone, however, almost always is.)

For the past five years the most forthcoming institution by far has been the National Gallery in London (see right). In contrast, the Neue Galerie in New York and the Phillips Collection in Washington DC have ignored all requests for information. Our chief interest at the Phillips concerns Renoir’s great work of 1881, the “Luncheon of the Boating Party” which was bought in 1923 for a then massive $125,000. That museum’s continuing silence masks a long-running controversy that goes to the heart of twentieth century restoration practices.

In May 1983 Sheldon Keck, a leading American restorer, delivered a defence of picture restorers (“Some Picture Cleaning Controversies: Past and Present”) to the American Institute of Conservators. It contained an anecdote that reflected extremely well on himself and his restorer wife, Caroline:

“In the 1950s, Mrs Keck and I attended a dinner party where an internationally known British connoisseur attacked the cleaning of paintings in general insisting that artists counted on the mellowing effects of time to enhance the harmony of their designs and colours… One of the other guests inquired whether the gentleman had viewed the Phillips Collection’s Renoir ‘Boating Party’ since it had been cleaned (by us, as most of those around the table knew). ‘It is ruined’, he said, ‘ruined…the harmony of the whole has been destroyed, the glazes have all been stripped away…I stood in front of it and I wept.’ Defence was undertaken by Mrs Keck and if she may have exceeded normal dinner party proprieties, her statements were eminently accurate. We had photographically documented the painting, even made a color movie of our cleaning, and every solvent swab used on the surface had been saved in large jars.

Later that same year [1955]I accompanied this painting along with others to Paris for display in the ‘De David à Toulouse-Lautrec’ exhibition at the Orangerie. I had opportunity to show our film of the cleaning to an audience which included Renoir’s son. Afterward, he came up to me to tell me how much the painting now looked as he recalled it from his childhood and that to the best of his knowledge his father never varnished  his own paintings.“

This self-celebration seemed consistent with a memoir on Duncan Phillip’s by his widow, Marjorie, in her 1970 book “Duncan Phillips and His Collection”:

“Duncan often spoke of the terrible day when he had two necessary and immediate decisions pending. One was whether to have the great Renoir ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’ relined and the other was whether to operate on the poodle ‘C’est Tout,’ who had swallowed part of a rubber elephant and become critically ill when it swelled up inside of him. What a day! But when the ‘go-aheads’ were given, Dr Curry, a wonderful veterinary surgeon, operated on the dog successfully, and the Sheldon Kecks, outstanding restorers, ‘operated on the Renoir successfully!’”

However, in 2000 the former Time magazine art editor, Alexander Eliot, recalled (“A Conversation About Conservation”, The World & I Journal, June 2000) dropping in to the Phillips Collection in the mid fifties:

“…to revisit an especially beloved image: Renoir’s ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’. I found that this sunnily celebratory masterpiece had been moved from its central position to a dark side room, as if in shame, and I could easily understand why. Its blossomy colours appeared dried out, droopy and half-awry. The seated figure in the foreground had been reduced to corpse grey. Barging angrily into Duncan Phillips’ office, I asked for an explanation. Tears misted the sensitive old gentleman’s eyes. ‘Well,’ he told me mournfully, ‘I sent the picture to our mutual friends – you know the restorers I mean. The best in the business, right?’ Mr Phillips paused to wave an imaginary fly. ‘I’d asked them to iron out a small blister on the surface and then forward the canvas to Paris for a major exhibition at the Louvre. Deciding that my prize acquisition required cleaning, they went ahead with that. The people at the Louvre at first refused to accept the resultant ruin as a Renoir! Fortunately we were able to put them straight because our friends had taken the precaution of filming their work on the canvas. I have a copy of the film, which you’re welcome to view. In it you’ll notice actual colour-stains coming off on the cotton swabs. But please, for God’s sake, don’t report this tragedy. It’s too dreadful.’ ”

Although Mrs Phillips spoke of a lining, not a cleaning, owners of pictures with blisters are often advised that lining with an additional canvas is needed to prevent the disintegration of paint and that cleaning is essential to this “cure”. Few owners openly admit injury to their own works, but lining is today widely recognised as an intrinsically dangerous combination of heat and pressure in which glazes get melted, brushwork gets flattened and pictorial values get irreversibly corrupted by invasive adhesives.  

Faced with starkly contradictory testimonies and an institutional black-out of technical information, how might the conscientious art lover judge between such conflicting experts? As it happens, the scales can be weighted further. In 1983, even as they crowed about their past handiwork, the Kecks’ made a disastrous entry into a live restoration controversy. On the 16^th of June The New York Review of Books carried an essay (“Crimes Against the Cubists”) by the British art historian John Richardson. It began:

“When I complimented William Rubin of the Museum of Modern Art on the brilliant choice of Cubist works in the Picasso show… I felt obliged to hint that… MOMA was killing its Cubist paintings… The varnished surface of one masterpiece after another testified more to a desire to embellish than to any understanding of what Picasso intended…‘To subject these delicate grounds to wax relining and, worse, a shine,’ I concluded, ‘is as much of a solecism as frying a peach.’ “Much to my relief, William Rubin agreed… Many of MOMA’s paintings, he readily admitted, had suffered from overzealous restoration…before his time [1973-1988], and before his eyes had been opened to these abuses by no less an authority than Picasso…[who] after pointing out the error of varnishing a Cézanne… took the opportunity of insisting that Cubist paintings were even more vulnerable in this respect…”

Mrs Keck responded in the NYRB of 13 October 1983 with an abusive, defensive, evasive and utterly self-defeating letter. She declared herself “unacquainted” with the art historian, expressed curiosity about his age and scepticism about his familiarity with Braque, Picasso and Miss Toklas. He, she alleged, “blows his top as indiscriminately as a tornado.”  Judging herself possessed of a “personal competence…in the preservation of Modern paintings”, she dismissed the historian as “not very knowledgeable” about the material components of paintings and “not at all familiar with the processes of competent restoration.”  

She offered a raft of defences for the restorers who had damaged cubist paintings. They were “not alone in lacking the special comprehension needed to retain cubist textual values” because “knowledge of this particular exigency does not seem to have been prevalent among dealers, curators, art historians or owners”. She held that “Not all painters are interested in whether their pictures will last”; that few understand their own materials; that pictures consist of materials that “do not want to stick together”.  And, that while “not every painting may safely be cleaned”, every picture determines its own treatment and every restorer is a painting’s “intimate friend [whose] tender loving care” provides an “individually tailored bridge to the future.”

She did not acknowledge that she and her husband had helped found MOMA’s conservation department, trained many of its staff, and were consultants to the museum. She did cite her own restoration of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting but – incredibly – it was one in which she had deliberately rubbed off original paint:

“Once when I was removing a layer of blackened filth from a crisp scene of New York under Miss O’Keeffe’s sharp observation, I showed her where my swab came away with a trace of cadmium yellow as well as dirt. Go right ahead, she directed, the area was pure colour and she far preferred to lose a top skin of yellow than permit  her painting to be spotted all over with soot.”

John Richardson delighted in having “drawn Mrs Keck’s fire…since her name stands for the practices my article deplored… ” and in having his own worst fears confirmed by her persistence in “disregarding the Cubists avowed intentions: no varnish in any circumstances.” Rebutting her slur that his contact with Picasso had been “cursory”, he disclosed constant and close contact for over ten years during which he had often heard the artist “inveigh against the iniquities of American restoration at a period when the Kecks were leading the pack”. On her self-disclosed cleaning method, he reflected “I would have thought that, on the evidence of her own words, Mrs Keck might set up shop in a television studio, where her colourful swabs could be shown to scour paint more effectively than ‘the other brand.’ ”

That the great Phillips Renoir has suffered from solvent-laden swabs is demonstrable today. Examination of the dark blue drapery of the young woman in the bottom left-hand corner of the picture shows that dissolved red paint from her (now smeared) costume’s trim has been rubbed into the paint cracks like coloured ink on an etched plate. Renoir could not have rubbed dissolved paint into age cracks on his own fresh paint – so who else might have? Nor was it he who smeared the red stripes on the awning. Why, then, will the Phillips permit no-one to view the film of which Sheldon Keck boasted but of which Duncan Phillips himself spoke so remorsefully?

Michael Daley

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In response to an appeal made to ArtWatch UK by Polish art historians which was reported by The Observer (and is carried here below in the post of December 13) Count Adam Zamoyski the Chairman of the Board of the Princes Czartoryski Foundation has made a quite extraordinary ad hominem attack on me and, in terms which would be actionable under British law, he has impugned the integrity, motives and reputation of both myself and ArtWatch UK in the Polish press.

While I can certainly understand that the interests of Count Zamoyski’s Foundation are endangered by the campaign to prevent Leonardo’s “Lady with an Ermine” from travelling to London, it seems gratuitous to impugn the standing of ArtWatch itself and, by implication, all those distinguished people who have contributed to it in the form of articles for its journal or lectures to its public meetings who include Professor Hellmut Wohl of Boston university; Professor Mark Zucker of the Louisiana State University; Professor Charles Hope, former Director of the Warburg Institute; Professor David Freedberg, Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art and Director of The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University; Michel Favre-Felix, President of the Association Internationale pour le Respect de l’Intégrité du Patrimoine Artistique (ARIPA); and Jessica Douglas-Home President of The Mihai Eminescu Trust.

Perhaps Count Zamoyski should consider confining himself to attacking the arguments of those he disagrees with rather than the individuals who voice opposition to his plans.

Rather more bizarre and inexplicable was an attack from the Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones who claimed to find it absurd that the Polish art historians should appeal to ArtWatch UK for assistance in this matter since we were, by his account, an inconsequential group of crackpots. Perhaps Mr Jones has forgotten that one of his early free-lance pieces for the Guardian newspaper (which may indeed have helped him get his appointment as its regular art critic) was based on a consultation with me on the attribution of Michelangelo’s “Entombment” conducted while we made a joint tour (at his request) of the National Gallery’s collection. So at one point at least, Mr Jones seemed to regard ArtWatch’s judgment very highly, even though he has since attacked both me and my late colleague James Beck, Professor of Renaissance Art History at Columbia University.

This new-found animosity may, of course, be related to an item carried in a recent issue of the ArtWatch journal in which I simply quoted a published anecdote of his own in which he described his small daughter using the Elgin Marbles gallery as her “own personal race track”, as they jointly “play and yell” in museums – behaviour which occasionally caused “humourless [museum] guards” to tell them off. Mr Jones responded to this citing of his own words rather hysterically, describing it as an “attack on his family”. Sadly his assessment of ArtWatch’s activities now seems permanently affected – and remarkably ill-informed. He describes us as being implacably hostile to the National Gallery when, in fact, our relations with that great institution are extremely constructive: the current director, Nicholas Penny, and his predecessor, Charles Saumarez Smith, have been generous and helpful to ArtWatch UK, allowing me open access to their restoration dossiers and historical records. It’s a pity that Mr Jones has allowed his peculiar personal sensitivities to get in the way of understanding the issues – or even acquaintance with the facts.

Michael Daley, Director, ArtWatch UK

Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com

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We carry below an abridged translation (kindly made by Thi Minh Ngo) of a scholarly article published in 2007 by Michel Favre-Felix in Nuances, No 38-39, the Journal of ARIPA (Association Internationale pour le Respect de l’Intégrité du Patrimoine Artistique). Publication of the article – which was critical of the Louvre’s recent restoration of Veronese’s The Pilgrims of Emmaüs – prompted an interview with Mr Favre-Felix about the restoration’s problems (“Methodology should be rethought”) in the December 2008 Le Journal des Arts. On 4 September 2009, again in the Journal des Arts, the campaigning work of ARIPA and its journal Nuances were praised by Roland Recht, a member of the Institut de France, art historian and professor of European culture at the Collége de France. Prof. Recht deemed ARIPA’s campaigning to be as important to the preservation of the artistic heritage, as the protection of human rights is to the dignity of humanity itself. On 15 September 2009, the French newspaper, Le Figaro deplored the recent restoration of The Pilgrims of Emmaüs in forthright and unequivocal manner: “A masterpiece victim of an unfortunate restoration”.

This reception of the Nuances article may have panicked Louvre Museum staff: shortly before the 17 September 2009 opening of its “Titian, Tintoret, Veronese” exhibition, the Louvre made an unprecedented covert re-restoration of the Veronese. This (clumsy) second attempted “improving” intervention compounded the earlier error. The additional changes to the face of a principal figure were noticed by Mr Favre-Felix – who further discovered that no account of them had been entered in the picture’s dossiers.

ArtWatch UK reported the saga in its June 2010 Journal (No. 26) and published a photograph of the face of the Mother after her second recent repainting (see figs. 16 and 17 below). On 23 June 2010, Michel Favre-Felix was awarded the 2009 Frank Mason Prize in recognition of his exemplary work in the protection of art and heritage, at the inaugural annual James Beck Memorial Lecture (given by Professor Hellmut Wohl, at the Society of Antiquaries of London). Those events in Britain prompted further international press coverage. See: “Louvre masterpiece by Veronese ‘mutilated’ by botched nose jobs”, by Dalya Alberge, The Observer 13 June 2010; "Louvre: sfigurato dai restauratori un capolavoro del Veronese", by Francesco Tortora, Corriere della Sera, Milano, 13 June 2010 ; “Le Louvre accuse de restauration abusive sur une oeuvre de Véronèse”, Artclair.com, 16 June 2010 ;“Le Louvre accuse de restauration abusive”, Beaux-Arts Magazine, No. 341, August 2010. On 11 June 2010, a spokeswoman for the Louvre described the "second restoration" to Dalya Alberge, for The Observer (see above), as simply being spruced up ("bichonnée") and added: "That’s why you cannot find it in the painting’s dossier.”

Changing Veronese at the Louvre between 1950 and 2004

“It should be made clear that, when one intervenes on a work of art, one intends to change it. It is important, however, to discuss the legitimacy of such an intervention”

Marie Berducou, then director of studies at the French Institute of Restoration (IFROA), in 2002 (5^th Meetings of ARAAFU)

Veronese painted The Pilgrims of Emmaüs around 1560, for a now unknown family. The painting was later brought to France where the prestige of Veronese was growing, and acquired by Louis the XIII in 1638. Epitomising the 17^th century rivalry between the French and Italian school of paintings, The Pilgrims of Emmaüs was exhibited side by side with the 1661The Family of Darius by Charles Lebrun. Unfortunately, in 1682, Louis the XIV scaled the two paintings to the same format in order to exhibit them as perfect pendants in the Salon of Mars in Versailles. The Family of Darius was reduced by one third, while The Pilgrims’ canvas was enlarged on its two sides and a large band of about 50 centimetres was added at its top (see fig. 1). These additions were surely executed by Lebrun, the royal painter, who also made overpaints on the original Veronese sky in order to incorporate the band added to the original painting.

During the 18^th century the picture underwent a cleaning and a relining. As time passed, its surface was dimmed by several layers of varnish and was probably retouched.

Pilgrim Luke ~ 1950

In 1940, the decision was made to recover Veronese’s original composition by removing the enlargements. In 1950-51, during a second stage of restoration, the excess varnish was thinned out and Lebrun’s no longer necessary overpaints on the sky were largely removed. But the restorer, Pierre Paulet, also made changes to the cloak worn by Luke, the Pilgrim seen from behind. Paulet judged the neckband on the garment to be an overpaint “from the 19^th century”. This area was visibly mediocre in execution and suspect in its appearance. Without justifying his dating, Paulet removed the neckband and further exposed the back of the Pilgrim, as well as the neck of his white shirt (see figs. 3 and 4) which, oddly, he dated to Le Brun’s time.

The decision to remove the alien enlargements was justifiable, since dimensions very close to those of Veronese were recovered. It was also legitimate for Paulet to remove the excess of varnish that had accumulated, while preserving a layer of the oldest varnish. Paulet was, however, twice mistaken in his estimated dating of the “overpaint” which he removed from Luke’s garment:

1) The neckband could not have been entirely a 19^th century addition because it was already recorded in the earliest known copy of the painting which was made before 1710 (see fig. 2) [1]. A comparison of the copies made before 1833 and the copies made after 1869 (see fig. 5) shows that, during this period, the drapery on the shoulder had been seriously altered. If this alteration had been made to conceal an injury (or a first attempt of cleaning) it might explain why Paulet erred in judging the entire passage a “19^th century restoration” that should be removed.

2) The collar of the shirt discovered could not be of Le Brun’s time. One cannot imagine circumstances in which this shirt had been added in 1661 by the King’s painter (Le Brun) only to be concealed a few years later by the addition of a neckband (recorded in a copy before 1710). The shirt collar must be considered – in the lack of contrary evidence – to be from Veronese’s time. But that is not say that it was evident in the final version of Veronese’s painting. It might have been a temporary step that the artist himself had finally covered with the neckband which appears in all the known copies. The alteration in the 19^th century may, thus, have induced a misunderstanding of the situation by Paulet.

What is less forgivable is that the Louvre’s own laboratory technicians and art historians should neither have noticed the dramatic changes that appeared in this area during the 19^th century, nor paid attention to the clear testimony of the copies. Instead, they simply repeated, in their own files and in their own publication, errors of dating, and failures to recognise material inconsistencies.

It would, however, seem that although being without a complete understanding of the issue, the choices made by the restorer in the 1950’s were not guided by a desire systematically to “purify” the painting from all earlier interventions. To the contrary, Paulet was respectful of what he deemed to be overpaints of good quality. In particular, he preserved all the folds on Luke’s garment, just as he did for those that enliven the dress of the mother, although he had judged them to be additions from “the 19^th century” (once again, an erroneous dating, as can be shown by examining older copies of the painting – see fig. 6) [2].

Pilgrim Luke ~ 2004

The restoration decisions taken in 2003-2004 were far more radical: the folds on Pilgrim Luke’s back were completely removed (see figs. 7 and 8).

What were these folds made of? The analysis was incredibly summary. Only two samples of paint were analysed – and only one of which revealed a so called “brown glaze” on its upper layer. This brown material was impossible to date. Nonetheless, convinced by this limited and ambiguous result, the Louvre decided that the whole folds were overpaints from an earlier restoration and that they should all be removed, without discrimination, even though – as was clear from the first attempts at taking the folds off on test areas – there was no original drapery to be found underneath. What did this removal of paint reveal? Nothing more than a severely degraded surface in which only abraded remains of Veronese’s pigments remained in an eroded paint layer deprived of the forms and colours that the artist had conceived and applied (fig. 8).

Even if one had been convinced that these folds were added during previous restorations, the question would arise whether these additions were not meant to replace original folds that had been damaged. At any event, the folds removed were similar to those visible in all the old copies of the painting, which serve as historical documents of reference [3].

This is the striking reality of what is called, in the museums of France, “a moderate degree of cleaning”. Did Jean-Pierre Cuzin, the curator who supervised this operation, not assert a completely opposite stance in favour of moderate interventions during a conference at the Louvre, the year before: “On principle, an older restoration should never be removed when it is well integrated [within the painting as a whole] – but that is well-known to restorers. The respect for a piece of art also means respecting and admiring the work of previous restorers, one or two centuries later.”

We shall no longer have any chance to admire this work, and – what is worse – we must now suffer an incongruous overpaint added in our early 21^st century. At present, a hazy and brownish arc sweeps down Luke’s back, roughly following his spinal column. His flattened garment is underlined on the left by a shadow as feeble as it is indistinct (see fig. 9). According to those responsible, writing in Techné (p. 46), “this reintegration [which is actually a complete invention – M. F.-F.] evokes the missing folds by means of retouches vibrant in their facture and drawn with suitably incisive strokes.” These “vibrant” retouches – in fact pitiful – follow none of the few faint traces of the drapery once painted by Veronese that could be discerned after the folds were removed (fig. 8). In breach of all deontological rules, these modern overpaints have no basis in any documentation and give a deceiving impression of the artist’s work, which totally misleads the public. No viewer could ever guess that these new overpaints “evoke missing folds”. The family mother underwent a treatment yet more unbearable.

The Mother ~ 2004

Figure 10 is the last photograph (of very average quality) that records the state of the painting at the start of the cleaning.

Figure 11 shows the state of the picture after the varnish and older retouches were removed. The lacunas, where the original material is completely missing, are circumscribed and covered with white mastic. Already at this stage, one can notice a surprising weakening of the composition. The left eye of the mother has lost the fine eyelashes – on the edge of the upper eyelid – that gave her glance its expression. Her eyebrows have faded, as if they had been plucked. The vigorous and sensual line that separated the wing of the nose from the cheek has been liquefied. The subtle line that formed the slight double chin has disappeared to give way to an improbable swelling.

Figure 12 shows an incredible transformation. The shape of the nose, noble and harmonious, was already blurred by the cleaning. It is now completely distorted by the retouching, which unscrupulously transformed the original shape into the turned-up nose of a starlet with a mutilated nostril. The space between the nose and the mouth has become a shapeless and dubiously grey zone. The mouth has been entirely painted over without any respect for the drawing of Veronese. Crossed by a hesitant black stroke, the mouth is now ludicrously small and soppy (note the small and clumsy “V”). Finally, the charming double chin has disappeared to give way to a goitre-like neck and a bloated, pinkish, and heavy cheek, which gives the eye a porcine aspect. In sum, the Venetian mother, with her noble and mature features and slightly melancholic look, has become a caricature of a 21^st century adolescent with her awkward pout, her stiff expression, and obesity a-waiting.

This aesthetic manipulation is all the more grievous since the character of the mother is crucial in the composition intended by Veronese, who had painted more than a mere portrait of Venetian women. With her noble face and meditative look, this mother, carrying her newborn with his golden locks, evidently symbolised the Virgin Mary and Child. Protecting the little boy behind her cloak, she evokes the “Vierge de Miséricorde”, who appears frequently in sacred iconography since the 13^th century. Her husband stands behind, in an unassuming position attributed to Joseph in images of the Holy Family.

Only recently have art historians begun to understand that the profane splendour of Veronese’s paintings, which has been emphasized till now (e.g. Les Noces de Cana), has profound religious significance [4]. The reference to Mary is essential to allow the co-existence (indeed anachronistic), within the same compositional space, of this Venetian family pictured in its everyday surroundings, with the Christ in action during biblical times. In Veronese’s conception, the mother directly echoes the figure of the Christ. If one had any idea of the religious reflections that inspired this painting and of the sense of the imperatives of decorum that constrained it, this face could not have been altered in such a disastrous manner.

The current restoration pretends to be wary of any creative intrusion. It is in the name of objectivity that all the folds that enlivened the dress of the mother were removed – without any supporting analysis of any kind – with the same goal of purification that guided the intervention on Luke’s cloak, leaving in its stead a flat, modern and abstract surface (see figs. 14 and 15). The outcome demonstrates a total disregard for the evidence provided by historical documents, all of which corroborate the existence of the folds (fig. 13).

The 2003-2004 restoration deserves to be presented as a case study to students training to become curators and restorers. It displays variously: the uncontrolled removal of paint without any critical evaluation; fetishistic attachment to the sole original material however ruinous its state with no regard for the historical and aesthetic value of the work; dating errors; and, falsifying retouches. These failings and their effects on the painting are blatantly clear. Yet, no member of the restoration committee raised any objection. It is chilling to think that the same “methodology” – purification and retouches – produced the same results on so many other paintings, in so many parts of their composition, without raising any more questions.

Michel Favre-Felix: an addendum, 23 December 2010

This study had not aimed to create a “controversy”, to use a museum circle’s term, in the sense of an “uncertain dispute”. There was no basis for presenting “contra” and “versus” positions, for I had worked on data and documents obtained from the Louvre and Versailles archives and from the scientific files of the restoration centre, adding my own research only on the subject of old copies of the Veronese painting.

One should notice that although the restoration work had been done under the guidance of the C2RMF (Research and Restoration Centre of the French Museums) for the Louvre, the museum’s own curators and restoration commission had accepted the result. The Louvre, and the C2RMF even more, were understandably not pleased by this publication, but had no grounds for disputing the facts as I reported them. On the contrary, the necessity of some day correcting this unfortunate disfiguring was a point of agreement in the discussion I had with the Louvre, even if the painting was still hanging in its pitiful state two years after my publication.

It was surprising, therefore, that someone in the museum had had the idea of using the occasion of the Louvre’s own exhibition “Titien, Tintoret, Véronèse”, to re-work the painting, as if in a hurry, during the few days when it was taken down prior to the exhibition opening on the 17th of September 2009.

The main re-retouching that took place focused on the mother’s face. In my knowledge, this is the first time that a French museum has made so concrete an acknowledgement of the force of criticisms of a restoration as to re-restore the painting itself.

On discovering this second intervention during the course of the exhibition, I was shocked by the clumsiness of the attempt to repair the previous disastrous repainting. I asked the C2RMF if I might see the documents about the second restoration because they are generally in charge of the restoration of the Louvre paintings. They said that they had nothing new in their file (as I myself checked), because they had not been involved in what they characterised as a “localized intervention [that had been] requested and followed” (their words) by the Louvre’s curator for this painting, Jean Habert.

When I consulted the dedicated file in the archives wherein all interventions on the painting have to be reported, I discovered that no record had been made of the second repainting. When the arts journalist, Dalya Alberge, asked for explanations, the Louvre spokesman stated that in this second operation had consisted of the painting being merely “scrubbed up” (“bichonnée”) when that is a term normally used for very light interventions (such as dusting or retouching a minor scratch unnoticed in the museum but detected on a closer inspection made before an exhibition, etc).

As for the result of this further repainting, the previously messed mouth has been blurred, not corrected. The nose had been given an awkward point and a baffling enlarged new nostril, while the cheek remains puffed. This remains another alien 21st century version and, as such, it further dishonours Veronese’s painting.

My latest request to the Louvre has been for this re-repainting to be fully documented in their files, according the international museum’s standards and ethics. As an association we also pointed out officially to the Louvre’s authorities, the necessity for these successive “restorations” to be undone and the intervention to be rethought from the beginning.

[1] Presently kept at Versailles, it is as large as the original. These dimensions (a very rare 1/1 scale) permit to identify it as the copy n°849, of similar dimensions, in the Inventory of the King’s Paintings set up in 1709-1710 by Nicolas Bailly. So, it was made after 1682 (since it includes the enlargements) and before 1710.

[2] These folds are clearly shown in the engraving by Simon Thomassins, in 1742 in the Recueil d’estampes d’après les plus beaux tableaux …du cabinet du Roi, de Crozat, Mariette et Basan (fig. 6).

[3] That is, the copy of the painting in Versailles (see fig. 2) and the engraving by Thomassins made in 1742 (see fig. 6).

[4] See for instance Richard Cocke, Paolo Veronese. Piety and Display in an Age of Religious Reform, Ashgate, 2001.

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In ArtWatch UK Journal 12, Jessica Douglas-Home reported on the struggle being waged by the British-based Mihai Eminescu Trust to save the centuries-old Transylvanian Saxon architectural and crafts heritage that had survived the Ceausescu communist dictatorship. In 2008 Jessica Douglas-Home, chairman of the Mihail Eminescu Trust, was awarded the Romanian National Order for her “…activity before the fall of communism and her activity in promoting and developing the Romanian cultural patrimony.” An account of Jessica Douglas-Home’s smuggling of texts to dissidents in Eastern Europe before the fall of communism is given in her book “Once Upon Another Time”

Jessica Douglas-Home writes:

In June this year, the Romanian Cultural Institute in Belgrave Square held a conference entitled Democracy and Memory: Romania confronts its communist past. The failure of Romania to attempt any reckoning with the Great Terrors of Georghiu Dej and Ceaucescu is indeed an issue of the first importance, not only to European policy makers but to commentators everywhere on the transition from dictatorship to democracy. But to the ordinary Romanian far more important are their concerns about the lingering relationship between communism and corruption in local administrations.

Twenty years after the fall of Ceausescu many of the old guard are still in place – in particular in the countryside. In the Transylvanian village of Apold this summer, a posse of cars surrounded the mayor’s office. The mayor had been discovered with fraudulent accounts, had refused to leave and local councilors had come to confront him. Two weeks earlier, in the nearby village of Biertan, another mayor was caught siphoning off huge sums of commune money. When the news was splashed over the newspapers and national television, he was arrested and ejected from his political party, a grouping rooted in the communist past now renamed the Liberal Democrat Party. As in Apold, the “crackdown” was an illusion. The mayor proceeded to feign madness and arranged to be placed in the local sanitorium.

Four miles from Biertan lies an equally lovely village within the mayor’s jurisdiction called Richis. The centre of the village is officially a conservation zone. Yet shortly before the mayor’s arrest, he was implicated in the illegal sale of an historic property. This important house was bought by a cronie, a young man from Richis, now living in Germany. He has since gutted the building for use as a supermarket, demolishing supporting walls and pouring metres of cement onto the roof of the medieval cellar. As it is metres from the fine Gothic church he has been made to restore the façade. In Richis another supermarket is not needed. It appears more a war of attrition by the mayor and his party against the successful store run by two remarkable Dutch people. Ignorance and corruption have ruled the day.

This beautiful little building, (see photographs, right) now internally destroyed, belonged to the lawyer, poet and hymn writer, Georg Meyndt (1852-1903), whose simple melodies eternalise the seams of village life. Like many other houses in the Siebenburgen, the ancient Saxon region of Romania, the house has medieval foundations and is set in the context of the traditional vernacular architecture. Its façade is a fusion of Baroque and Neo-classicism, with a sophistication and charm rare even in this valley. To the south, 100 yards away and opposite the house, is one of the most spectacular Saxon churches of Transylvania, an extraordinary 14th century Gothic fortified church, famous for its medieval stone carvings of green men. In Romanian law all Saxon village centres are protected areas. If Romania is to put behind it the philistine vandalism of its recent past, now is the moment for the Ministry of Culture to place a summary preservation order on the building, call a halt to the demolition work and demand details of the deeds of sale.

The marvels of Transylvanian Saxon culture are no longer a secret. Herta Mueller has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature; the 18th century organs and clavichords of Samuel Maetz have become internationally recognized; Meyndt’s lyrical songs are reaching a cosmopolitan audience; ten Saxon churches have become World Heritage sites; the EU has given its highest cultural prize to a British Foundation’s project to regenerate the Saxon villages. Over the last 6 years tens of thousands of enchanted visitors have discovered the magic of those villages. In an expanse of land the size of Wales lies an image of Europe as it once was everywhere, a landscape intimately shared between wildlife and people, the outcome of successful settlement, a visible record of routines maintained over centuries of happiness and sorrow, in which men and women have shaped themselves to the earth and the earth to themselves in mutual harmony. No ordinary farmers, but a people who had kept their culture alive for 900 years, building exquisitely decorated stucco houses, lime-washed with the colours of wild flowers in pale yellow, pink, green and blue, with  hipped roofs of terracotta tiles, melding into the landscape as though they had grown from it. If these Saxons were artists, their masterpieces were their churches: massive fortifications, able to withstand every form of brigandage over the centuries but whose interiors were adorned by reverend, delicate workmanship, altarpieces matching those of Renaissance Italy, painted pews and angels and  intricate carved doors and stone archways.

Democracy is fledgling in Romania. These gentle villagers, now, after the tragic exodus of the Saxons, predominantly Romanians and gypsies, and still suffering from Ceausescu’s legacy, are nervous of personal retribution. Some of the more outspoken of them are still systematically spied upon. But petitions concerning the destruction of the Georg Meyndt house were sent courageously to the Ministry of Culture.  A protest website was set up. The Evangelical Church and the Prefectura of the county headquarters in Sibiu were formally requested to intervene. Is it too soon for the new urban bureaucrats to comprehend the value of the jewels of which they are the guardians? The disgraced mayor was seen back in the basement of the commune building. Unsubstantiated rumours have it that he is being taken to court. If conferences such as that in London’s Romanian Cultural Institute mean anything, it should be to send a powerful message to the Romanian government to enforce the law which alone stands between an incomparable treasure and its casual destruction: and to put a stop to the obliteration of the nation’s historic built heritage, a hallmark of Ceausescu’s catastrophic last years.

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Having already given evidence to the Culture Select Committee of the House of Commons, David Lee, the editor of  The Jackdaw was asked to justify some of his criticisms in writing. What follows is his further submission to that Committee.
David Lee wrote:
We were discussing, I recall, the Arts Council  Collection, a repository of some 7,546 works (plus 67 more bought in the last  twelve months), which has no permanent home, the overwhelming majority of the  work (80% according to an ACE employee, 70% according to the Chief Executive  of ACE) being at any one time in store. I stated my belief that in times of  financial hardship it is imprudent that new acquisitions should be made of work by artists who are either already extensively represented in its own or in other Government collections: for your information, apart from the Arts Council’s these state-owned holdings are most conspicuously the Government Art Collection (13,500 works, plus 75 new works added this year); the British Council Collection (8,500 works, plus 100 new works bought recently); and the  Tate (78,000 works, more of whose recent acquisitions below).
In the last year the Arts Council has acquired a work by Jeremy Deller (who is currently a serving trustee of the Tate; a gallery which awarded him the Turner Prize in 2004). It is the third work in the collection by the artist. The Tate also already owns five major works by Deller, four of which are not on display.  These include his most famous work, a film and installation of the re-enactment of a confrontation between police and demonstrators at Orgreave during the 1984 Miner’s Strike – a work funded, incidentally, by the Arts Council Lottery. The Government Art Collection has also this year bought a work from  Deller; indeed it is the same work as one of the un-displayed pieces in the  Tate’s collection, and also repeats the same Deller work in the Arts Council Collection The British Council owns three works by Deller, one of them being – you guessed it – the same work – “History of the World” bought  this year by the Government Art Collection and which is also in the permanent collections of the Tate and the Arts Council. Is the public trying to corner the market in this work, for it owns four copies of it?  History of the World is, incidentally, a moderately amusing flow diagram relating Acid House music to Brass Bands: I suppose it would be considered impertinent nitpicking to comment that it contains not the merest thread of art. There are also ten works by Deller in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Deller has recently been in the forefront of the campaign by Turner Prize artists to ensure that funding for the visual arts is maintained and, if possible, increased. His support is not surprising really, is it?
Such duplications are obviously wasteful and indicate more generally that collections might rationalise their purchasing nationally, or at least regionally. How many national collections, each harbouring enormous quantities of unseen work do we need buying works – even the same ones – by the same few fashionable artists?

You must bear in mind that the Arts Council and British Council collections were both inaugurated to make purchases from artists at the beginning of their careers in order to give them confidence and support and encourage them through the rough period immediately following art college. This seems an estimable use of scarce resources because established artists don’t need help from the state. Or you wouldn’t have thought they did. That laudable policy has been overturned by both the Arts Council and British Council to the extent that they are now acquiring works from a roll-call of the most recognisable and successful brands in British art… Effectively, both are duplicating the collecting responsibility of the Tate.

Also this year, the Arts Council Collection bought nine works by Wolfgang Tillmans, a German photographer and also, like Deller, a Turner Prize winner and a serving trustee of the Tate Gallery. (Incidentally, why any of our British photographers don’t qualify as a trustee of our principal gallery is bewildering. Mr Chairman, your committee may at some stage decide to look into the fishy resistance of the Tate to having appointed to its Board of Trustees any but Turner Prize winners and nominees.) These nine works were acquired despite the Tate already owning 63 works by Tillmans, none of which is currently on display. The British Council also owns11works by Tillmans.  Forgive my impertinence, but what is the work of a German photographer doing in the collection of a body whose founding function is to advance the standing of British Culture abroad?

Another bulk acquisition this year to the Arts Council Collection was five works by Keith Coventry. The collection already has in its vaults 23 works by this artist. The Tate also owns four works, one of which is currently on display, and the Government Art Collection and the British Council own another one apiece.

I notice in passing that the Arts Council Collection also acquired this year 3 works by Bridget Riley to add to the 11 existing in the collection. Riley also has 30 works in the Tate (4 currently on display), 9 in the Government Art Collection and 30 pieces in the British Council Collection.

The most expensive purchase this year by the Government Art Collection was the £57,500 paid for Cornelia Parker’s 14 crushed silver-plated objects: her ninth work in the collection. There are already 21 works by Parker in the Tate’s collection (2 currently on display), one of which is from the same series as that bought by the Government Art Collection, though it is not on display. Another Parker work, also from the same series, is owned by the British Council among 6 works in that collection by the same artist. The Arts Council Collection owns a further nine works by Parker, one of which duplicates a work in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s print collection.
I could continue like this indefinitely. Considerable savings could be made by stopping all but essential purchases and especially those which duplicate acquisitions in other national collections. Indeed, I can see no reason why the any of these four organisations (the Tate, ACE, GAC and the British Council) should make any purchases at all in the next few years because they already own far in excess of what they can ever exhibit.

The works in the Arts Council and British Council collections which are never shown and never requested for loan should be given to regional museums, or otherwise sold. Additionally, there is no good reason why the Government Art Collection should not be disposed of in its entirety. The public would lose nothing by these disposals and receive positive benefits in terms of savings and capital gains. If ministers wish to borrow works for their offices why can’t they do it from the Tate which has an unseen cache of work five times the size of the Government Art Collection’s.

Further on the subject of State acquisitions… The next time you hear Sir Nicholas  Serota moaning about not having sufficient money to extend the collections of his exponentially expanding empire, please bear this in mind: in the last four  years for which there are published records, 2006-2009, the Tate has acquired 2,209 new works. This equates to one new item every sixteen hours for four years. Indeed, in the last five years the Tate Gallery has absorbed more new works than the National Gallery has accumulated in its entire 186-year history – the National Gallery, incidentally, has all of its works on display.

If a moratorium were placed on new purchases for, say, the next five years in all national collections, visitors to the galleries would notice no difference to their experience.
I wish to reiterate the following points I made to the committee:

1. The overwhelming majority of British artists would not notice the complete withdrawal of all Arts Council funds allocated to the visual arts because they are considered by the Arts Council to be “the wrong kinds of artists” and don’t benefit from the Arts Council’s existence in any way at all.

2. The visual arts are unlike any other discipline dealt with by the Arts Council. In drama and music, the concert halls and theatres and the canons performed in them already existed. In the visual arts the Council opened its own galleries, some of them like the Whitechapel limping relics from a former age. These have been most often directed by the AC’s own former employees who are reliably steeped in the ethos of the Arts Council. The Council then institutionalised a new species of what it calls “Challenging Contemporary Art” to exhibit in them. Everyone else who falls outside this conveniently ill-defined phrase is excluded. The Arts Council has thus established an unhealthy monopoly, indeed a tyranny, which excludes more artists and styles than it includes. This derives solely from the personal prejudices of Arts Council employees instead of upon an intellectual openness to excellence wherever it exists on what is a very diverse stylistic spectrum in current art.

3. If you were today devising from scratch a way of funding the visual arts, you would look at the way the Arts Council does it as an object lesson in how to fail the overwhelming majority of your constituency.  

4. The need to rationalise in some way national and regional art collections first occurred to me in November 2006 when Bury Council auctioned a painting by L S Lowry from Bury Art Gallery in order to plug a gap in its annual accounts of £500,000. The painting sold for £1.4 million and the surplus was apparently used to pay for a library in Ramsbottom. De-accessioning, as this process of selling works from public collections is clumsily called, is a thorny subject which always causes outbursts of possessiveness among museum people. The truth is that when Bury sold its Lowry and left its walls devoid of a work by this highly popular local artist, there were in public collections within a few miles of Bury 305 works by Lowry which were not on show; these included 13 in Whitworth Art Gallery, 19 in Manchester City Art Gallery and 270 in Salford’s Lowry Centre. Galleries in Preston, Stockport, Bolton, Burnley and Oldham also had works by Lowry in their collections which were not at the time of the Bury sale on display. It is not that there is a shortage of works in public collections by artists like Lowry but that they are unseen in places that don’t apparently currently need them.  If ever there was an argument for a centralised, collectivised management of art collections it was highlighted by the sale of the Lowry from Bury Art Gallery.

5. Possible immediate savings by the Arts Council: withdraw funding from the ICA, which is now functionless and incompetently managed. Remove funding from the Serpentine Gallery. The few London dealers who benefit by having their artists exhibited in the Serpentine should be encouraged to assume running control. The gallery recently staged two exhibitions in one year dedicated to Jeff Koons and Richard Prince. Both these artists are represented by dealer Larry Gagosian who has his own spacious galleries in London which are more extensive than those of the Serpentine. Why is the Arts Council funding a gallery to show works by the world’s wealthiest artists represented by the world’s wealthiest dealer when those artists could just as easily be exhibited in their own dealers’ rooms? In the last year the Serpentine has shown the elderly artist Richard Hamilton, who also has a London dealer and has already been accorded no fewer than three retrospectives at the Tate. Also it has shown the ubiquitous Wolfgang Tillmans, who naturally  has his own London dealer and has also recently enjoyed a huge retrospective  at the Tate, where he is now safely installed as a Trustee. A quarter of all the money spent by the Arts Council’s visual arts department (£3 million of £12 million) would be saved by allowing both these organisations to sink or swim. The overwhelming majority of the public would notice no difference. And I don’t even mention the Hayward Gallery, which is a laughing stock…

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ArtWatch UK has received an appeal for assistance from art historians and restorers in Krakow (see documents, right) to help oppose a planned loan of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” to a special exhibition at the National Gallery in London in 2011- 2012. We feel honoured by the request and are entirely supportive of the appeal, the aims of which are legitimate, well-founded and highlight very serious problems that are widespread and far-reaching.

The essential case being put in Krakow against this proposal is threefold.
1 That this particular painting is artistically invaluable and irreplaceable and should, therefore, incur no unnecessary risks of loss or destruction; 2 That this intrinsically fragile work should not be jeopardised by the inevitable physical traumas and risks that attend movements across countries in varieties of vehicles and environments; 3 That the especial role and rootedness in Polish cultural and historical life that this work has acquired should be cherished and honoured, not violated.

It is disturbing here that the judgements of prestigious scholars and conservators should have been disregarded by the Krakow authorities, not only on the merits of the case, but because such an over-ruling extends geographically a culturally destructive shift of power that has been taking place for some years in the international museum world. The recent ascendency of commercial interests over professional/cultural/heritage priorities, in our view, threatens not only the physical well-being of works of art but the provision of conditions necessary for their proper appreciation and enjoyment. Further, these international museum-world power realities have stultifying and corrosive effects on professional discourse in art. It might be helpful to this appeal from Poland to illustrate here the nature of the risks.

In 1993 the New York Times art critic, Michael Kimmelman highlighted the professional self-censorship that modern museum practices enforce:

“no museum, either as lender or borrower, wants the taint of irresponsibility or carelessness. Although conservators, curators and directors privately raise doubts all the time about fragile and important works of art being moved around by other institutions, they virtually never speak out. When they do, it is as one chorus: nothing goes wrong where they are.”

Opposition to such self-censorship has been central to ArtWatch’s campaigning since its inception. We have known that opposition to institutionally disruptive but lucrative “special” travelling exhibitions is far greater than is generally appreciated.

It should be said at the outset that we fully recognize that in this particular dispute, the director of the intended loan “beneficiary” museum (the National Gallery), Nicholas Penny, has himself expressed brave opposition to the “blockbuster” phenomenon and its intrinsic risks. We recognise, too, the great financial and political pressures placed on museum directors to increase revenues from temporary – and paying – exhibitions. In his preface to Francis Haskell’s seminal book “The Ephemeral Museum ~ Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition” (Yale, 2000), Dr Penny noted that there was much evidence to make one uneasy about both the risks involved in transporting great works of art and the politics that drive such risk-taking. He cited Prof. Haskell’s recognition in 1990 that although:

“it can be argued that in exceptional circumstances such unease should be suppressed”, when “decisions to lend pictures are taken as a consequence of international politics or artistic diplomacy (that is, the hope…of winning loans of comparable significance in exchange) unease should turn to outrage.”

Dr Penny further noted that no public rebuttal was made of Prof. Haskell’s published case (originally in the New York Review of Books, 16 August 1990) “since it would only have brought to public notice the near accidents of recent years and might have prompted public statements from other senior figures.” Recognising that although at least one other eminent art historian (Sir Ernst Gombrich) had expressed misgivings about the transportation of great masterpieces, Penny added that “museum employees are obliged to stifle their anxieties…”

Sir Ernst Gombrich had revealed those anxieties to us five years earlier (letter of 30 December 1995):

“…When I was in Vienna in October, the Kunsthistorisches Museum was under enormous pressure to lend Vermeer’s Artist in his Studio, indeed in the end the Queen of the Netherlands rang the President of Austria (who had no idea what she was talking about!)…”

On that occasion – and specifically on the warning testimony of international experts like Sir Ernst and a German restorer – the museum’s resistance to intense political pressure was successful. The picture was spared risks and traumas. But not for long: in 2001 the painting travelled over land and sea to the National Gallery in London and New York’s Metropolitan Museum as part of a Vermeer-fest that replicated the joint 1995-96 Mauritshuis/National Gallery of Washington blockbuster. The London/New York blockbuster had been made possible by an indemnity against damages from the US Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities and the sponsorship of the firm Ernst and Young.

The Metropolitan Museum is proud of its own awesome political clout. The museum’s present director, Thomas P. Campbell, boasted, when still a curator of tapestries, that

“no one but the Met could have pulled off the exhibition of Renaissance tapestry we had a few years ago…The politics involved, the financing involved, the leverage and the expertise: No one else had that. We bribed and cajoled and twisted the arms of institutions around the world – well we didn’t bribe of course – but politically it was very complicated negotiating the loans of these objects” (- “Museum ~ Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art”, Danny Danziger, N.Y. 2007).

A former director of the Met, Thomas Hoving, celebrated his own tenacity in pursuit of foreign masterpieces in his 1993 book “Making the Mummies Dance” (p. 190):

“The discussions about a masterwork – we were asking for a Breughel – bogged down at once with a lecture from Fritzie [Fritzie Klauner, the director of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna] on the perils of sending works of art abroad. She allowed us to hang around her office for over an hour, gazing disapprovingly at us as we begged, and only then told us what we had to do to secure a loan. All requests had to be personally approved by the minister of foreign affairs, a man by the name of Kurt Waldheim [a former Nazi and the fourth Secretary-General of the United Nations].
“Somewhat to our surprise, we got an appointment with Waldheim right away. He reminded me of a shiny lizard…He suggested lunch at one of Vienna’s most luxurious restaurants to discuss the ‘highly delicate issue of loans.’ We got nowhere. Waldheim suggested that we meet for dinner that evening at another of Vienna’s most expensive restaurants to discuss the problem further. He brought his wife, who spoke three words the entire evening. We advanced no further. He suggested we join him the next night – at our expense- for another dinner at still another of Vienna’s most expensive restaurants. Again no progress was being made until Ted [Ted Rousseau, Hoving’s own appointed Deputy-Director of the Met] invited him to come to New York to attend the gala dinner of the ‘Masterpieces’ show, all expenses paid. Waldheim gave us his sly lizard’s smile and asked, ‘What precise picture you wanted? Some Breughel? It is altogether possible the loan can be arranged.’”

If power lies increasingly with administrators and not experts, we would still hope that the authorities in Krakow might reflect fully on the risks they are presently considering running. These comprise four specific categories: outright loss through crashes or fires; damage during transit; thefts during transit; damage during installation and “de-installation”. We cite cautionary examples of each.

Outright losses (and recent near misses)

In 1993 a Boucher painting was lost in an exhibition travelling from New York to Detroit to Paris. On 2 September 1998, a Swissair jet carrying a Picasso oil painting (“Le Peintre”) valued at £1m and a second unidentified painting crashed and disintegrated in the sea off Nova Scotia. In 2007 a China Airlines Boeing 737-800 was destroyed by fire shortly after landing in Japan. Passengers and crew escaped narrowly but all cargo perished. In 1983-84 267 works of Turner’s were dispatched in wooden crates in two lorries to be carried on consecutive days from Dover to Calais on board Sealink’s ferry The Spirit of Free Enterprise. On 6 March 1987 her sister ship, The Herald of Free Enterprise , carrying 47 lorries capsized and sank with a loss of 191 lives in calm seas. It was reported on 12 July 2007 that a plot to blow up (by car bomb) a Brittany Ferries vessel, the Pont Aven, carrying thousands of British tourists, had been thwarted when an ETA terrorist was arrested while carrying detonators for a van packed with explosives. An earlier ETA attempt to destroy a ferry leaving Valencia failed when the intended van-bomb broke down and had to be abandoned.

In 2003, following the arrest of a terrorist with an SA7 anti-aircraft missile, British Airways suspended all flights into Saudi Arabia for three weeks.

In 2003, the fine art insurance specialists Hiscox disclosed that insurance premiums had increased by 25 per cent in the two years that followed the events of 11 September 2001. The current threats to airlines from on-board terrorists or in-cargo devices need no description.

In November 2004, a curator at the Wallace Collection, Stephen Duffy, warned that:

“It is only a matter of time before a major work is lost when a plane crashes or a boat sinks.”

Tacit acknowledgement of travelling exhibition risks, is evident in exhibition organisers own arrangements. On a transatlantic tour through Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Seattle, three of Ghiberti’s gilded bronze panels from the Florence Baptistery doors travelled on separate planes because “They’re too valuable to risk a crash”. (There are more Ghiberti door panels – 28 – than Leonardo paintings). Similarly, 20 terracotta figures sent to the British Museum’s Chinese Warriors blockbuster were flown in on two planes “to reduce risk”. But as recently as 1997 the British Museum flew all of its Graeco-Roman encaustic portraits to Athens in a single plane. An entire and priceless class of objects at the Museum might have been lost in a single disaster.

Damage and risks during transit

In 2004, the art insurance company AXA-Art disclosed that it alone pays out around £3m a year for art damaged in transit. The true scale of damages is far larger, as museums and galleries generally repair (undisclosed) travel damage to works themselves to avoid increased insurance premiums and embarrassing publicity. Often the discovery of injuries triggers inter-museum disputes.

In 2000 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston found its Turner oil painting “Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying – Typhoon coming on” to be damaged and “extremely unstable” on return from the Tate Gallery. Despite having been “glazed and sealed against changes in relative humidity, the picture [had] reacted significantly to the voyage” and lost flakes of paint. A Tate spokeswoman said in response to disclosure of the damage:

“It arrived here safely where it was examined thoroughly. Its condition was stable…However, Turner’s paintings are notorious for becoming unstable.”

That picture had previously been considered one of the few Turner masterpieces in good condition.

It is often misleadingly claimed that modern technology has eliminated the risks of travel. In 2001a Rembrandt (“Portrait of an Elderly Woman”) insured for $12m, and sent from the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in a “climate-controlled container”, suffered a gash nearly 3 inches by 1.4 inches. A protracted dispute over liability and insurance compensation ensued. The Pushkin Museum claimed that the case must have been dropped en route:

“If it was badly packed, it would be a different type of damage. The painting has a double canvas. To rip through several inches of it, there had to be a blow that allowed the picture to fall from the frame.”

(See “ARTS ABROAD; The Dreaded Call. A Hole in the Art. Now It’s Settled”, The New York Times, 19 December 2002)

In 2006, the British Museum sent 251 Assyrian objects – including its entire, incalculably important, fragile, wall-mounted Nimrud Palace alabaster relief carvings in foam filled wooden crates in two cargo jets to Shanghai for the “Assyria: Art and Empire” exhibition. The Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, claimed:

“It’s easier to transport these big valuable objects now – but it’s just as important to be certain they’ll be safe at the other end.”

The other end can be a long way away. The only flight capable of transporting all of the massive carvings to Shanghai left from Luxembourg to where the crated objects had to be moved by lorry/ferry/lorry. The planes stopped in Azerbaijan during their 16 hours flights – giving a total of four landings and four take-offs each on the round trip. On arrival in Shanghai, it was discovered that the recipient museum’s low doorways and inadequate lifts required that the crates with the largest carvings be “rolled in through the front door – which meant that we had to get a mobile crane to get them up the stairs” said Darrel Day, the British Museum’s senior heavy-objects handler. “Even then we had to unpack three of the crates to get a bit more clearance…[one carving] was still too tall, so we had to lay him down on his side”. When the collection was finally unpacked (delay had occurred because a replacement had to be found for the Chinese museum’s ancient unsafe forklift truck), it was found that “a few little conservation things had to be done” and that a support had broken off one of the carved reliefs. Nic Lee, head of the Museum’s Stone, Wall Paintings and Mosaics Conservation Section, said: “that was a bit of nineteenth-century restoration that I’d been wanting to get rid of for ages, anyway”.

A restorer at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, has claimed that within the museum world there is a professional concept of “acceptable potential loss” when considering works for loans. There would certainly now seem to be a systemic tolerance of failures in the movement of great art works. Forward planning seems an art yet to be achieved by many travel-happy museums (- a wider use of tape measures might help). An incoming Morgan Stanley sponsored exhibition of Chinese terracotta figures at the British Museum produced another art-handling pantomime. The more than two dozen wooden crates required were delayed for two days in Beijing because they would not fit into the holds of the two chartered cargo planes. When they finally arrived at the British Museum, they would not pass through the door of the round Reading Room (from which Paul Hamlyn’s gifted library had been evicted for the six months duration of the show). Even after the Reading Room’s main door frame had been removed, the largest crates still could not enter the temporary exhibition space built above the famous circular desks of the library, and had to be unpacked outside the exhibition space in the Great Court.

In 2006, the British Museum loaned over four thousand objects.

Mr MacGregor has said that he sees no reason why any work might not be loaned abroad providing it can be moved “safely”. The difficulties such arrangements generate were discussed by one of his predecessors, David Wilson, in his “The British Museum: A History”, (The British Museum Press, 2002 – pp 334-336, “Exhibitions – A Vicious Circle?”). Sir David admits that objects occasionally get damaged and sometimes “go missing” and that the number of loans from the Museum doubled between 1985 and 2000, in which year 114 separate loans of individual items or groups of objects were made within Britain and a hundred foreign loans sometimes of only two or three “objects of high importance” but sometimes with large groups of images – usually prints and drawings that are highly sensitive to light.

Although less spectacular than actual crashes, the net incremental effects of widespread and repeated travel cause much harm. Every loaned painting is subjected to vibrations and changes in atmosphere that cause stress to its support and its support/paint interface. A late member of ArtWatch UK, a former airline pilot (and picture owner), Aidrian Shann, explained the risks to us in these terms:

“It is not a simple subject. For example, it could be argued that the Comet crashes are irrelevant. They are not in this sense: the problem arose because of the continual flexing of the weak points of the fuselage (e.g. the windows). So what? Well, the artwork (as indeed ourselves) will be subject to a fairly rapid change of altitude; in my time a typical ‘cabin altitude’ would be set between 6000 & 8000 ft [i.e. having been so selected by the crew] and there will be continual cycling of pressure to maintain this cabin altitude; don’t forget one will be climbing initially, descending later, and throughout the cruise stepping-up to a higher altitude so as to maintain fuel economy – all such changes in altitude being subject to ATC [Air Traffic Control?] and to weight of aircraft as the fuel is burnt off. (When I flew the Boeing 707, max. fuel was 72 tons in weight @ take/off, most of which would be burnt off by arrival over destination.)” “I cannot believe that paintings are not likely to be adversely affected by changes in altitude (or pressure), likewise by varying temperatures (possibly in the hold v. low) & by an uncertain humidity, esp. with rapid changes in local climate @ points of departure & arrival [again esp. with cabin/hold cooling in hot, humid climates.] “Then – where I am not up to date, but it was being introduced years ago – there is the commercial pressure to vary these very parameters so as to economise on fuel. “So heaven knows exactly what (beneficial?) effect this hazard has on these rare irreplaceable prizes in our civilisation. Anyway, ignorance is NOT excusable, surely, for curators or whoever who take upon themselves the hubris of moving these wonderful things round the world.”

On another occasion Mr Shann put it like this:

"The crunch may really lie in what is not a one off. The dangers lie in the cabin and the hold air pressures which may be the equivalent of 10,000ft (I guess around 3,000 metres) and in the electrically charged atmosphere [because] with the aircraft itself being metallic, safety requires bonding (so there is no electrical discharge within the aircraft.) It works,” he added, while wondering “what effect must this be having on old masters?”

On 12 July 2001, when bringing ten panels from Massacio’s Pisa Altarpiece to the National Gallery in London, the then director, Neil MacGregor, claimed that it had become safe at some point in “the past five to ten years” to jet works of art around the world because little gadgets in modern packing cases alert handlers to “any movement in the container”. He did not explain what a handler might then do if so alerted in mid-flight.

In 2000, pages of the Book of Kells were damaged by vibration when the precious illuminated manuscript was flown from Ireland to Australia.

In 2004 a Raphael was found, on arrival for the National Gallery’s“Raphael: From Urbino to Rome” show, to have suffered “a raised crack” in transit.

The effects of vibration on old fragile paintings have been little studied. How might they be? Would any responsible curator permit an old master painting to be fixed inside a container and shaken variously and erratically for hours on end?

The fashion for dispatching even the most famous and fragile works of art accelerated greatly in the 1960s. In 1962 France’s first Minister of Culture, André Malraux, flamboyantly made a personal loan of the “Mona Lisa” to the President of the United States, Jack Kennedy, and his wife Jacqueline. Despite fierce opposition from the Louvre Museum’s conservators, the centuries old, crack-susceptible panel crossed the Atlantic on the S.S. France and was put on public show by the Presidential couple first in the National Gallery Washington and then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, early in 1963. At both venues people queued for hours to snatch a glimpse as they shuffled past the picture, marshalled by guards to prevent any loitering.

The exercise was deemed a great popular, political and technical success: several millions of people had “seen” the most famous painting in the world; Europe’s finest and most revered had embraced America’s most gilded and dynamic; and, despite being subject to the strains and risks of travel, a precious and fragile panel painting had, by courtesy of state-of-the-art packaging technology, suffered no discernible harm (but see below).

That success spawned imitation – if even the “Mona Lisa” could be moved great distances with impunity, why not anything? It only recently emerged that while in the “safe-keeping” of a high security vault at the Metropolitan Museum the painting had been drenched overnight by an undetected faulty sprinkler system.

In its annual report of 1975 (p. 60), the National Gallery (London) defended its own (sometime) decisions not to loan:

“Because of the interest shown in our refusal to lend five of the seven paintings requested by the Turner Bicentenary exhibition…(at the Royal Academy), it is appropriate to say something about our policy when deciding whether to lend or not.

“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 dispatched the Michelangelo ‘Pietà’ to New York), profit, patriotism, scholarship or pleasure. It is against the background of this general principle that we discuss, month by month, requests for loans brought to us by the Director. Among the points to be considered are, then: the condition of the painting; its dossier of previous travels (if any); the significance of the exhibition for which it is requested and the weight of its own contribution there; the security measures adopted by the organisers; whether the exhibition is a static or a migrating one; the importance of the painting in itself, in the context of where it hangs, and in the importance of the eyes of our visitors.

“It is true that, stimulated by increased scientific 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 the caution this induces is not misplaced is suggested by the fact that one of the two Turners that we did lend came back with a slight split, some blistering and a very small area of paint loss- trifling wounds, and in no way reflecting on the care lavished on loans by the organisers of the exhibition, but requiring, all the same, remedial treatment before the painting could be rehung.”

Turner was again on call for loans five years later. On 21 December 1980 The Observer reported (“Tate Turners crack”) that many turner paintings were too fragile to travel abroad – scarcely 100 out of 279 paintings were thought to be sound enough “to risk being shaken, bumped or dropped in travelling”. The Tate’s head of conservation, Viscount Dunluce, said “Paintings are not designed to travel, but to go on a wall. If you send them about in lorries, trains, ships or planes it is bound to have a deleterious effect.”

Thefts

Accidental damage is not the only risk incurred when transporting art.

Every year, more than £2bn of art is stolen, some of which is art on the move.

In November 2006, the Toledo Museum’s Goya, “Children with a Cart” was stolen en route for an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

In 1994 the Tate Gallery loaned two Turner paintings insured for £24m to the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. “We will not be sending a courier”, Tate director, Sir Nicholas Serota, told the museum, “but as the works have high values we would like a member of your staff to supervise the arrival/ depalletisation of the cases at Frankfurt [airport] and their transit to the Schirn Kunsthalle”.
In what was clearly an “inside job” the pictures were stolen from the Frankfurt museum on the day of arrival and only returned to the Tate in December 2002 after payment of a £3m ransom to the thieves in 2000.

In December 2010 thieves broke into a warehouse and drove off with a van filled with £5m-worth of works by Picasso, Botero and Eduardo Chillida being returned to Spain from a loan to Germany. Police said that the robbery had all the hallmarks of “an inside job”. Police/Museum/Criminal relationships are a vexed subject. In the February 2001 The Art Newspaper, it was reported that Geoffrey Robinson, the former Paymaster General had claimed that the German police had infiltrated the gang (“a group of particularly nasty Serbs”) that had stolen the two Tate Turners, but had “then loused up on the recovery operation”. There are grounds for suspecting a de facto going-rate “reward” of ten or fifteen percent of a work’s insurance value in order to effect a recovery and avoid a full pay-out. If so, the Krakow Leonardo, insured at €300m, would present, on its being moved to London, a potentially easily realisable haul of €30-45m to thieves.

Even when stolen art works are recovered, they are typically damaged as a result of careless handling. Two Picassos recently recovered from a theft in Paris were found to have been rolled so tightly that the paint had flaked. Two stolen Munch paintings were found on recovery in 2006 to have been scraped, punctured and to have suffered dislodged paint.

Installation/De-Installation Risks

Quite apart from risks to works of art, the costs of mounting blockbuster exhibitions are high to art institutions themselves and, especially to their curators and museum staffs. By tradition – and for the best possible reasons – museums employ curators to curate their collections. To do this work appropriately curators must be both highly knowledgeable in their fields and intimately familiar with and attentive to their own collections. By tradition this has not been highly remunerated employment but it has carried very high job satisfaction and rightly high esteem. Curators used to occupy places at the summit of museum hierarchies because their work was seen to be crucial to the central purpose of the museum: studying and tending to the collections. In modern times all manner of extraneous roles and requirements have been attached to museums and the proportion of resources devoted to serious curatorship has shrunk dramatically. Arguably the most perniciously destructive of these changes has been the rise of the “Education” nexus within the museum. A stand-alone education department in a museum is at best a parasitical construct if not a positively alien one. The collection and the quiet undisturbed contemplation of its contents is itself the true educational core of the institution. Professional educationists inevitably bring intrusive professional ideological baggage that insinuates itself between the art and the viewer/student. The one-on-one engagement in tranquillity that museums have traditionally permitted may be a great privileging luxury, but it was the very purpose of the institution in the first place to make available to all the possibilities that had once belonged only to the few.

The rise of the temporary, would-be blockbuster exhibition has done the greatest possible great harm to museums intended “core” purposes. The achievement of a commercially successful exhibition requires a serious realignment of museum policy and internal priorities. The public relations and publicity departments must flourish. The institutional face presented to the world necessarily becomes more akin to that of the fairground barker hustling for passing trade. Internally, the energies of curators are hi-jacked onto projects for which their skills may not be particularly well-suited or on which they may be insultingly wasted.

As we have seen, large international exhibitions require levels of planning, expertise and expenditure that commonly exceed those of even the greatest and richest museums. Massively high costs must be spread. Partner museums must be found before the horse-trading can even begin. Committees must be set up. Sponsors/backers must be found. The sponsor is invariably presented to the public as saviour/benefactor and indulged with special events, dinners and private viewing which transfer patronage away from the museum itself – which can often end up resembling an up-market scenic set for a voracious corporate entity. The expansion of special privileged viewings is creating a two-tier policy: pampering for the select few; unspeakable over-crowding for the paying punters.

Special, temporary exhibitions may have long gestations but their assembling and “dis-assembling” are inevitably occasions of haste and confusion. A document recently came into being (see below) which sheds light on the destructive institutional costs of the high-profile temporary exhibition mania.

On 21 January 2008, a Renaissance painting owned by the National Gallery (London) was dropped and smashed during the de-installation of a temporary exhibition: Renaissance Siena: Art for a City. From our access to National Gallery papers we appreciate that this was by no means the first such incident, but it was, perhaps, the first to be publicly acknowledged.

It was reported in the online published minutes of a gallery board meeting held on 8 February 2008 that the (then) Chairman, Peter Scott, had warmly welcomed the new director, Nicholas Penny. The occasion might have seemed like a baptism by fire: lurking under the heading “Pictures for treatment”, the minutes disclosed that:

“The Board were shown ‘Marcia’ by Domenico Beccafumi (NG 6369). The Director of Conservation confirmed that, following damage to the painting which had occurred while removing the painting from the wall, he had decided after consultation with the Chairman that repair work should start immediately, without the Board seeing it first, in order to avoid possible further damage. The restoration work was now complete, and the Board agreed that the painting was ready to go back on display. The Board thanked the Director of Conservation and his department for the work they had carried out on the painting.

“The Director of Conservation reported that an audit report had been commissioned to investigate the causes of the accident which had led to the damage, and to recommend any changes of procedures or other changes which might be required to guard against future incidents of this type. The report would be considered by the Board’s Audit Committee in March and the Audit committee would report to the April Board.

“The Director confirmed that the damage had been reported to the DCMS and would be reported the MLA [Museums, Libraries and Archives Council].”

In our Spring 2008 Journal No.23, we ran three news items on blockbusters:

1 “Museums now have to do blockbuster shows to get the people in, “Paul Williamson, of the art transporting firm Constantine, said on BBC Radio 4’s the World Tonight on November fifth [2007], adding “They’re under financial pressure to tour the exhibitions: so various exhibitions may undertake a five, ten or fifteen-venue tour around the world.” On the same programme, a spokesman for the art insurers Hiscox disclosed that a large claim was filed when a forklift truck driver at Heathrow drove his forks through a very well-known painting that was very lovely.”

2 The National Gallery’s Domenico Beccafumi ‘Marcia’ suffered serious damage when removed from a wall. The Gallery’s long-serving restorer and present Director of Conservation, Martin Wyld, decided in consultation with Board Chairman Peter Scott Q.C., to repair the picture without showing it to the Board. An internal report on the accident and its causes was considered by the Board’s Audit Committee in March and the Audit Committee reported to the full Board in April. The damage has been reported to the DCMS and to the MLA. To date, there has been no press coverage of the accident.

3 Arts commentators were taken aback when Nicholas Penny, the National Gallery’s new director, publicly challenged the mania for blockbuster exhibitions by declaring that: “The responsibility of a major gallery is to show people something they haven’t seen before. A major national institution should be one that proves a constant attraction to the public. What is important is encouraging historical and visual curiosity in the public.” His admission that he had “a lot of thinking to do about our exhibitions and the directions they are taking” was echoed by Ralph Rugoff, the Hayward Gallery’s director, in the Independent on March 8th: “exhibitions cost more and more to put on and there are more risks involved. Its easy to say let’s play it safe. Let’s go on what the public know and already loves.” (For Dr Penny’s longstanding blockbuster reservations, see “Blockbuster Exhibitions: the Hidden Costs and Perils”, AW Journal 22.)

Press coverage of the Beccafumi injury followed our item. On 16 May 2008 The Guardian reported: “Oops! Gallery handlers break Renaissance painting”

In June 2008 The Art Newspaper carried a report headed: National Gallery drops Renaissance painting, splitting it in two ~ Director admits the accident was “extremely serious”

On 20 June 2008 the gallery made available to us the photograph of the smashed panel shown here, and the full auditors report (“Report on the Circumstances behind the Accidental damage to NG 6369 Domenico Beccafumi’s Marcia”) by Tadeusz J. A. Glabus, Head of Internal Audit, the British Museum, that had been submitted to the gallery on 13 March 2008. (We are indebted to Nicholas Penny for those disclosures.)

The photograph (above) speaks for itself. The report is eloquent in ways that may not have been intended. Although it names no names and attributes no culpability, it shows, in essence, that the accident was product of an accelerating shambles and that this had been an accident-in-waiting. The report works backwards from the accident. It might be instructive to consider its detailed findings in reverse.

The exhibition was one of many: “In a typical year the Gallery’s exhibition programme will contain three major Sainsbury Wing shows, three Sunley Room shows, three or four Room One shows and the UK tour show (an exhibition of around 24 works to Bristol, Newcastle and the Sunley Room.”

According to the last published figures, the gallery has a curatorial complement of twenty (as opposed to one of twenty-five, for example, in Communications, Media, Press and Marketing).

The Renaissance Siena exhibition was unusually large for a Sainsbury Wing show – 116 exhibits compared with a usual figure of 50-70. 102 of its exhibits were loans. It was said that “this exceptionally high number of exhibits was attributed to the exhibition curator’s remarkable rate of success in converting the contents of the Exhibition Loan Request List into firm commitments.”

The exhibition itself was unusual in other respects. It contained 20 three-dimensional objects that “presented a set of different technical challenges to staff more accustomed to dealing with flat objects.” The number, variety and geographically dispersed locations of the exhibits “impacted significantly on the range of operations relating to the exhibition” and thereby imposed a “very heavy workload for staff”. The exhibition was unusually ambitious in its design: “one of the most technically challenging and logistically complex shows ever staged by the Gallery” but it was less clear that the allocated resources were sufficient to the task. Preparing for this show “impacted significantly on a range of internal operations and there is anecdotal evidence that the workloads of some staff, particularly in Registrar and Design, were stretched to breaking point.” Although general failures of communication and absences or confusions of lines of authority were identified under a heading of “blurring of roles and responsibilities”, the strains in Design seem to have been seen as chiefly responsible for the accident. The Gallery’s in-house designers struggled to cope with designs that were “ambitious and complex”. Design work was “out-sourced”. The in-house 3D designer works “almost exclusively on exhibitions but Design is part of Communications”. Confusions exist in the relationships between the organising curator, the Exhibition registrar and Art Handling: “there is a need to clarify who is actually in charge of the installation and de-installation”. The appointment of an external designer mid-way through the project may have been right in view of the “excessive workload” but it was not universally welcomed by the “project team” on account of the “high regard in which the in-house designer’s work was held”. The incoming designer was on a steep learning curve, unfamiliar with Gallery practices and jargon, and constituted a break in continuity that was deemed “disruptive and irksome” in a period marked by “lack of continuity, confusion and, at times, absence of direct management.” It was judged that “In practice, the designer received instructions from the registrar, Curator, 3D Designer, Head of design and Exhibitions Organiser”. He believed himself to be being managed by the Exhibition Organiser when the Exhibition Policy states that this responsibility rests with the Design department.

All of the above might have amounted to no more than the normal bruised egos colliding in a large organisation, but, fatefully, the workload was spinning out of control. Ongoing difficulties resulted in the “unprecedented decision” to allow the Head of Art Handling to take on the complex tasks of recreating a 15th C bedchamber and reuniting a 15th C wooden polyptych. The original design for the exhibition had stipulated seven showcases. This grew in the course of the exhibition to twenty-four, with unforeseen implications for design that “may have been a contributory factor in problems arising from the late delivery of some drawings”.

These drawing were vital to the execution of a key piece of installation: a special masking frame to house and exhibit three (originally related) Beccafumi panel paintings, two of which were the gallery’s own, the third a loan from the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome. It had originally been intended to hang the three paintings as a triptych but behind separate masking frames that would permit them to be “displayed on a level visual plane but without the distraction of separate frames”. It was later decided (two weeks before installation) to hang all three paintings behind “a single wall-mounted masking frame”. It remains unclear “who actually made this decision”. The design of this frame was still being discussed in the second week of the installation. It is suggested that one reason this project was so low down on the list of priorities is because two of the paintings were the gallery’s own – even though the pictures are classed as fragile and “would never be allowed to go out on loan to another institution”.

It was acknowledged that each time these paintings were moved or placed and taken off a wall or fitted into the masking frame “there was a risk of damage, also a higher risk in mounting both paintings in one frame”.

The chosen masking frame arrived on the very last day of installation – the 19 October 2007, when it was noticed that “the sight-sizes for all three paintings were too small”. Many people discussed the problem but the designer was not present for the installation. A conservation technician and a restorer agreed to undertake the necessary alterations, apparently without having been given any information on the frame’s intended function as a purely “masking frame”. The alterations were made on a misapprehension: that this was a “holding frame”, the apertures of which were too small. Work was not started until the following Monday. As a temporary measure, all three Beccafumi panels were fixed to the wall on the Friday so that they could be seen at a colloquium the following day. On the Monday the two National Gallery panels were removed to the conservation department in their frames. The masking frame was altered and the two panels were fitted into it by wooden battens, each of which was fixed to the frame by a single line of hot melt adhesive applied by a hot melt gun. The, by then, glazed and framed pair of paintings left conservation 17.00, needing to be installed in the gallery by 17.30 in order to be on show for a private view later that evening. The solution appeared to everyone involved to have worked.

“De-installation” took place on 21 January 2008 in the “unusual” presence of two curators, one of whom was seeking (successfully) to persuade the Galleria Doria Pamphilj’s courier to permit their panel to undergo x-ray and infrared examinations.

To cut a long story short, the masking frame that had become a holding frame was found to be stuck to the wall. It was freed (accompanied, some staff members recall by a “cracking noise”) but as the frame was being handled, the panel Marcia fell out of the back and smashed against the skirting board, as did the defective glued wooden fixing that was supposed to hold it place. The glue on the fixing to the other Gallery panel (the Tanaquil) was also found to be defective and to have “partially failed”. It was discovered that the glue had been applied to only a single surface not the required two surfaces. It has been decided by Conservation never to use this type of adhesive for that purpose again. At the time of installation Conservation staff had been confident that a reinforcement of the bond with screws was unnecessary.

The Auditor’s report suggests that “There were probably too many people around at the time of and immediately after the accident” and that, contrary to established procedures “there was anecdotal evidence of curators arriving during installation with unannounced guests”.

After the Marcia panel was restored, it and its companion Tanaquil did not return to their place in the main galleries but were relegated to the ill-lit basement of the reserve collection which is open to the public for only a few hours a week. [M. D.]

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The Early Music pioneer (Sir) John Eliot Gardiner recently left the Daily Telegraph’s music critic, Ivan Hewett, reeling with incredulity by saying that he had not seen himself as a crusading musicological force but simply as a jobbing musician who recognised that “other views are valid, as long as they’re convincing in performance”. For Hewett, Gardiner had long epitomised the radical movement to “scrape the varnish” off music by playing on obsolete period instruments and eschewing later styles and types of musical understanding in attempt to produce historically authentic performances.

For over half a century after the Second World War picture restorers at the National Gallery, London, sought to recover the historically authentic appearances of paintings by first removing all (supposedly) non-original and “inauthentic” material and then using their judgements to paint hypothetical reconstructions in areas of lost or damaged paint – see illustrations, right. The gallery now claims in its new hand book, Conservation of Paintings [1], that its pictures are changed “primarily for aesthetic reasons” (page 53) on the “aesthetic objectives of those responsible for the cleaning” (page 45) and that although such “different aesthetic decisions” produce results that “may look very different”, all results can “be equally valid as long as they can be pursued safely” (page 53).

To gauge the significance of these seemingly similar recent professional reformulations, it is important to appreciate the extent to which the 20^th century cult of simulated historical authenticity had profoundly different consequences in music and painting.

Music is an “adversarial” art where interpretation is both of the essence and healthily subject to criticism. If Gardiner plays Monteverdi or Bach as if frozen in time, as if musical instruments had undergone no evolution, as if Haydn or Beethoven had never existed, the interpretive potential of their music might be constricted on a point of musicological dogma, but nothing is permanently lost and something is gained. Gardiner, as a bona fide creative musician, cannot do other than interpret composers’ guiding notations (and thereby add to the stock of musical readings). While all performances are individual resurrections-through-interpretation, all performers must nonetheless appeal to the critical sensibilities of living audiences and professional critics. In music, there can be no final solutions because the original authorial texts (the scores) remain sacrosanct and leave every composer permanently up for interpretive grabs. This is why even the most revered and legendary recorded interpretations must coexist in critical engagement with other historical or more recently recorded performances [2] – and why BBC Radio 3’s CD Review is the most perpetually nourishing and stimulating programme on air.

But while one interpretation/performance can never expunge another in music, picture restorers thrive precisely by undoing and redoing each other’s work. Because painting is not an interpretive art form but a concrete one, the artistic consequences of such interventions can be deadly. Painters bequeath not scores to be realised through performances but fixed, artistically-live objects. Such unique creative works can be rendered artistic corpses through a single bungled restoration or be progressively falsified through the “Chinese Whispers” of successive restorers’ interpretations. Although restorers – who operate with historically alien (and often synthetic and experimental) materials on the creative works of others – have now dropped misguided quests to recover historical authenticity and claimed quasi-musical interpretive rights instead, they still continue to brook no criticisms. They alone, the National Gallery holds, may “determine the way a painting looks” (page 53) even though “controversy often follows when great paintings are transformed by cleaning” (page 5). Their profession, restorers continue to insist, is a uniquely specialised techno/aesthetic hybrid whose mysteries elude non-initiates and float beyond criticism.

Unlike genuinely creative people, restorers can never concede technical errors or aesthetic misjudgements for fear of implicating the curators, trustees and sponsors who authorize and fund their actions. Museum politics demand that whatever is done last must be proclaimed right and better than before. Within this criticism-free zone, the National Gallery’s contention that rival restorations can be “equally valid as long as they can be achieved safely” may be a politically and institutionally convenient formulation but it begs important technical questions and evades artistic ones: how safe are current treatments? On what critical basis might equally “safe” but aesthetically contrary treatments be evaluated? [M. D.]

[1] First published in 1997 with aid from The Robert Gavron Charitable Foundation in the gallery’s “Pocket Guides” series. Its author, David Bomford, then a Senior Restorer at the gallery, is now the Associate Director for Collections at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

[2] Explorations of musical interpretation have generated a rich literature. The Oxford Journals’ Early Music (for which I had the sometime privilege of illustrating its “Performing Matters” features) has examined the strengths and weaknesses of the “Early Music” movement – or HIP (Historically Informed Performance), as is sometimes preferred – through constructive and illuminating critical dialogues. In the August 1994 edition, for example, Willem Kroesburgen, a harpsichord maker, and Jed Wentz, a traverse player and leader of the group Musica ad Rhenium, challenged widespread assumptions of earlier musical decorousness by citing accounts of 17^th and 18^th century performances in which organs shook buildings, and singers, with mouths open wide enough to accommodate hay-wagons, screamed until their eyes rolled “like stuck pigs”, while violinists (praised for their powers of “penetration”) were instructed to hit the strings with “The full breadth of the hair” so as to make “the string vibrate strongly”.

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