Vandalism and restoration ethics: The case of the Dutch “Thinker”
Art restoration is increasingly becoming a culture within a culture. After a century of modernism, the possession of personal artistic skills and of technical proficiency are considered disqualifications in much contemporary art teaching and practice. Today, the preference is for “ideas” and “attitudes” and, in this milieu, even a brazen appropriation of the artefacts and ideas of others is taken as proof of creative potency. Restorers, who have long pig-a-backed professionally on the bona fide creations of past artists and are now hailed as technical wizards vis-à-vis today’s artists, claim a “right” to determine personally how the art of the past should be “presented” to modern audiences. With the art world incapable of producing another Michelangelo or Rodin, restorers lay claim to powers of artistic transformation and resurrection. A “New Michelangelo” has been offered, the acceptance of which would require the rewriting of art history itself. Catastrophic art injuries provide restorers with further opportunities to deploy their embalmers’ “black arts” and theoretical premises – and, with a self-regard that verges on narcissism, celebrate/immortalise their own interventions in portentous television documentaries. An instance of such may have arisen in the Netherlands.
Maaike Dirkx writes:
The American industrialists William and Anna Singer (see Fig. 3) used their wealth to collect art. Their collection is located in four museums, two in Norway, one in the United States, and the Singer Museum in The Netherlands. The Singer Museum in Laren was founded in 1956 by Anna as a small private museum and concert hall. Its sculpture garden housed a fine collection of statues, with as its most prized exhibit a bronze cast of Rodin’s “Penseur” or “Thinker” and Anna Singer always considered this statue the crown jewel of her collection.
In January 2007 thieves broke into the museum grounds and stole “The Thinker” and six other bronze statues with the intent to melt them down for their bronze value. The bronze would have yielded 350 euros when the “Thinker” alone was valued at over one million euros. After a few anxious days the “Thinker” was recovered but it had been tragically mutilated (see Figs. 1, 7, 8 & 9). The six other statues had already been melted down. What had saved “The Thinker” was public exposure: its theft had been widely reported in the Dutch media and the thieves, who later stated they had never heard of Rodin, had panicked and had buried what was left of the statue.
POLEMICS AND CHOICES
Although all concerned agreed that the statue had become a wreck and that Rodin’s original intent and artistic achievement could never be recovered, the insurers were not convinced. They claimed that, after restoration, the statue could still fetch a few tons on the art market. Rob Scholten, Head of Sculpture of the Rijksmuseum, resigned from Singer’s management committee because he was opposed to restoration which, he said, could only be cosmetic.
Another option was to exhibit the ruined statue as “a forceful symbol of art vandalism” as was done at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where a cast of “The Thinker” was damaged by a bomb in 1970 (see Fig. 6). But the Singer case bore no relationship to a “tradition of iconoclasm” and the idea was dismissed. For a small museum such as the Singer there were insufficient funds to buy another cast should one appear on the art market and casting another statue from one of the surviving plaster models was a legal impossibility since the French government, owner of Rodin’s estate, had implemented laws specifying that only 12 casts could be made from each surviving plaster model to ensure the quality of the casts and to prevent the appearance of forgeries (in the form of cast copies taken either from present bronze casts or from plaster models) on the art market.
After twenty months of wrangling a decision was reached: the statue was to be restored. An advisory committee of independent experts* concluded that “by restoring the external shape of the statue, its symbolic function for the Singer Museum can be retained”. Invoking “general principles of restoration ethics”, the committee recommended a restoration method that could be largely reversible and which would restrict the number of interventions as much as it was possible.
PATCHING UP A RUIN
A major problem in the restoration was the missing right lower leg (see Fig. 7). Rodin’s bronzes were sand cast, an exacting method whereby a plaster model is pressed into sand which then retains the shape of the model. In complicated designs, a plaster model is cut into different parts that are cast separately and later joined together. The melted bronze is poured into the sand impression and after the bronze has cooled down, the sand casing is removed and the rough bronze figure is then chiseled, polished and treated to produce a specific patina. The plaster models could be re-used but they would deteriorate over time and through sand casting usage, reducing the quality of the casts.
The Musée Rodin possesses four original plasters for the studio-type “Thinker”. A team of Dutch digitalisation experts with their equipment travelled to Paris where the most likely plaster model used (identified by an abnormality on the big toe of the left foot and a “wart” on the back) was scanned in 3D images. The damaged Singer “Thinker” had also been scanned and by superimposing the two images, the details of the damages (such as the displacement of the left arm and skull) could be charted. The Musée Rodin gave permission to construct a plaster model of the Parisian right lower leg based on the scans, which was then cast by a Dutch casting firm and affixed to the statue.
The dislodged upper part of the head and left upper arm were manipulated back into shape at the Rijksmuseum Restoration Studio, a delicate operation (see Fig. 8). To determine how best to fill in the deep gashes made by the grinder, metallurgic analysis was conducted. The proposed epoxy resin saturated with bronze powder was approved by the consulting committee and Musée Rodin, as guardians of Rodin’s legacy.
It proved impossible to determine the exact composition of the patina: years of outdoor exposure meant that the patina on Singer’s “Thinker” had acquired different light and dark green copper sulphates. To retouch the original patina where this had disappeared as a result of aggressive grinding, a removable acrylic paint mixture was applied.
IS SINGER’S THINKER STILL A RODIN?
The question is a tantalizing one. For one thing, the statue was cast posthumously. Some 50 cast bronzes of this studio-size Thinker still exist in the world: are they mere copies or does each contain an intrinsic uniqueness?
Rodin worked with casters whom he trusted implicitly, such as father and son Rudier. It is believed that the latter, who cast at least five Rodin sculptures in the sculptor’s lifetime and was therefore fully aware of the sculptor’s intent and artistic demands, cast Singer’s impression of the “Thinker” around 1930. Anna Singer purchased the statue, with two other Rodin bronzes, possibly in 1937 when she visited the Musée Rodin.
Not only are plaster models different from each other (as we have seen, it was possible to identify with near certainty the plaster model used for Singer’s “Thinker” from the abnormalities in one particular model), but the casting process, too, yields a slightly different result each time and the applied patina will also be different in each case. It can therefore be argued that each of the fifty “Thinker” bronzes is itself unique in certain aspects or details. They are not uniquely original as works of art, but they are distinguishable and not mere identical copies.
Rodin himself modified the design during his lifetime: “The Thinker” in Melbourne, which is considered the first individual cast of the statue made by Rodin for the art collector Ionides in 1884, still wears the cap of the original “Thinker” on the Gates of Hell who represented Dante. Over the years, “The Thinker” became a synthesis of Dante, Victor Hugo and Baudelaire, representing the “artiste-poète” and later a man who, as Rilke writes in his biography of Rodin (1903) “… sits deep in thought, dumb, heavy with images and thoughts, and his entire strength (which is the strength of a man of action) thinks. His entire body has turned into skull and all the blood in his veins to brain.”
The cultural uniqueness of the Singer “Thinker” lies in the fact that it was bought by Anna Singer: that gave it its added emotional value for the museum she founded. Although the statue was severely damaged, it was still recognizable as the historical version that she had acquired. That it could, therefore, be reconstructed seemed obvious. But what are we left with? Is the sculpture, to all intents and purposes, still a Rodin or is it today more a patched up product of a restoration studio? The symbolic value for the museum and the memory of its founder have been retained and honoured, respectively, but the “restoration” itself convinces only on a superficial level.
*The “advisory committee” (Adviescommissie) consisted of: Drs. Annemarie Vels Hein, Chairman (Chairman of the Museum Committee of the Singer Museum in Laren and former director of the Presentation Department of the Rijksmuseum); Drs. Ineke Middag, Secretary (former director of “museum affairs” of the Singer Museum); Ysbrand Hummelen, senior researcher of the ICN (the Institute Collections of the Netherlands); Robert van Langh, Head of Conservation and Restoration of the Rijksmuseum (field of expertise restoration of metals); and, Dr Louk Tilanus, art historian, Art History Department of the University of Leiden (field of expertise Rodin).
When the restoration proper started, the advisory committee made way for an “accompanying committee” in which two of the above (Tilanus and van Langh) also participated.
Maaike Dirkx is a Dutch art historian and researcher.
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Below, Fig. 10: the “Thinker” after its (insurance company prompted) “restoration” with epoxy resins and “re-patination” with acrylic paints. Fearing – for good reasons – that their epoxy resin “in-fills” might well need replacement at some future date, the restorers made casts of them in tin. Those casts and a cd containing all the data, were placed/immortalised, time-capsule fashion…inside the patched-up and painted remains of Rodin’s sculpture.
![](http://lh5.ggpht.com/_C8RKf1feDnY/TRkMb2_I8AI/AAAAAAAAAOY/K-VsX8Z6Jis/s800/hr-line950x1px.png" height="1" width="800"){kind=spacer}
Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic – A suitable Case for Treatment?
A director of the National Gallery, Sir Philip Hendy, once joked that the (helpful) consequence of successive picture restorations was the eventual recovery of a perfectly preserved, pristine white under-painting. After several further generations of modernist stripping and purging, even the restorers have taken fright. Now – and perhaps feeling licensed by the indulgencies and frivolities of post-modernism – they are discovering the delights of “putting back” what their (sometimes very recent) predecessors should never have taken off. After a century of pictorial reductionism, the latest pioneering “recoverist” restoration at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Thomas Eakins’s painting The Gross Clinic, has been heavily trailed in the press. In celebrating their own attempts to reconstitute what had been wrongly discarded, today’s restorers seem little aware that they, too, are entering methodological quick-sands.
James Keul writes:
The Thomas Eakins picture The Gross Clinic is arguably the most important American painting of the 19th Century. In spite of – or perhaps because of – this exalted status it has had a difficult and complicated history. Aside from suffering the “theme park” indignity of being relegated to a mock-medical tent when first exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Expo in Philadelphia, and an initial rejection by contemporary critics, it has been humiliated further through its subjection to no fewer than five major restorations in its relatively short existence of 136 years.
The painting has been relined three times – one of which nearly caused it to tear in half. (Why should a modern canvas require relining even once, let alone three times?) It was dramatically altered in 1925 by the removal of dark glazes that Eakins had applied with the specific artistic intention of toning down areas that were meant to recede. As recently as 1961, an overall varnish was applied that has since darkened enough to be used as one of the justifications for the most recent restoration of the painting last year (- but see photograph and caption comments at top right). The days when museums could credibly refuse to admit that paintings were damaged by past restorations have passed and it has become increasingly common to see labels next to paintings admitting such unfortunate occurrences. At the Metropolitan Museum’s 2008 exhibition “The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art”, for example, numerous paintings were accompanied by specific acknowledgements of past restoration-induced injuries. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s decision to restore the Gross Clinic is another example of this new trend – but one, as will be seen, with a crucial difference.
It is almost inevitable that each new generation of restorers views itself as superior to its predecessors. Perhaps restorers today are more cautious than those of a half-century ago and it is encouraging to see that with the benefit of hindsight many earlier harmful practices have been abandoned. With new developments in x-radiographs, infrared reflectography, chromatography and other specialized equipment, restorers certainly have a lot more technical (if not artistic) information at their disposal, but the question remains: what does this mean for the art itself?
In the case of the 2010 restoration of the Gross Clinic, it meant that Mark Tucker, Senior Conservator of Paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a team of restorers, including a Mellon Fellow in Conservation, felt sufficiently confident in this new technology to undertake the task of repainting large portions of Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece in an attempt to bring it back to the way Eakins had intended it to be seen. At best, however, this could only have been a partially realisable goal. Attempting to return a painting to its original condition is, on its own, an area of great debate. With age, paintings acquire patinas and, as with all objects, time takes its toll. What makes this restoration the more troubling is the fact that the latest restorers in the chain are not trying to bring it back to its (supposed) original condition, but rather to a specific condition that is represented in photographs from a period more than thirty years after the painting was completed and after the painting had already been lined with an ironed-on backing canvas – a procedure now widely acknowledged to risk adversely effecting a painting’s appearance.
Our concerns about the questionable nature of this enterprise have been compounded by the explanations that have been offered to us concerning its execution. Mr. Tucker informs us, for example, that, in order to maximize the accuracy of the placement of his own “in-painting”, tracings were made on clear Mylar film from an enlargement of a photograph of the painting taken in 1917. Some of these tracings were cut out, “producing something that looked like a stencil”, and were used to “place small temporary reference marks that were useful in attaining an appearance in the restored damages that is as faithful as possible to the early images of the painting”. [Emphasis added.] Inferring what an artist wanted his work to look like decades or even centuries after it was made is problematic enough, but attempting to recreate one particular historical state of the painting based on black and white photography is problematic to say the least.
In addition to the inherent problems presented by using photography for this purpose at all, because no colour reproductions of the painting exist prior to the 1925 restoration, determining even the proper colours becomes itself a major issue. When asked how the freshly added colours were determined, Mr. Tucker replied that their colour choices were:
“based on a determination of the pigments present in a preserved area of the original surface, on a direct visual match to the colour of the best preserved areas of the passageway, and on close consideration of the relationship between the colours present on the painting and the tones recorded in the 1917 photograph”.
This attempt itself raises concerns. Because pigments vary greatly depending on their source, how can one be sure that the pigments used by today’s restorers will be the same as those used by Eakins? Any artist who has bought raw umber from different manufacturers will immediately notice differences in colour “temperature” and value from one brand to another. If the latest restorers were to say that it does not matter since the colours used were matched to the adjacent colours that had survived on the painting, the question would arise: what, then, was the point of even “determining” the pigments that the artist had originally used?
There would also be a question concerning the reliability of the tones present in the period photograph that was chosen as a point of reference.The restorers have informed us that they also used a drawing made of the painting by Eakins himself as a source of reference. But, aside from questions concerning the level of its accuracy to the original painting, the fact remains that the drawing is a different work of art from the painting and whatever its accuracy might be (see comments right), it is clear that on close examination it differs greatly from the picture today in terms of pictorial/tonal values. To use some combination of the testimonies of a drawing that does not match the painting and a period (1917) photograph whose reliability cannot be assumed, in order to infer some compromise position on the artist’s original intent as a basis for present “in-painting” (- which is, properly speaking, re-painting) leaves a great deal of room for error and artistic interpretation on the part of the restorer, and possible historical falsifications.
On the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) website, under a heading ‘compensation for loss’, the recommended practice states that “If compensation is so extensive that it forms a substantial portion of the cultural property, then the compensation should be visually apparent to all viewers”. Though only a recommended practice, it is indicative of the importance of authenticity. This recommendation was not followed in the case of the Gross Clinic. The “in-painting” on the occasion of the last restoration was an attempt to recover an original condition that had been lost, and to match it perfectly (- that is to say, deceivingly) to the surviving surrounding passages. If a group of school children were to go to the Philadelphia Museum today and look at the Gross Clinic, they would not be able to tell where Eakins’ work ended and where Mr. Tucker’s began.
The video which accompanied the recent Eakins exhibition and which covers the history of the painting by examining the evidence left by its various restorations, states that this is the third painting by Thomas Eakins from their collection that has been “renewed” with repainting (- the other two being his Between Rounds and Mending the Nets). As a society, we must think about what we want to see when going to museums. Is it the image that is important, or is it the authenticity? For sure, the picture will have changed significantly since it was painted (more by restoration than by time), but attempting to bring back something that has been lost is simply not possible. While Thomas Eakins’ painting might look closer to the original now than it previously had, it is by no means an original picture today. Rather, it is a reconstruction of what today’s restorers take to have been its likely original condition, had so many bad things not been done to it by their predecessors. We trust that future visitors to the museum will be fully informed of the eventful “conservation history” of this painting.
James Keul is a painter and the executive director of ArtWatch International
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Misreading Visual Evidence ~ No 2: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling
No single proof of a restoration-induced injury to a work of art could be clearer than the photograph shown here (Fig. 1) of a section of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes. It was taken after the last restoration and shows in its centre section a repair made in 1566 by the painter Domenico Carnevale when a section of Michelangelo’s fresco fell away during settlement of the building (see Fig. 2 diagram). Carnevale had re-plastered the loss and, while the plaster surface was still wet, faithfully painted it to match Michelangelo’s (then) surrounding colours and tones. The repair was a good one and for centuries it remained almost invisible (see Figs. 4, 5 & 6). Ever since the last restoration it has been glaringly evident that Carnevale’s painted section no longer matches what has survived of Michelangelo’s painting (see Fig. 7). As will be shown, on the evidence of these photographs, fair estimation can be made of the injuries inflicted upon Michelangelo’s frescoes during restoration.
The reason why the photographs testify to restoration injury is simple and elegant. Carnevale’s repair was made a fresco in “good” or buon fresco, which is to say, solely with pigments that were painted onto the still-wet plaster and, crucially, without any later additional painting on the surface of the fresco after it had dried. With this method, Carnevale matched the pictorial values of Michelangelo’s frescoes as they were then found, only half of a century after their completion. However, unlike Carnevale’s painting, where the pigments were locked into the lime plaster when it dried, Michelangelo’s own frescoes were completed a secco – that is to say, with much additional glue or size-based painting applied to the surface of the frescoes after they had dried. Against great evidence (see below), the Vatican’s restorers concluded that Michelangelo had painted entirely in buon fresco without a secco additions and, on that (unsound) decision, they contended that it would be perfectly safe to apply a recently developed oven cleaner-like thixotropic cocktail of cleaning agents (in two applications of three minutes duration each, each being washed off with copious amounts of water) that had been designed to strip polluted encrustations from marble buildings and that would most certainly strip all organic material – which in the event would include Michelangelo’s own glue-based painting – from the ceiling’s plaster surface.
Because Carnevale’s own painted repair was not so vulnerable we now see in the repaired (centre) section a better record of how Michelangelo’s own painting had appeared than exists in the surviving sections of Michelangelo’s painting. By properly reading the testimony of this photographic record, we can calculate the scale of loss that ensued when Michelangelo’s own a secco work on the surface of his frescoes was removed.
By that method, Michelangelo had painted shadows onto his figures after the plaster had dried. After the recent removal of those shadows a figure emerged (as seen right) with arms that were apparently depicted flatly and without tonal modulation in a single local colour/tone by Michelangelo on either side of a section by Carnevale where the forms of the arms were fully modelled by dramatic shading. Could that ever have been the case? Would Carnevale have been allowed to conduct a master-class demonstration to Michelangelo on how to render painted forms sculpturally? Those who still defend this restoration – as some British newspaper art critics do – might attempt to offer some credible explanation for this startling visual and plastic mismatch, which presently stands as the largest elephant in the art restoration room.
The crime against art that this restoration constituted was compounded by art historical apologists who claimed that the Michelangelo everyone for nearly five centuries had thought existed, had never existed, and that a new, true Michelangelo who, far from being “essentially a sculptor” was “one of the great colourists of Western Art”, had been uncovered by courtesy of a single cleaning. To justify this historically revisionist and artistically subverting “outcome”, apologists for the restoration were obliged to offer one of the most cockamamie art historical/technical accounts: namely, that what had “deceived” Michelangelo’s own contemporaries and everyone else for nearly five centuries had been nothing more than the effects of dirt and soot that had slowly and imperceptibly accumulated on the ceiling’s frescoes over the centuries.
This deceiving filthy material had, the artistically credulous are invited to accept, artfully arranged itself around Michelangelo’s flat, bright, “colouristic” designs so as to mimic the effects of the very sculptural preoccupations for which Michelangelo was already famed. In due course, it was further suggested, this artful dirt and soot had been set in glue by successive restorers, who, on one occasion, it is said, did so while standing on the top of thirty feet high step-ladders while brandishing glue-filled sponges tied to the end of thirty feet long poles. When the Vatican authorities were challenged on this account (by us) they had to admit that no proof existed of any glues ever having been applied by any restorers. What the Vatican authorities might also have admitted is that a further indisputable technical proof of Michelangelo’s authorship of the glue-painting on the fresco surface had emerged in the 19th century when the Vatican made its own moveable scaffold available to the British painter Charles Heath Wilson – and that this testimony was known to them. On examining the ceiling, Wilson had found that:
“…the frescoes are extensively retouched with size-colour…evidently by the hand of Michelangelo”.
Wilson could not only see this glue painting on the plaster surface, he could touch it:
“The colour readily melted on being touched with a wet finger and consisted of a finely ground black, mixed with a size…The shadows of the drapery have been boldy and solidly retouched with this size colour, as well as the shadows on the backgrounds. This is the case not only in the groups of the Prophets and the Sybils, but also in those of the Ancestors of Christ in the lunettes and the ornamental portions are retouched in the same way. The hair of the heads and beards of many of the figures are finished in size colour, whilst the shadows are also thus strengthened, other parts are glazed with the same material, and even portions of the fresco are passed over with the size, without any admixture of colour, precisely as the force of water colour drawings is increased with washes of gum…These retouchings, as usual with all the masters of the art at the time, constituted the finishing process or as Condivi expresses it, ‘l’ultima mano’.”
In addition to his expert (i.e. artist’s) testimony, Wilson offered two further material proofs of Michelangelo’s authorship that might otherwise have been expected to be considered clinching by today’s “scientific” restorers:
“They [the retouchings] were evidently done all at the same time and therefore when the [original] scaffold was in its place.”
“There can be no doubt that nearly all of this work is contemporary, and in one part only was there evidence of a later and incapable hand. The size colour has cracked as the plaster has cracked, but apart from this appearance of age, the retouchings have all the characteristics of original work.”
It is a matter of record that the ceiling cracked before any restorers went near it. If the size painting cracked with the plaster, it must have predated the cracking – and, therefore, also that of any restorer’s intervention. Or, to reverse the testimony: if the glue had been applied by restorers long after Michelangelo had painted the ceiling and long after the ceiling had cracked, as has been suggested, it would have run into the already extensive cracks – but it was not and it had not. We can thus be in no doubt that today’s restorers removed the final stages of Michelangelo’s own work; that the “New Michelangelo” they had “discovered” was nothing more than the mutilated remains of his original work that they had left on the ceiling; that no part of the ceiling had escaped the consequences of their labours.
The last restorers of Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoes seem not fully to have heeded the cautionary evidence of their predecessors’ mishaps. The warnings – both pictorial and documentary – were clear enough. We see in the photograph of the left hand of God from Michelangelo’s “The Separation of the Earth from the Waters” (Fig. 10) that there is today a great mismatch between the sleeve and the fragment of cuff that had been repaired by Carnivale. Engraved copies of the 18th and 19th centuries (see Figs. 8 & 9) suggest that losses of shading to God’s left arm preceded the latest restoration. Charles Heath Wilson, who complained of the ceiling’s filthy and neglected condition and believed that it would profit from cleaning, nonetheless warned in terms against any watery interventions. Not only had he found Michelangelo’s size-painting vulnerable to a wetted finger, he complained that parts of the ceiling had already “undoubtedly been injured by rude [restoration] hands, suggesting that glazing has been partially or entirely swept away” and that great restoration injuries had previously occurred when the ceiling had been “washed by labouring men with water in which a caustic has been mixed”. (For details of the recent water-based cleaning methods, see bottom right.) The consequences of water injuries had been set out by Wilson:
“Thus great brushes or sponges have been swept over the skies and backgrounds and have not only removed dirt in a coarse unequal way, but have eaten into the colours and destroyed them in a variety of places. The Face, shoulder and arms of the prophet Daniel, various parts of the bodies and limbs of the young men sitting over the cornice and other portions of the frescoes have been nearly obliterated by this savage proceeding. The Injury done is irremediable, for the surface of Michelangelo’s work has been swept away.”
Michael Daley
For a full account of the ceiling’s injuries, see “Art Restoration ~ The Culture, The Business and The Scandal”, London 1993 and 1996, New York 1994, by James Beck and Michael Daley.
For evidence of injuries to the prophet Daniel, see our post of January 23rd 2011.
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Misreading Visual Evidence ~ No 1: David Hockney, an art historian and an x-ray photograph
It was recently claimed that “fresh insight” gained on Caravaggio’s painting technique supports David Hockney’s theory that the artist used a primitive form of photography to create his paintings (“Exhibition sheds new light on the art of Caravaggio”, Daily Telegraph report, March 11th). Diagrams, mirrors and light boxes displayed in an exhibition at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, were said to “show” that Caravaggio “may indeed have” used a camera obscura to project figures on to a canvas so that they might be painted directly, with “extraordinary realism” and without any need for designs or preliminary studies. Showing that someone may have done something cuts no ice when logic, logistics and the laws of art all combine to testify against the Hockney hypothesis.
“Insight” itself is a weasel term and is not the same thing as evidence. The art historian supporting Hockney’s thesis, Dr John Spike, offered the observation that “Gallileo was developing the telescope and they [artists] were all fascinated by optics” as if by way of some circumstantial corroboration. Whether or not they were so fascinated, we should note the absence of evidence and consider the logistical difficulties that they would have faced if attempting to work on the basis of the Hockney Hypothesis.
Are we really to suppose that all the figures and animals, and babies, and flying angels, writhing serpents, crucified men and beheaded victims depicted in Caravaggio’s paintings in arrested moments of extremis, were actually copied directly, literally, from life? More specifically, are we to suppose that various combinations of human, bestial and divine creatures were first assembled and then simultaneously posed in full costume for as long as it took the artist to convert their projected photographic image into his painted pictures? (See illustrations on the right.)
Or should we believe that each figure was individually copied down, in full costume, exactly as seen when projected through a pinhole onto a wall in a darkened room? If so, was each painted figure subsequently “overlapped” and partly obliterated by the next in the sequence? Is there any material evidence of such overlaps? If not, we would have to assume that Caravaggio painted directly onto only that part of the projected image that would remain visible when the next figure was copied in. Timing is an important separate consideration: whether the models were depicted in entire groups or individually, how long would they have been expected to hold their usually animated and dramatically expressive poses (see right) in a compositionally perfect position in relation to other figures not yet posed or painted?
There is another crucial consideration: were Caravaggio’s famously dramatic and theatrical lighting effects copied directly from nature onto the canvas via an image of a multi-figure tableau projected through a pinhole? Consider the exponentially increasing practical difficulties an artist would have to overcome when attempting to work in such fashion. Caravaggio would not only have had to paint at speed to avoid his models wearying and slipping out of pose, he would have had to have done so at a speed that would not allow the brilliant light source illuminating his figures to move – and to have done so when working not in front of his painting but to the side of the image projected upon it so as not to block it with his own shadow. Has any artist in history so handicapped his own labours?
Would the light source deployed on Caravaggio’s frozen models have been the sun? If so, at what time of the day did he work? At noon, with the sun’s all-bleaching brilliant light at its zenith, producing unhelpfully top-lit figures? Or in the mornings and evenings when low, acutely angled, less bright but faster moving and changing? Did Caravaggio not only anticipate photography, but Impressionism too? Or, would his groups have been lit for long periods by a fixed battery of brilliant theatrical lamps?
When it is claimed that Caravaggio had achieved the extraordinary realism of his paintings 200 years in advance of the invention of the camera, on the same logic it should further be claimed that he anticipated and emulated the achievements of the cinema. It took the full resources of modern cinema and means of lighting for Luis Bunuel to be able to compose and momentarily arrest a multi-figured tableau in mimicry of Leonardo’s The Last Supper in his film Viridiana. Is there any evidence that such human and technical resources were available to Caravaggio? Is it believed that Caravaggio had invariably worked in this manner? Or that he did so on some occasions but not others? Has any material evidence been found in Caravaggio’s paintings that reflects such radically different patterns of working methods?
The real problem with the Hockney thesis, however, is not the absence of supporting evidence but the existence of contra-evidence. The Telegraph report is illustrated by a photograph of Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew, and by an x-ray photograph of the two figures at the picture’s right-hand side. Those photographs (see above right) constitute a material record of both the paint that is visible to the human eye and the hidden earlier underlying painting. The caption claims that “x-ray analysis shows the style of the artist and supports the idea that he used a primitive form of photography in his work”. It is hard to see how this might be so. X-rays are notoriously difficult images to read with confidence because while they show all the successive states of a painting simultaneously they do not pick up all pigments and materials equally.
Nonetheless, the x-ray photograph that is shown adjacent to the two figures helpfully permits direct visual comparisons. The most striking feature is that the underlying paintwork exposed in the x-ray is not identical with the paintwork that is visible to the human eye. Had Caravaggio worked in the manner being claimed, an x-ray would reveal no differences – no revisions, no “pentimenti”, nothing other than what was already visible on the picture’s surface. But the x-ray evidence here is doubly injurious. Firstly, it shows major changes to the pose of the figures – Christ’s raised arm is higher in the x-ray than in the painting while, conversely, his hand droops dramatically. Secondly, the image is sufficiently intelligible to establish major discrepancies of artistic style.
In the space of the figure (St Peter) standing in front of Christ, the type of drapery seen in the x-ray photograph is manifestly different from that now seen in the visible paint above it. One observer (Giorgio Bonsanti) attributed the underlying drapery, on the basis of an earlier x-ray, to the figure of Christ – see right. Certainly as drapery it is greatly more accomplished artistically – more “Raphael-esque” – than the comparatively stiff, angular, “bent-tin” draped material seen on the St Peter. Most damagingly of all, this underlying painted drapery is not just finer it is of a type found only in art and never in nature. It is not some literal mechanical transcription of an actual draped garment, but a conjuring of spirited flowing, wind-filled forms that arc around the body and derive from the laws of drapery that were first understood and devised by the God-like artists of antiquity and then later rediscovered and emulated by the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance. The living sculpture drapery revealed by the x-ray could not have been taken down from a static figure because it was an invention, a product of art and imagination that served the great powers of composition, design and expression – it conferred grandeur, grace and dynamism to the theatrical stage-right entrance of Christ. We might reasonably agree with Giorgio Bonsanti (see right) that Caravaggio, having first created this great glory, then opted to suppress his own magnificence of drapery so as to have the secondary, Christ-obscuring figure of St Peter serve as a dull mundanely reproachful foil to the wealthily and vibrantly attired group of figures to his left. On the basis of this clear hard embodiment of artistically purposive thought and revision – to the point of artistic sacrifice – it can hardly be concluded other than that Caravaggio was a great inventive, self-critical self-revising showman of an artist and not some secretive shortcut-taking literalist.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
“Caravaggio did not arrive at the final version right away, and it is important to remember that even compositions that appear to have been born in an instant are the fruit of a long preparatory study. X-ray analysis has proven absolutely indispensable in revealing to our later vision forms and figures that the artist, after sketching them on the canvas, believed would remain concealed from all eyes, including his own, beneath the final version. Thus, in an early version of the Calling of St Matthew, the figure of Christ stood alone and was not covered, as in the final version, by that of St Peter. The latter’s presence involved the accentuation, in the final version, of his role as mediator (he would be the first pope) between man and God. Indeed, we see a sort of division of Christ into two parts, as though two persons have germinated and branched off from the same trunk. This already emphasized Christ’s human and divine nature. Peter laboriously and almost stiffly repeats the gesture of Christ, which in comparison is handled with the greatest eloquence. In addition, we immediately notice the painting’s total independence from the designs of earlier religious painting. From this we may conclude that the artist is not interested in instructing, admonishing or stirring his audience to religious feeling, as the Counter reformation expected art to do. He felt it was not his task. He seems to say, this is what happened. Christ and Peter suddenly came in and made it clear that they wanted to talk to Matthew, while the two youths, taken by surprise, prepared to face an intrusion whose nature they were unaware of; and indeed two other figures, unaware of what was going on, continued counting the money. Matthew brought his hand to his chest, as though to ask if it were he that they wanted. An instant before, the scene had been different; an instant later, it would no longer be the same. If a scene is to be instructive, it must be prepared, planned, and arranged. If it is devoid of this kind of orientation towards a specific end, then the artist is virtually free to shape it as he likes and to change it from one moment to the next, not preparing it, but taking note of it.“
“Caravaggio, who broke with tradition in his representation of this theme, was an unusual exegetist and his imagination produced revolutionary iconographic results. As protagonist of the scene, the painter inserts an angel seen from behind, placing the figure in a prominent position, in the golden section that splits the composition into two parts: the left-hand one, with St Joseph, the donkey, and stones, is dedicated to earthly life, while the right-hand area, which includes the Madonna and Child among living plants, is devoted to the divine world. Even the half-clad angel, for which ambiguous interpretations have forcedly been proposed, corresponds very precisely to the contemporary views put forward by Constantino Ghini in 1595 (the picture, painted at the same time as as the Mary Magdalen, dates from somewhere between 1595 and 1597) and Federico Borromeo, who held that the nudity of angels is a sign of their immunity from any contamination by human misery, just as the bare feet indicate that they are untouched by earthly things…The principal motif of Caravaggio’s Flight into Egypt is that of the music that can be heard on earth, considered by the Fathers of the church to be a copy of music in heaven. The intermediary between these two worlds is the invisible sound, which in art takes the form of an Angel playing music, a divine messenger that stands at the border between material and spirirtual reality. God communicates with men through Angels, who are his go-betweens:'[it is the] Angel who spoke to me,’ says Zachariah and for Ezekiel, the Angel is ‘man dressed in linen,’ just as Caravaggio depicts him.“
“With our Art Laser you can clean any work of art without damaging it” ~ Why professional art conservation is not always a good thing for works of art
Art conservation is not at all like conservation in the real world. If you want to conserve marshland, you don’t drain it. If you want to conserve rich ancient meadows, you don’t plough them or spray them with chemicals. If you want to save rare species you protect their habitats. The essence of conservation in nature is leaving alone and not doing. Art conservation is a different beast: a systematised doing of things to art objects, in exchange for fees or salaries.
Art conservation is now a substantial vested interest, a business with a shifting ideology that serves as self-promotion. Chemical and other manufacturers promote their wares through trade advertisements and fairs ( for examples, see right). There are also substantial educational interests. Conservation training – degrees and doctorates are now given – converts otherwise superfluous arts or science degrees into hard job opportunities. Every last little museum (of which there are thousands) now boasts or craves an in-house conservation department. Sponsorship is easily attained – who would not want to be associated with saving art? For a petro-chemical giant to sponsor prestigious museum art conservation programmes makes particular image-improving sense. Development plans for museums (of which there are many) are virtually guaranteed success if they include a proposed expansion of conservation facilities.
Regardless of conservators’ good intentions, the fact remains that their treatments alter the material fabric and aesthetic appearance of works of art. Alterations are made on promises to prolong life, prevent deteriorations and recover original conditions, when history repeatedly shows contrary outcomes. History also reminds us that much art conservation was formerly called art restoration. Art restoration got a very bad reputation in the nineteenth century when picture restorers were dubbed “picture rats”. Throughout the twentieth century restorers sought to convert public opprobrium into approbation. The International Institute for Conservation (IIC) gives a biennial prize (The Keck Award – see our post of January 8th) specifically for those considered to have best increased public appreciation of “the accomplishments of the conservation profession”.
Even before conservation provided a fashionable gloss, restorers appropriated medical jargon and practices and presented themselves as “picture surgeons”. They dropped artists’ smocks for white coats and they began calling their apprentices “interns”. They x-rayed paintings for “diagnostic” purposes. Such medical airs proved spurious and deceiving. In art restoration there is constant methodological mayhem. There are no agreed methods of cleaning – some favour solvents; some, soaps; some, abrasives; others, lasers. Some advocate total and swift cleanings; some, slow and partial ones. Some favour selective cleanings. There are no universally accepted codes of ethics, no strict rules of professional behaviour, no striking off from registers. There is, as the painter Thomas Torak has regretted, no Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm”.
While there is perpetual talk of conservation ethics, in practical terms this amounts to little more than a hope that one restorer/conservator’s interventions might easily be reversed by the next. If the next restorer can (sometimes) take off what the last left, he can never put back what the last removed or destroyed. Art conservation treatments are cumulatively destructive – which is why the art market places a premium on little restored works and not vice versa – and arbitrary.
In the privacy of trade journals, professors of conservation will admit that if four restorers could restore a painting at the same time, four different paintings would emerge. Some conservators insist that such different outcomes are acceptable as long as they are “safely” executed. The deployment of this non sequitur is a rash – or defiant – move in a profession where untested, supposedly “reversible”, manufactured synthetic materials that were sold as being superior to traditional natural materials, have so frequently proved irreversible and deleterious. Such bad experiences have failed to slow the conservation juggernaut for the simple reason that treatments are not means to agreed ends, but themselves constitute the profession’s raison d’être. When one treatment fails another must replace it, leaving alone, not doing, is not an option.
Criteria of appraisal are moveable feasts. The most egregious unintended outcomes of “treatment” are presented as “discoveries”. To lend credibility to such re-writing of history, picture restorers sport scientific airs. They produce peer-reviewed publications and organise quasi-academic conferences. To bolster this stance, real scientists are employed in conservation departments. Armed with academic respectability museum picture restorers demanded and obtained professional parity with curators. A new discipline, “Technical Art History”, was formed, a mongrel collective of art historians, picture restorers and conservation scientists. Controversial decisions (on restorations or attributions) are now defended/promoted by conservation scientists. This brings immense political advantage to museums because the public is more trusting of “scientific evidence” than of art experts’ aesthetic arguments. Appeals – sometimes cynically made – to the authority of science have trumped criticism and neutralised debate, which practices, in art’s case, should always and properly be considered as being of the essence.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Why is the Metropolitan Museum of Art afraid of public disclosures on its picture restorers’ cleaning materials?
Many museums have mastered the art of presenting their picture restorations as miraculous recoveries that preclude any need for examination or criticism. A few days after our post on secrecy and unaccountability at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Public Relations officer at the museum, in the presence of Artwatch International’s executive director, James Keul, asked television crew members who had just interviewed Michael Gallagher, the Met’s head of picture conservation, not to broadcast his comments on cleaning solvents, any mention of which would “open the doors for critics”.
There are strong – but not good – reasons why a museum might wish to avoid discussions on the materials that restorers use. In hope of prising the Met’s doors, we re-visit the museum’s secret 1971 cleaning of Velazquez’s great portrait Juan de Pareja at Wildenstein and Company. We do so in the light of four documents: an untitled, undated Met booklet; a special conservation issue of the Met’s Bulletin (winter 1993/94); and two accounts given by the Met’s then director, Thomas Hoving, in his books of 1993 (Making the Mummies Dance) and 1996 (False Impressions). None of these identifies the solvents and varnishes used on what had been one of the world’s best preserved Velazquezes.
Restorations take place within general cultures and within local/institutional cultures. Healthy cultures require debate and transparency. Unfortunately the richly-funded, impregnably protected Met sometimes seems to take itself as the summation of Culture. When, in 1971, the museum snatched Juan de Pareja from the impoverished and enfeebled British (who had owned it for centuries), institutional pride was fit to burst. The Met booklet carried entries from the President of the Board, Douglas Dillon; the Director, Thomas Hoving; the Vice-Director and Curator in Chief, Theodore Rousseau; the Curator in Charge, European Paintings, Everett Fahy; and the “Conservator”, Hubert von Sonnenburg. Before the sale, Hoving, Rousseau, Sonnenburg and Fahy had flown to London, Madrid, and Rome – a sort of “boy-gang” playing at spreading rumours like “the disinformation section of the KGB”, as Hoving, (who later claimed to have discussed with Wildenstein’s how to “manipulate the art press and crank up the rumor mill” in a general strategy of “dissimulation and misleading rumors”), put it.
When bought, the picture was not paraded to the Met but “sneaked” into Wildenstein and Company “for secrecy”, partly because funds had been committed without the Board’s knowledge but also because, as Hoving put it, the Board had to remain longer in the dark as “total secrecy” would still be needed to “prepare our public relations stance” and “have the time to clean it.” The deceiving of the public was absolute: for a short period before the restoration, the picture was exhibited to New Yorkers as Wildenstein’s own property. Ignoring back-room machinations, the crucial question is: Why should a miraculously well-preserved, three and a quarter century old unlined canvas, have immediately been subjected to the traumas of a rushed restoration before the Board and the city might learn of the acquisition?
Hoving deferred to Sonnenburg on matters of connoisseurship and artistic technique, and had abnegated all responsibility for deciding whether or not to buy the picture: “back in New York with Chairman Dillon, Rousseau and I were on pins and needles awaiting Sonnenburg’s word. Would it be yes, or forget it? ” When Hoving, Sonnenburg, Rousseau and Fahy assembled before the painting in London, the Met’s conservation oracle suavely predicted a new and different picture that would be liberated dramatically from within a yellowed varnish tomb. Hoving sold those predictions of an even greater artistic glory to the Met’s big-wigs, some of whom had personally pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars. Velazquez’s mixed-race assistant with “dark-brown flesh” would emerge with “rosy” flesh tones and a nice clean “grey” doublet. Thus were the museum’s key players guaranteed a dramatic restoration result that would “present” as a further triumph of their collective perspicacity – and also, by eliminating any trace of Radnor family restorations (restorations that had been posited but nowhere established by Sonnenburg), expunge all historical and aesthetic continuities and make the picture entirely their own.
In such possessive and chauvinistic contexts, admitting the possibility of errors, aesthetic losses, or regrets, becomes unthinkable. This restoration would be – must be – beyond appraisal, reflection, debate or criticism. But given that no artist, writer or musician is above evaluation and criticism, why should a technician, acting on what was by common agreement the finest creative work of one of the world’s greatest artists, have been so indulged? And for that matter, why should every Met restorer be allowed to “touch base” on whatever he takes to be a picture’s bedrock “original” surface? How original can a repeatedly solvent-invaded, swab-abraded surface be?
Sonnenburg, working under intense pressure to complete before any political or journalistic exposure of the secrecy, on a script of his own writing, proved himself right to Hoving’s satisfaction: “the most astounding feature of the work was that there was hardly any color in the picture.” Purging the picture of extraneous “varnishes,” or what Hoving called “gunk” transformed the picture, but at what cost? Looking at the booklet’s now historically precious fold-out spread of three identically sized and printed full colour plates that recorded the restoration in progress (see previous post), it would seem that the original “varnished” state was indeed more, and more variously, colourful.
Sonnenburg’s high reputation as a moderate, risk-avoiding restorer stood on his having spent several years as an apprentice to the most famously cautious, slow-working and aesthetically alert restorer, Johan Hell. In Britain, Hell’s restorations were greatly preferred by artists to those of his fellow German émigré Helmut Ruhemann, who established the National Gallery’s highly controversial in-house restoration department after the Second World War. The President of the Royal Academy, Sir Gerald Kelly, entrusted his own grandest works to Hell’s varnishing technique.
By hiring Sonnenburg in the 1960s, the Met put cultural distance between its earlier troubled restorations and those then raging at the National Gallery, but it did so without anyone fully comprehending Hell’s philosophy or method. For a time, Sonneburg was succeeded at the Met by the British restorer John Brealey who had also studied with Hell. Brealey’s disastrous restoration of Velazquez’s Las Meninas at the Prado (see right) shows him to have been no proper student of Hell’s (– a judgement endorsed to us by Dr Hell’s late widow, Kate). The Met booklet sequence makes clear that, on the great Juan de Pareja, Sonneburg proceeded in outright violation of his declared master’s precepts and practices. By swiftly stripping the picture from one side to the other, instead of first establishing the antiquity of the “varnish” and only then, perhaps, proceeding to clean gradually and equally overall, Sonneburg embraced the practices of Ruhemann and repudiated those of his master (- to whose work we shall return in future posts).
The cover photograph of the Met booklet shows the face in detail. A close-up reveals a system of open and exposed cracking that is more visually disruptive than was ever recorded before or after the restoration (see above right). We do not know how – or with what solvents – the painting had been cleaned before that point. There is no indication of when the photograph was taken. We do not know what steps were taken to minimise the visual disruption of those cracks afterwards. We do know – as Sonnenburg must have – that Hell would never have arrived at that point in a restoration; would never have stripped a picture of all varnish, even into its cracks, for fear of letting his solvents invade the paintwork and attack the exposed paint/ground interface.
There may be irony in the fact that the heavy restoration doors now being slammed at the Met have, for five years past, been generously and most helpfully opened to us at the National Gallery in London.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Discovered Predictions: Secrecy and Unaccountability at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Impeccable condition in a painting is more of a goad than a deterrent to restorers. When the youthful Thomas Hoving was appointed director of the Metropolitan Museum in 1967, he formed a respectful – even deferential – alliance with the (then) head of picture conservation, Hubert von Sonnenburg. Two decades earlier in London, the National Gallery’s director, Philip Hendy, forged a similarly dependent relationship with the German émigré restorer Helmut Ruhemann. Ironically, von Sonnenburg had presented as the heir-apparent to Johannes Hell, another German émigré to Britain who’s mild and gradual cleanings were widely preferred to Ruhemann’s controversially swift “total cleanings”.
Hoving and von Sonnenburg together stalked one of Velazquez’s finest portraits, his Juan de Pareja, which the Met acquired in 1970 for a world record $4.5m. Although, on their own testimony, that picture was in superb condition and had never even been lined, on acquisition it was whisked to Wildenstein and Company, “for secrecy”, as Hoving later admitted. There, Von Sonnenburg secretly “proceeded to discover”, as Hoving put it, “everything he had predicted he’d find”.
It was not unprecedented for a museum director to have a major acquisition secretly restored. Sir Charles Eastlake, scorched by National Gallery cleaning controversies in 19th century Britain, had his acquisitions cleaned in Italy before bringing them to the gallery. Secrecy in conservation can seem systemic: in 1960, when the National Gallery constructed “modern” purpose-built conservation studios, part of one was partitioned by a wall, behind which the chief restorer could work on projects of “particular difficulty or confidentiality”, as a then National Gallery restorer, David Bomford, put it in 1978.
Eastlake made no photographic record of the pre-restoration condition of his acquisitions – even though he happily used photographs for attributing paintings, and must, as president of the Royal Photographic Society, have appreciated photography’s unprecedented testimonial capacities. Fortunately, photographic records of the Sonnenburg/Hoving Velazquez restoration were kept and published by the Metropolitan Museum (in an undated booklet – see right). While these photographs may not be of the highest, digital age, standards, they are nevertheless “of a piece” and permit comparisons between recorded states to be drawn.
Much as von Sonnenburg thrilled over an impeccably preserved, never-lined canvas, he could not resist tampering with it. Two of its edges had been folded over on the stretcher. This fact was presented to Hoving as a “discovery”, even though it had been reported by the Velazquez specialist José Lopez-Rey seven years earlier. The folded canvas strips were opened, flattened and reinforced with new canvas to extend the picture’s format and diminish its subject, shifting him leftwards and downwards (see right). The justification for this compositional “recovery” was that original paint had been applied to the folded strips, but the pictorial testimony of that paint, when first revealed, was not photographically disclosed – see account on the right.
Von Sonnenburg, it seemed, could not resist the urge to “liberate” the painting’s supposed “pure flesh tones” and thereby leave the dark-skinned servant’s face lighter and pinker. By stripping off “varnish” von Sonnenburg also caused previously unified components to detach themselves from each other:
“the rounded shape of Pareja’s forehead, for example, is defined only by a large spot of impasto-crisp in the center, bordered by dragged spurs – applied directly on the thin underpainting. When seen close up, the highlight seems to be floating over the paint in an almost measurable distance…”
This was a classic restoration apologia. Even the emergence of a formerly hidden streak of flesh-coloured paint on the background was presented as an act of liberation and recovery:
“Attention should be drawn to the single dragged brushstroke of light skin colour in the center of the background at the right…Unquestionably, this randomly applied paint is original, and shows how Velazquez chose to try out his loaded brush on the background…Such spontaneity, combined with the greatest subtlety of color and technique make the Juan de Pareja one of Velazquez’s most painterly works.”
Convinced that Velazquez had happily left his own brush-wipings visible on one of his two finest portraits (the second being his Pope Innocent X), and that he had used glazes less than Titian, von Sonnenburg was not dismayed when his cleaned painting betrayed markedly less colouring and reduced to a “predominantly gray color scheme”. His rationale for losses of colour and of spatial and plastic coherence; for the flattening of a formerly prodigiously well-modelled and sympathetically lit head; and for the spatial inverting of a background that formerly receded, was audaciously lame: in 1938 an English restorer, Horace Buttery, had described the doublet as “dark gray”. Despite recognising that the painting had – miraculously – shown “no signs of ever having been abused by solvent action during the past”, von Sonnenburg nonetheless contended that it must have been cleaned and varnished “at times”. On that basis, he speculated that it could therefore safely be assumed to have been so restored by Buttery, and, therefore, to have enabled him, on that occasion, correctly to have read the doublet’s true colour. This hypothetical daisy-chain was presented as a proof, despite the fact that before and after Mr Buttery, the garment had always been described as a “green doublet” – not least by Velazquez’s biographer, Antonio Palomino who in 1724 precisely reported “a muted green for Juan’s doublet”.
After their stripping and repainting of pictures, restorers invariably apply fresh varnishes… which in turn discolour and thereby serve as a pretext for another “restoration”. With successive varnish removals, solvents deplete, embrittle and optically alter paint films. When penetrated by solvents, paint films heat, swell and soften so that even the friction of cotton wool abrades them – as the restorer Caroline Keck admitted. Soluble plastic components of the paint itself are carried off by evaporating solvents. Restorers sometimes claim that because old paintings have so frequently been abused in the past, there is nothing left to extract today – but with the Juan de Pareja, no such claim could be made. At the same time, they sometimes admit that cleaning pictures with thick paint is easier than cleaning ones with thin paint. (If cleaning methods really were as safe as is claimed, it would not matter whether the paint being treated was thick or thin.) When stripped to a restorer’s conception of “clean”, the remaining paint is left parched, absorbent, matt and in need of “nourishment” by varnishes.
When new varnishes (i.e. resins dissolved in solvents) are applied, they penetrate and amalgamate with the parched paint thereby making the next cleaning the more hazardous, and so on ad infinitum. If we are lucky, von Sonnenburg will have used a natural resin varnish. If not, if he subscribed to the Met’s then hi-tech enthusiasms, he will have used a synthetic resin in the confident but erroneous expectation that it would not discolour and that it would remain easily soluble.
In 1966 a restorer at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts deplored the use of untested synthetic materials, judging them “all right for space ships” but not for old master paintings. By 1995 a conservation scientist, Tom Learner, reported that synthetic resins which had “appeared to offer” advantages over natural ones “are now known to be inherently unstable”. In 1998 the Met’s (present) Chairman of European Painting, Keith Christiansen, admitted that synthetic varnishes used at the Metropolitan Museum had turned not yellow but grey and had “cross-linked with the pigments below, meaning that removal is, if not impossible, extremely difficult”.
Dr Christiansen has yet to reply to the question ArtWatch and ARIPA put to him on February 6th, concerning the Met’s intentions towards its new, miraculously well-preserved Perino del Vaga painting.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
An ominous silence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
On February 6th, ArtWatch and our French colleagues in ARIPA sought an assurance from Keith Christiansen, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Chairman of European Paintings, that the museum will resist any temptation to clean its newly acquired and miraculously well-preserved early mannerist painting by Perino del Vaga. Dr Christiansen has yet to reply.
The Met had made a wonderful double acquisition at Sotheby’s, New York annual Old Masters Sale. On January 26th it bought (for $782,500) Perino del Vaga’s stunning drawing The Marriage Bed of Jupiter and Juno, a design for one of a series of tapestries commissioned by Andrea Doria for his palace at Genoa (see right). On January 27th it also bought Perino del Vaga’s very fine The Holy Family with the Infant St John the Baptist for $2.098m – a sum that greatly exceeded auction estimates; that was a record price for the artist; and that surely testified to the painting’s superb, restoration-free condition (see right).
This rare and precious condition was celebrated by Christopher Apostle, Sotheby’s senior vice president and head of the firm’s Old Master Painting Department in a video promotion:
“This Holy Family with Madonna and Child is by Perino del Vaga, one of the most important and elegant painters of the late Italian Renaissance. Despite the way it looks now, it is actually in extremely beautiful condition. It’s under a varnish, which is aged and discoloured over many, many centuries. “It probably has not been restored in the last two or three hundred years, if ever. “Underneath you see wonderful details, wonderful retention of paint and even small flakes of gold. Here, in the hair of the Madonna, in the hair of the Infant Christ, as well as along her collar and along the border of her cloak. It’s an exceptionally elegant picture and one has not seen one like it on the market for many, many years.”
Sotheby’s respect for the condition – and forgoing of any temptation to spruce it up for the market – had paid off handsomely. Not only was the price a record, at $2m it had reached something like five or six times its estimate of $300,000–400,000. By contrast when, in the same sale, Sotheby’s put up Titian’s A Sacra Conversazione: The Madonna and Child with Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria – another painting said to be in fine, rarely touched condition, but which had been restored for the occasion (see right) – it failed to reach its upper estimate ($20m) selling for only $16.9m (or £10.6m). Although even this low price broke a 20 years old auction house record for the artist, it did so when the going “museum rate” for privately sold large multi-figure Titians is about £50m (as with the Diana and Actaeon when recently bought jointly by the National Gallery, London, and the National Galleries of Scotland).
It is possible that certain non-condition factors adversely affected the Titian’s price. A number of newspaper writers noted the distinctly downbeat and opaque circumstances of the sale. The Daily Telegraph’s art sales correspondent, Colin Gleadell observed that:
“Although unquestionably by Titian, some felt there was evidence of the hands of his assistants at work, and there was only one bidder, an anonymous European collector, for it.”
In the New York Times, Carol Vogel also flagged up the curious solitary and anonymous bidder who had got himself up to the new record price by bidding to the bottom estimate:
“The painting, which dates from around 1560, sold to a lone telephone bidder for its low estimate, $15 million, or $16.8 million, including Sotheby’s fees. The auction house would identify the buyer only as ‘a European collector.’ The price was a record for the artist at auction, surpassing the $13.5 million paid at Christie’s in London in 1991.”
The high premium that auctioneers now place on little or un-restored works is, to critics of restoration practices, one of the most heartening developments of our times. Another is the fact that some restorers, even, acknowledge that less has proved more in the preservation of old masters. The New York dealer/restorer, Marco Grassi, has disclosed that of the paintings coming into his hands, the ones enjoying the best condition are those of relatively minor and unfashionable artists. As he concludes, because such lesser works are so often “impeccably preserved, so we have to think something terrible started in the nineteenth century when the painter/restorer trade began.”
We in ArtWatch and ARIPA were hoping that in this new climate and with the widespread delight of art lovers over a particular miraculous survival, the Metropolitan Museum, despite recent signs of hyperactivity in its own picture restoration and up-grades department, might now allow its exciting newly acquired benchmark painting to be enjoyed for what it is by the public and to be properly studied as such by experts. Our hopes are dashed: we see in Carol Vogel’s report of January 27 that she had already ascertained Dr Christiansen’s pro-active intent:
“Though the work sold for more than its estimate, Mr. Christiansen said the museum actually benefited from what he called ‘negative chatter’ about it from dealers. Although the painting is in good condition, he said, it is filthy and will go on view only after it is cleaned. Paintings by this Renaissance master are rare.”
His “reading” of the sale seems eccentric: negative chatter about filth drives prices down, to the benefit of the Met, while driving them up to record highs in the wider world? Does Dr Christiansen not know that “filthy” is the traditional hungry restorer’s term of denigration for any work with an old varnish the removal of which might earn a shilling? Does Dr Christiansen not appreciate that any replacement varnish will also discolour in short order and need also, on his logic, to be removed? Will he not concede that every removal of a varnish layer that is inevitably amalgamated with the underlying paint carries inherent risks?
Of course, if a painting really were “filthy”, then any dirt should be removed from its varnished surface, with mild and safe means. At which point, in this particular painting, the optimal moment would occur for studying what may well be a rare and original final coating that speaks of either the artist’s own finishing procedures or of those that were general to his times. If when so cleaned, an old varnish is found to be an impossibly obscuring accumulation of varnished layers, then, certainly, it might gently, gradually be thinned until a non-injurious transparency is attained. But we can, pace Dr Christiansen, be confident that this particular painting cannot have been in such a dire or filthy condition – for how else might so many people have marvelled at its beautifully nuanced, gradated and harmonised chromatic and plastic relationships, along with its wonderful and clear details?
So far as we know, there has been no public indication or discussion of what Dr Christiansen and the Met’s restorers might or might not be intending to study and report – or intending to remove or suppress – during their cleaning of the picture. While we would have hoped that it is now a universally recognised duty of museums to cherish and study disinterestedly any historically-preserved and artistically intact work without haste or the imposition of personal tastes, we are in this respect disquieted to recall Dr Christiansen’s own somewhat hubristic declaration that “Restoration is interpretation”, and, “in the end, it’s a matter of taste. And I guess I have confidence in my taste.”
Given Dr Christiansen’s continuing silence and declared intention, we can only fear that despite all recent confessions of past errors – Rembrandts wrecked at the Metropolitan Museum; Picassos likewise at MOMA – once again, as an exceptionally fine and intact painting has entered the Met’s Restoration Maw, it will already, just as did Velazquez’s great Juan de Pareja before it, have disappeared into the cleaning tank before the public might have stolen the briefest glance; before artists (see right) and other experts might have examined, reflected, reported and discussed; before any profitable illuminating non-invasive, long-term explorations might have got under way; and before any of the Met’s too-bright, too-flat, too-modernist, overly “conserved” pictures might have been put to shame by the aged but intact condition of the new arrival.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
The European Commission’s way of moving works of art around
In our February 2nd account of the European Commission’s desire to speed the “trafficking” (as it were) of art objects between European museums, through its project “Collections Mobility 2.0”, we addressed the current forms of this politically orchestrated campaign but neglected a rationale for it that had recently been offered by Androulla Vassiliou, the European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, in her introduction to Culture in Motion’s brochure The Culture Programme – 2007-2013:
“I am especially happy to highlight the importance of culture to the European Union’s objective of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. At a time when many of our industries are facing difficulties, the cultural and creative industries have experienced unprecedented growth and offer the prospect of sustainable, future-oriented and fulfilling jobs.”
Michel Favre-Felix, President of ARIPA (Association Internationale pour le Respect de l’Intégrité du Patrimoine Artistique), has drawn our attention to his own study of the earlier and underlying stages of this policy. An account of those researches was published in his article of Nuances 40-41 (2009). We are deeply indebted to Mr Favre-Felix not only for conducting those initial studies so thoroughly and for demonstrating their unsatisfactory – if not sinister – character, but also for presenting them here in summary form.
Michel Favre-Felix writes:
Since 2003, the declared ambition of the European Commission has been to “facilitate”, “encourage”, “promote” and make “easy” the “mobility of art collections” within Europe. To this end, five conferences were held in Naples (2003), The Hague (2004), Manchester (2005), Helsinki (2006) and, Bremen (2007).
The initial premise rested on an arithmetical calculation: exhibitions of international character are presented by only 300 institutions out of 30,000 European museums. Recommendations were issued to stimulate exchanges and loans of works of art within Europe, in addition to existing international travelling exhibitions.
Apart from administrative simplifications, it was seen that the best means of encouraging loans lay in a reduction of costs. With insurance charges comprising on average 15% -20% of travelling exhibition budgets, savings in this area could be achieved by four means: by museums’ extended use of the non-insurance of cultural objects; by waiving certain risks; by waiving costs of depreciation; and by expanding the use of State guarantees.
In the latter, a State takes the responsibility of an insurer, at almost no cost to museums, for the largest part of the values engaged in the exhibition, loan, etc. The minimal part not guaranteed by states, or the “excess” part, is insured by private companies that remain responsible for covering “the first losses”. These are the more frequent and the most tangible (and not having covered these liabilities is the reason why States have had little to pay for damages up to now – which does not mean that accidents had not happened).
It should, however, be recognised that even commercial insurance does not cover all injuries: damages that are not discovered and declared within 48 hours are excluded: the universal rule of “nail to nail” further excludes any deteriorations that manifest themselves sometime after the return of a work. Nor does insurance always cover damages linked to the fragility of an art work in the environment of travel and exhibition as with regard to humidity, temperature, etc. The reasoning is that so-vulnerable art should not have been given permission to travel in the first place, and that the lender erred in permitting it. “Pre-existing fragilities” are specifically a possible exclusion argument. However, these companies do maintain in the process their strong concern with security risks.
A first-step European study, in 2004 specifically acknowledged that:
“Insurance costs serve as obstacles for projects that are doubtful in terms of conservation, for the reason that insurers are not willing to cover particularly high risks. From this point of view, insurance costs are a guarantee against ill-considered exhibition projects. […] Insurance companies have an influence on security measures taken in museums, thus helping prevent damage” [See endnote1].
Nevertheless, the same study and the later EU reports advocate the reduction of insurance and recommend that:
“Museum professionals agree to: -waive certain risks. -consider lending on a non-insurance basis, -cover only restoration of material damage and waive depreciation” [2]
On the possibility of “Non-insurance” the report contends that:
“Essentially, the question is: why take out insurance on objects lent abroad if the object is not insured when it remains on home ground?”
The purpose of the question is baffling: in 1991 the art insurer Hiscox stated that the risks involved were ten times higher for work on loan than when left at home. Sixteen years later, in 2007, in answer to our questions, Axa Art in France estimated the risks in loan venues to be about six times higher than in permanent residences.
Specific European suggestions that lenders should: “not insure works while they [are] at the exhibition venue” ignore the fact that most injuries occur during the time of the exhibition – and especially at moments of handling: mounting/dismounting, unpacking/repacking. In addition to which, environmental stress and risks have sometimes proved higher during exhibitions than during the travelling time.
The admonition to “waive depreciation” means that lenders should relinquish the loss of value after damage. This is a rationale from a mere financial strategy: mathematically, costs of depreciation comprise 80% of the money paid back by art insurance companies. But for ethical and cultural commitments, this strategy is most shocking. Apart from “money value”, waiving depreciation means to ignore, to deny the irreversible loss to the artistic integrity of the work of art when damaged.
Artistic integrity is totally written out of consideration when EU experts specifically advocate that:
“depreciation should not be insured because the value of an object is not important in collection mobility.”
According to this risks/damage management, depreciation should not be a concern, and neither should restoration be a problem, as we see in this incredible statement:
“in many cases, after the exhibits have been restored, only experts can assess the alteration resulting from the damage. The restored artworks can therefore be exhibited as they are.”
This rationale that an injured and then restored work has returned to its non-injured condition – or has returned “enough” to be “re-used”– is not only clearly fallacious, but represents a major fault in museum and conservation ethics. Because restorations may (temporarily) deceive the eyes of the uninformed, restoration is presented as a miraculous mean for wiping off responsibility and liabilities. So, too, may “restorations” that are unnecessary for a work of art in its location, be imposed in order “to enable it to travel”, to endure the constraint of transport and the stress of alien environments. Such thinking might rightly be considered a source of abusive treatments of art objects: because of hasty intervention to meet deadlines or because of losses of their integrity (i.e. by relinings). But EU papers only address this question in terms of financial charges – which are to be kept “to a minimum”.
A most shocking aspect is that there is never any request that the money saved through the proposed facilities be re-invested to enhance security measures. In this strategy of “keeping costs at minimum”, Museums are further counselled to moderate even their demands for increasing safety:
“Museums that are willing to waive insurance coverage of certain risks may want assurances that transport, display, security and climate control are of the highest standard. However, it would be counterproductive [sic] to impose additional demands that again increase costs, especially when the insurance waiver was intended to reduce such costs.”
The “Museum collections on the move workshop” in Naples 2003 advised lenders to “limit as far as possible” extra expenses, and to think twice before asking for accompaniment by a courier [3], although this has proved to be the most effective procedure to secure the object during its whole travel.
All the opposite – increasing the security and safety measures – should have been a central preoccupation of this European project, because, wishing to have more loans and more exhibitions (than those already conducted by the 300 major museums) would, necessarily mean involving a lot of small museums – which are less equipped – and borrowing art works from non-museum sources (i.e. city-owned or various communities collections). It is well known that when the lender is not an informed professional and is not well advised by a professional conservation team, his work of art would not likely receive the safest (more expensive) forms of care and protection. The tragically recurrent abuses of Signac’s largest painting should serve as a reminder. (See illustration and comments, right.) It should therefore be a priority to promote a reinforced ethical responsibility of the borrower, to protect the “little” lenders.
The last point that deserves urgent consideration is the very motivation for such movements of collections. There is a clear interest to gather works of a given artist (though preferably not the most commonly represented ones) on the benefit of this artist first, and of the public and the experts alike. Common sense and museum ethics too, consider that loans of works of art
“should only be granted to exhibitions abroad which are artistically or academically of high quality”. [4]
Specifically to be excluded should be loans assembled for the purpose of festivities, political celebrations, personal or group promotions, etc. European institutions might themselves be supposed to set a “best practice” example in this regard. How then, on what academic, artistic or scientific reasons, were the 27 nation members of the European Union asked to send “a treasure of their cultural heritage”, to be gathered in a single (over-crowded) room of the Palazzo Quirinal in Rome (from March 24th to May 20th 2007) in order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome?
(1) Study No. 2003-4879 ordered by the European Commission to inventory national systems of public guarantees in 31 countries (June 2004) http://ec.europa.eu/culture/key-documents/doc915_en.htm
(2) Lending to Europe Recommendations on collection mobility for European museums (April 2005) http://www.nba.fi/mobility/background.htm
(3) The role of the courier is to act as representative of the lender in ensuring safe handling of the loan during transit, unpacking, packing and, if necessary, during installation and de-installation. Moreover, he would need the presence of an accredited supervisor (extra expense) to look after the loan all the way along to the plane holds on airport freight zones.
(4) General Principles on the Administration of Loans and Exchange of Works of Art between Institutions, Code of practice of the international group of organisers of large-scale exhibitions (Bizot Group).
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
The Inspector of Historical Monuments urged “to keep the painting where it is and not to attempt to have it sent again in various exhibitions”.
This was a waste of advice: the painting, although extremely fragile and large, was sent in 1997 to an exhibition in Paris… where it again arrived ripped, without any understanding of “how and when a shock could have hurt the painting while all the precautions have been taken [sic]”.
Who is to blame? The too-confident small city of Montreuil? Or, the self-confident Paris exhibition organizers – who might have declined the loan in view of the painting’s well-known fragility?
Why is the European Commission instructing museums to incur more risks by lending more art?
Given the notorious risks of loaning works of art (see: An Appeal from Poland) and the high costs of insuring against those risks, why should the European Commission now be doing everything in its power to increase the practice throughout all of Europe’s museums?
In 2009 the Commission, through its “Culture Programme of the European Union” (which is funded to the tune of €400m), set up “Collections Mobility 2.0 Lending for Europe – 21st century”. This latter organisation, has itself funded international junkets – already – in Shanghai, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Budapest, Paris, Amsterdam (again) and, for this coming November, Athens. (Why Shanghai? – Is China seeking entry into the European Union?)
The ostensible prospectus for this pan-European project to “set culture in motion”, under the aegis of the 2007 “European Agenda for Culture in a globalising world”, rests on an evident conviction that an ever-greater shuffling around of the stock of art that is housed in Europe’s historical and nationally distinctive museums is a self-evident Good Communautaire Thing. While lip service is paid to “retaining the cultural diversity of the member states” it is hard to see how this might be achieved through a project which by design “contributes to European integration” and aims to bestow “a context” upon the art which is moved. When reading the promotional literature, it is hard not to see an overarching desire to homogenise European cultural life precisely by subverting the richly individual historically-forged identities of national institutions. It is hard to see how, in the real Euro-world of collapsing economies and soaring unemployment, a massive bureaucratized drive to increase inter-museum loans and their attendant risks might be considered other than whimsical and irresponsible.
As if in denial of the inherent risks, Collections Mobility 2.0 has constructed top-down national training programmes to be run in all European member states with the express purpose of encouraging more loans by the imposition of tiers of pre-cooked administrative procedure. All participants on these crash courses are required to:
“…cascade the training programme to other professionals in their own country using the training package that is being developed.”
The targets of this training package are to be:
“…professionals dealing directly with the administration of international loan of artworks as collection keepers, registrars, etc.”
The enterprise itself is dressed in pure dissembling management-speak:
“The Collections Mobility 2.0, Lending for Europe – 21st Century project organises training courses and provides a training package in order to introduce the most recent developments, best practices, concepts, standards and procedures on lending and borrowing of museum collections. ‘Getting practical’ is the aim of the project.”
Getting practical is not the same as “Getting real”. The risks to loaned works are real and the cost of insuring against them is correspondingly and appropriately high. As if to bypass this latter reality, Collections Mobility 2.0 charged a group of experts to examine over 5,000 loans made in five years under state indemnity schemes. This group duly reports that only seven claims for minor damage were made under those schemes. Taking these findings at face value and making no allowance for the under-reporting of travel injuries in the art world, Collections Mobility 2.0 seeks to increase loan traffic volumes by advising museums to insure less, to insure their works only for the specific short periods of travel at the beginning and end of a loan period, and not for the full duration of the loan.
This would greatly compound the hazards. TheArt Newspaper reports (February) that Sandy Nairne, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, has pointed out that loaned paintings get stolen from within museums and not just while on the road. He should know, having been charged when at the Tate with making the arrangements for the recovery of two of its Turners that were stolen when on loan to a museum in Germany.
Mr Nairne’s warning that “Without insurance the Tate would have had no money, nor the paintings”, cannot be gainsaid. What might be said is that by paying a ransom of over £3m to what Geoffrey Robinson, the former Paymaster General, described as “a group of particularly nasty Serbs”, the Tate established a going-rate “reward” of fifteen per cent of a work’s insurance value to obtain a recovery and avoid a full insurance pay-out. Whether such ransoms masquerade as “payments for intelligence” or not, they make art theft an increasingly tempting prospect.
For example, were the Krakow, Czartoryski Foundation’s, Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine, to be stolen during its proposed trips to and from the National Gallery in London, it would, with its current insurance rating of €300m, afford a juicy potential haul of €30-45m to thieves. Were that Leonardo to be insured only during its times of travel, as Collections Mobility 2.0 now urges, the insurance cost might fall “considerably” – but the painting would remain a plump €30-45m target. Were it to be stolen from within the National Gallery, the owners, having acted on Collections Mobility 2.0’s advice, would receive nothing from the insurers. Similarly, if the painting were to be dropped and smashed at the National Gallery during the periods of installation or de-installation (as happened recently to a panel by Beccafumi), the Polish owners would receive nothing from the insurers. Were private insurance arrangements to be replaced by state-guarantees of indemnity, in the event of thefts, states would find themselves in “recovery” negotiations with nasty criminal groups and without the political cover afforded by commercial insurers.
There are no limits to the problems associated with Collections Mobility 2.0. Were the Lady with an Ermine to be loaned by her owners to France instead of, or in addition to Britain (and any or all venues would seem to be on the cards with this painting under its present aristocratic stewardship – in recent years she has been loaned to: Washington, 1991; Malmo, 1994; Kyoto, 2001; Nagoya, 2001; Yokohama, 2002; Milwaukee, 2002; Houston, 2003; San Francisco, 2003; Budapest, 2009) the risks of theft or injury would likely be higher still. The Daily Telegraph recently reported growing concerns that French museums are easy targets for thieves (“Lending works of art to France is a risky business”, 29 August 2010). For the past fifteen years thefts from French museums have run at three a month. In May 2010 thieves broke into the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and stole five paintings valued at £86m.
Two works loaned to France from the Victoria and Albert museum have been damaged in the past two years. An official at Apsley House, London, has said of the museum’s art “We wouldn’t lend that to the Louvre. We don’t know what state we’d get it back in.”
Whether or not one supports the European “Grand Project” to forge a United States of Europe, we should all be clearer about the implicit cultural price of ironing-out nationally distinctive institutions. It is barely over half a century since Hans Tietze, writing in the aftermath of the devastation of the Second World War, said of The Great National Galleries of Europe and the United States:
“The least part of their value lies in the millions they would fetch on the market; their real worth lies in the intellectual labour which they embody and in the spiritual pleasure stored up in them. To create these possessions the nations contended one with the other, and each land has built its own memorial in the Gallery which enshrines its history and its way of life.”
If Eurocrats are offended by these nationally expressive institutions, they should say so openly. Better yet, they might resolve to leave them in peace to speak for themselves. Since we already have the free movement of all European citizens, there is no impediment to their visiting any art – in its own already culturally rich context – anywhere on the continent. Let us cherish Europe’s unequalled and diverse cultural achievements for what they are and avoid putting them to unnecessary risks.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Below: Leonardo da Vinci’s late 15th C. Lady with an Ermine, oil on wood panel, 54 cm x 39 cm. This painting, normally housed at the Czartoryski Museum, Kraków, is presently on show at the National Museum in Warsaw. It has recently been loaned to the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. It is planned to move the picture again to London for the National Gallery’s exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan” exhibition from November 2011 to February 2012.
In an appeal to ArtWatch UK on November 30th November 2010, Prof. Grazyna Korpal, the expert of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in the field of painting restoration, at ASP Krakow, commented:
“The work of Leonardo da Vinci called Lady with an Ermine, from the collection of the Czartoryski Museum is one of the most valuable paintings not only in the context of the Polish collections, but also of the world heritage. Such masterpieces require exceptional protection. Prevention is the main priority. Its fundamental principle is the unconditional restriction of movement and transfer to the absolutely necessary. If you transport a picture panel such as the Lady with an Ermine, even the most ideal methods in the form of modern environmental chambers or special anti-shock frames are not able to sufficiently protect the work against a variety of vibrations, shocks or changes in pressure. By allowing the painting to travel we create yet another serious threat, largely extending the area of possible human error, while increasing the likelihood of the impact of the so-called independent factors.
“Given the technology of the picture, it is necessary to keep it under constant microclimatic conditions, in one place, in a tight microclimatic frame of the new generation, made on the basis of the already proven solutions used for panel masterpieces in renowned museums. Only by storing the picture in a fixed location will eliminate to the maximum such basic threats as unavoidable external pollution, changes in the microclimate, all kinds of shock, vibration, drastic changes in pressure, and reduce the risks resulting from independent factors.
“To sum up the basic arguments put forward for the protection of the painting Lady with an Ermine, I firmly declare that each loan and the associated with it transport are a serious, even reprehensible, threat to the state of preservation and safety of this priceless work of art. I also believe that based on the special immunities provided for outstanding works of art already developed and operating in Austria, Germany or the United States, it is necessary to grant such immunity to the painting from Krakow.“Like every masterpiece the painting Lady with an Ermine has a historical value, and in this value is also included – the Czartoryski Museum, Cracow’s atmosphere and the tumultuous history of the picture during the last century. Each loan ‘strips’ the work of this unique ‘setting’, which while not indifferent to the viewer, should be especially nurtured and protected in the Polish reality.
“Around 600 people registered to attend the Culture in Motion conference 15-16 February in Brussels! Discover the new brochure!
Secure your place now before it’s too late, and get a sneak preview of the brand new Culture in Motion brochure full of exciting project interviews.
Around 600 people have already registered to attend the Culture in Motion Conference and the Stakeholder Consultation Meeting on the Future Culture Programme 15-16 February in Square Meeting Centre, Brussels.
Don’t wait; register now to secure your place, using this link: www.culture-in-motion-2011.eu
The fresh, new Culture in Motion brochure is now available to you in English, French and German, with sizzling stories from people involved in running EU-projects – projects you’ll get to meet during the Culture in Motion Conference – plus everything you need to know about handing in your own application. You don’t want to miss this!”
How the National Gallery belatedly vindicated the restoration criticisms of Sir Ernst Gombrich
History has repeatedly shown that scholars and art-lovers (no matter how distinguished and mild-mannered) who put themselves between museum picture restorers and their professional ambitions, run high risks.
In 1950 Ernst Gombrich drew attention, in a Burlington Magazine letter, to Pliny’s description of wondrous effects achieved by Apelles when finishing off his paintings with a thinly spread dark coating or “varnish”. How could we be sure when stripping off “varnishes” today, he asked, that no Renaissance masters had applied toned varnishes to their own works in emulation of antiquity’s fabled painter? He received silence.
When he repeated the question in his seminal 1960 book Art and Illusion, his scholarly reputation and position as director of the Warburg Institute at London University commanded an answer. One came from Helmut Ruhemann, the National Gallery’s consultant restorer and author of its notorious “total cleaning” policy. Ruhemann insisted in the British Journal of Aesthetics that there was no evidence whatsoever “for anything so improbable as that a great old master should cover his picture with a ‘toning-down layer’.”
Gombrich returned play in a 1962 Burlington Magazine article (“Dark varnishes: Variations on a Theme from Pliny”). The discovery of a single instance of a tinted overall varnish, he suggested, would undermine the dogmatic philosophy of the National Gallery’s restorers. A dual reply came from the gallery’s “heavy mob” – its head of science, Joyce Plesters (who was married to the restorer Norman Brommelle), and the pugnacious former trustee and collector, Denis Mahon, in two further Burlington articles.
Plesters herself dismissed Gombrich on two fronts: for lacking “technical knowledge” and for displaying incomplete and misinterpreted scholarship. The entire documented technical history of art, she claimed, showed that “no convincing case” could be made for a single artist ever having emulated Apelles’ legendary dark varnishes. The passage from Pliny, she sniffed, was merely a matter of “academic rather than practical importance”. She offered to “sift” and “throw light upon” any future historical material that Professor Gombrich might uncover – should he but present it directly to the National Gallery. Her technical rank-pulling was underwritten (as perhaps was her article in part) by the director, Sir Philip Hendy, who disparaged technically ignorant “university art historians” in the gallery’s annual report.
In reality Plesters was a technical incompetent. It was she who claimed that the Raphael cartoons at the Victoria and Albert Museum were stuck onto “backing sheets” when there are none. It was she who described the large (150 cms wide) panel The Entombment, which is attributed to Michelangelo, as a single massive plank when it is comprised of three boards held by butterfly keys. It was she who counted six boards on the large panel Samson and Delilah, which is attributed to Rubens, when there are seven.
Her errors were products of a then unchecked institutional culture of technical adventurism and gross aesthetic recklessness. Great Renaissance paintings were ironed onto boards of compressed paper (Sundeala board) which today are too unstable to be moved. One such was Sebastiano del Piombo’s The Raising of Lazarus. That painting, originally on panel, had been transferred to canvas. When decision was made to re-attach the canvas to a Sundeala “panel”, technical examination identified three further “backing” canvases. When these three “backings” were duly removed it was discovered that no fourth and “original” canvas existed and that the surviving paint was attached only to a layer of disintegrating paper. But that crisis-of-their-own-making provided the gallery’s restorers with opportunity to play what Professor Thomas Molnar here called “demiurge” and improve upon the artistic content of the painting. In order to stabilise the paint layer which they had left loose and unprotected, the restorers embedded it from behind with terylene fabric attached by lashings of warm, dilute wax-resin cement. Because Sebastiano had painted his picture on a warm-coloured ground and because paint becomes more translucent with age and allows the tone of the ground greater influence on the picture’s values, the restorers decided to brighten things up and give the picture a brilliant white ground (like that of a Pre-Raphaelite painting) by adding highly reflective pigments to their own remedial wax-resin cement applications.
Plesters died in August 1996. Earlier that year, the National Gallery had published a report in its Technical Bulletin on the cleaning of two paintings by a Leonardo follower, Giampietrino. One, his Salome, had clearly suffered the Gallery’s trademark restoration losses of modelled form (see right and below), but his Christ Carrying the Cross was miraculously unscathed. Moreover, that picture was found simultaneously to display an “intensity of colour” and a restrained “overall effect” – precisely the paradoxical combination attributed by Pliny to Apelles but that had been pronounced technically preposterous by Ruhemann, Plesters, Mahon, Hendy et al.
It further emerged that Giampietrino, having first built up an “illusion of relief” with “dark translucent glazes”, had, again just as Pliny had said of Apelles, deliberately “restricted his own range of values” with a “final extremely thin overall toning layer consisting of warm dark pigments and black in a medium essentially of walnut oil, with a little resin”. Sir Ernst, nearly half a century on, had finally been vindicated but the report, inexplicably, made no reference to the dispute of the 1960s – to the very dispute which in 1985 had been described by the Burlington Magazine’s then editor, Neil MacGregor, as “one of the most celebrated jousts” ever. Had the National Gallery, having ridiculed Gombrich in the 1960s, not told him of its own remarkable technical/art historical discovery and of his own vindication? It had not. When we reported the findings in June 1996, Sir Ernst was approaching his 87th birthday. He replied:
“I could hardly have a nicer present than the information you sent me. I don’t see the National Gallery’s Technical Bulletin, and would have missed their final conversion to an obvious truth…”
Gombrich’s vindication proved a double one. Not only had the gallery discovered a technical/physical corroboration of the scholar’s astute original supposition, but the survival of a Renaissance artist’s final toned coating served further to corroborate Gombrich’s general criticisms of the gallery’s over-zealous picture cleanings. Because the two Giampietrino works were restored at the same time in the same gallery, but with the surface of the one being protected from solvent action by an ancient oil-film, while that of the other was unprotected, an unwitting laboratory experiment had been conducted on the gallery’s own “cleanings”. We can now compare the appearance of the restored but protected painting, with that of the restored but unprotected one (see right and Michael Daley, “The Lost Art of Picture Conservation”, The Art Review, September, 1999). As can be seen here, the unprotected painting (the Salome) suffered clear and dramatic losses of modelling and weakening of forms.
For a number of years after the twin Giampietrino restorations, it was possible to examine the two cleaned specimens side by side and to demonstrate the unequal effects of the treatments they had received. That is no longer possible. One of the pair has been relegated to the ill-lit basement of the reserve collection which is accessible to the public for only a few hours a week on Wednesday afternoons.
The relegated work is not the restoration-injured Salome, but the miraculously preserved Christ, the very picture which now arguably constitutes the best-preserved example of a Renaissance artist’s technique in the entire collection. This picture, which might be expected to enjoy pride of place in the main galleries, shares its new dungeon exile with another recent National Gallery Embarrassment – the Beccafumi panel painting Marcia which was dropped and smashed at the Gallery when being “de-installed” from a temporary exhibition. We had hoped and suggested that the Christ might make a return to daylight on the occasion of the Gallery’s forthcoming Leonardo blockbuster exhibition, but it seems that it will not do so – not even to join Giampietrino’s full-sized faithful copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper. (For many years, that Giampietrino mouldered in the Royal Academy’s basement as embarrassing relic of the institution’s former artistic interests.) When the last restoration of Leonardo’s Last Supper got into difficulties, the copy was taken to Milan so that full-size tracings of Leonardo’s figures might establish the limits of the restorer’s own substantial watercolour in-painting.
It seems fitting that last word be given to Sir Ernst, who died on November 3rd 2001. In another letter in 1988 he had recalled:
“I believe it was Francis Bacon who said ‘knowledge is power’. I had to learn the hard way that power can also masquerade as knowledge, and since there are very few people able to judge these issues, they very easily get away with it.”
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Born March 30th 1909, died November 3rd 2001
In Memoriam: Thomas Molnar (1921-2010)
The Catholic philosopher and historian Thomas Molnar died on July 20th 2010. The author of more than thirty books and a survivor of Dachau who then witnessed the communist takeover of Hungary, Dr Molnar was a critic of all “transformative” ideological philosophies of the left or the right. In 1950 he earned a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Columbia University, New York. In 1967 he warned against technological hubris in his book “Utopia: The Perennial Heresy” suggesting that the public forgets:
“…man cannot step out of the human condition and that no ‘universal mind’ is now being manufactured simply because science has permitted the building of nuclear bombs, spaceships and electronic computers.”
He was, with the painter Frank Mason and the cultural historian Arcadi Nebolsine, a force in a tributary/precursor organisation (The International Society for the Preservation of Art, and its Committee to Save the Sistine Ceiling) which joined forces with ArtWatch International when it was founded in 1992. In 1990 he wrote a manifesto on art restoration, which we publish below.
His friend Arcadi Nebolsine contributes this note:
Concerning Professor Thomas Molnar in memoriam:
“I lament an old friend and a great religious philosopher and elegant author of many works. I always admired his brilliance and his humor. There was something 18th century about it since he was always an effective foe of the French Revolution and other succeeding revolutions and their consequences 20th century modernism and ‘Americanism’ (not America!).
A strong proponent of Tradition, he condemned the Vatican II excesses and pseudo-seriousness and sheer silliness. He was the best of Mittel-Europa, very much continental and an inveterate foe of Communism. He lent distinction to William Buckley’s National Review. His opposition to Modernism extended to the arts and architecture – for instance in the sadly failed attempts to save Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.” [Arcadi Nebolsine.]
Thomas Molnar – A Manifesto: Restoration in Art
“In an age when all certitudes are questioned, and Truth and the Good are on the defensive, Beauty still rallies the largest number of enthusiasts. The onslaughts against it – tasteless monuments, concoctions in cement and metal in our parks, puzzles on museum and gallery walls – are violently resented by lovers of art. The latter have also turned their attention to the no-less important area of art restoration where abuses have increased in the past decades.
“We are aware now that the art of the past is vulnerable: to the work of the removal of layers on paintings, the retouching, the search for alleged original lines and colours. Although armed with expertise and good intentions, many restorers are tempted to play demiurge, to ‘know better’ than the work’s creator. The trouble is that misapplied zeal carries them away, they become competitors against the artist whose work they ought to serve.
“A cultural misunderstanding should be dispelled: the Sistine Chapel or Leonardo’s Last Supper are not only the works themselves as localized and dated, they have had a life of their own during the half-a-millennium since their creation. The ‘search for the original’ may be an ill-conceived enterprise in view of the fact that the artist must have foreseen the effects of time and would not today wish to return to the illud tempus, to what his work appeared when he finally put down the brush or the chisel.
“We must think twice about the branch of art called restoration, and resist the modern urge to erase time – in these cases the intervening centuries – during which the work of art has matured. No cause is served when every generation tries its hand at re-doing the masterpieces for the questionable purpose of saving them. A masterpiece today is not what it was in the original creator’s workshop. Nor should contemporary taste, marked by the puritanical penchant for geometry and poster design be so sure of itself as to rush in with the job of cleaning and retouching. Moral prudence should combine with aesthetic reverence in the task of preservation, a more reassuring term and endeavour than restoration.”
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Shifting contours – and other faults with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s photographs
We have had a disappointing response from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Gareth Hawker’s recent comparison of its online photographs of paintings with those of the National Gallery (“The National Gallery, London: The World-Leader in museums’ online provision of photographic reproductions of paintings”).
A curator at the Met with whom we maintain a tense but productive thread of occasional discussions, suggests that it is unreasonable and naïve to expect consistent accuracy in published photographic records of paintings.
All photography, we are advised, should be considered an art not a science. Because light changes constantly and different photographers respond differently to these shifts, accurate or consistent photographic records of paintings in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection cannot be expected. This view, respectfully, we reject.
Although digital photography can be used in many ways to many ends, and provides infinite and easy means of manipulating images, it also now provides the capacity to track all alterations made to a given ‘master’ photographic file. This capacity, combined with the well-established technical procedures and simple optical/physical safeguards described so clearly in Gareth Hawker’s account, absolutely entrenches photography’s near-miraculous capacity to produce objective and verifiable records of how things appear at singular moments under particular controlled circumstances.
Given that the unprecedented testimonial capacities of this new technology are demonstrable, verifiable and replicable, it seems fair to ask why some museums fail fully to deploy it. With the Metropolitan Museum, its response to our post may reflect a wider institutional image-handling malaise.
In March 2006, we asked the Met restorer, Dorothy Mahon, who had last treated John Singer Sargent’s magnificent Madame X, what accounted for certain differences in the picture’s striking profile head that had emerged between all previous photographs and a new image seen in a plate (p.178) of the then current catalogue to the Rothschild-sponsored exhibition “Americans in Paris” (jointly organised by the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in association with the Metropolitan Museum).
Ms Mahon, who had not yet seen the exhibition catalogue, suggested that she “could only assume it is due to wide variations in publication printing quality that is regrettable but not unusual…” The discrepancies, however, were of an entirely different order. They were not the customary variations of hues or tones that have previously be-devilled all printed reproductions, but were of shapes and design within the artist’s own famously distinctive depiction of his physically arresting subject, Madame Pierre Gautreau.
To demonstrate these differences, we sent a greyscale scan (see right) showing the cover of the Met’s own Spring 2000 Bulletin superimposed over the plate illustration in the new catalogue. Greyscale was chosen so as to disregard any variations of colour in printing. I pointed to specific differences in the shape of the hair, to the fact that the bunch at the top of the head was now sharper than before, whereas the curve at the back of the head was blunter, less pointed (see illustrations, right). Of this effective redrawing of an artist’s work, on March 9, Ms Mahon replied:
“…After reviewing the two images you sent I can see for myself the discrepancy which is the cause of your concern. I spoke with Barbara Weinberg, Curator of American Paintings and Peter Anthony, Chief Production Manager, Editorial. They explained to me the process by which the color reproduction of Madame X was prepared for the exhibition catalogue that was published by the National Gallery. Colour proofs that were sent by the Italian printer employed for this project by the National Gallery were sent to New York. Peter and Barbara made color correction notes on the proofs while standing in front of the painting in the gallery. The annotated proofs were sent off to London. How this image may have been altered during color correcting at the Italian printers I cannot say, but sometimes this process involves digitally masking off separate areas. Perhaps this could explain the contour shift in the hair…I can assure you that absolutely no conservation treatment has been done since 1996.”
That explanation disturbed us on many levels. It suggested that technicians can introduce falsifications of images during the reproductive process – and that these may escape the “quality control” procedures of even the grandest museums. Moreover, the Met’s seeming attempted shift of responsibility to the National Gallery for the reproduction of one of its own star paintings precisely highlighted our concerns over the unclear and sometimes conflicted lines of authority that occur in the organisation of institutionally collaborative blockbuster exhibitions – as we have seen more recently to such disastrous effect at the National Gallery.
This all raised further straightforward questions of procedure: did staff at the Met retain copies of the annotated proofs they had returned to London? Did staff at the National Gallery retain copies of the corrected proofs before sending them off to the printer in Italy? Was any supervising member of either gallery’s staff present in Italy during production of the catalogue? Did anyone ever check the catalogue’s plates? Did means exist to establish the point at which the image of a great portrait painting had been corrupted? Have similar corruptions occurred in other catalogues? Why had no one at the Met noticed the changes?
Long after we had demonstrated to the Metropolitan Museum this particular photographic reconfiguring of a major “iconic” work in its collection, no attempt seems to have been made to warn members of the public who bought the expensive catalogue of the serious error within. That presumably (?) still uncorrected catalogue remains on sale. It is hard to believe that curators would permit technicians’ errors of similar magnitude in their own texts to go uncorrected. Why should errors of reproduction be treated less rigorously? Do images of artists’ works count for less than curators’ words?
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
The museum world’s increasing acceptance of virtual-reality “resurrections”
An enthusiastic New York Times report on the discovery of an American 19th century painted rolling theatre backcloth carried a photograph of a restorer using what appears to be a high pressure water hose (see right). This prompts recollection of classic graphic satires on museum picture cleaning methods. More ominously, it marks yet another insinuation of digitally manipulated photographic imagery into contemporary museum restoration and display practices.
The muslin backcloth – the “Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress” which bore the work of artists of the calibre of Frederick Edwin Church – first appeared in 1851 to rave reviews but by the 1860s the excitement had subsided and the backcloth had been rolled, crated and stored by a theatre owner. That material, inherited in 1896 by the Dyer Library and Saco Museum, has recently been uncovered.
Discoveries present rich restoration opportunities. This particular 800 feet of fabric prompted a restoration aided by a grant of $51,940 from “Save America’s Treasures”. It is being carried out by Williamstown Art Conservation Center.
As if in assurance of advanced restoration precautions, New York Times readers are informed that the restorers “sometimes wore socks to avoid leaving footprints while removing dust, creases and signs of water damage known in the trade as tide lines.” However, this work is not being “restored” to its former original function but to provide a means for making a photographic facsimile of itself:
“Digital photographs, taken from a camera on the ceiling, will be spliced together to create a panoramic reproduction that the museum will use in live performances.”
A synthetic fabric with a heft and texture similar to the original muslin has been identified and Jessica Swire Routhier, the director of the Saco Museum, thrills: “Things print well on it, and it’ll be incredibly durable”.
When Inigo Jones’ Queen’s House at Greenwich was restored in the decade before last, original ceiling canvases by Orazio Gentileschi that had been removed to another building were replaced by full-size photographic facsimiles’ printed on vinyl. Because the original canvases had been cut down in places to fit into their new home, the Gentileschi images were digitally extended by cutting and pasting bits of the surviving imagery on the computer screen before being printed and fixed to the ceiling of the historic building.
When, in the same decade, the National Gallery restored Holbein’s The Ambassadors on-camera for a BBC film, the famous anamorphic skull in the foreground was (as discussed here) repainted to a new design, not according to the contemporary laws of perspective, but after a computer-generated distortion of a photograph of an actual skull. That unprecedented imposition of “virtual reality” onto an old master painting was specifically justified on the grounds that “modern imaging techniques” offer more “scope for exploring possible reconstructions” than do the 16th century perspective-al conventions by which the artist’s image had been produced. Had the repainted additions been left identifiable as such, gallery goers might have appreciated that the painting now contains an a-historical hypothetical reconstruction. But instead, as those who viewed the BBC film of the Esso-sponsored restoration will appreciate, the newly added paint was tricked up to give a “deceiving” visual match to the neighbouring original paint by the imposition of painted black lines that mimicked age cracks.
A further development in the realm of virtual restorations emerges at Harvard where more old canvases have been recovered from storage. In 1964 a suite of five Mark Rothko murals were installed in a sunny dining room at Harvard University. The works swiftly faded and progressively suffered damages, graffiti and foods splatters. They were removed to storage in 1979. No means exists for restoring them physically. Undaunted, conservators at Harvard’s Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art and Strauss Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, in conjunction with “The Massachusetts Institute of technology’s Media Laboratory, and Switzerland’s University of Basel Imaging and Media Laboratory, propose to apply computer-controlled lighting that is intended to impose the original hues and appearances upon the now irrevocably degraded canvases.
The proposal constitutes a perfect ethical/aesthetic conundrum. On the one hand, this would be an ideal “restoration” in that there would be no physical or chemical or other intervention on the works themselves. On the other hand viewers would be led to believe – or asked to believe – that they were experiencing the work just as it was when new, as if they were themselves time-travellers, as if works of art – especially modern ones – never age, when they would in fact be witnessing wrecked works of art altered, as if by a theatre lighting designer’s skills, on an hypothesis extracted from a combined chemical analysis of the paintings’ degraded pigments and an optical analysis of old colour photographs. The chances of this project hitting the target on each of the variously placed canvases at every moment of the day’s changing lights must be estimated at zero. The public would be being deceived.
That so revered, serene and “spiritual” a modernist (Rothko’s Harvard canvases were based on his reflections on the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ) should be considered an appropriate candidate for conversion into some speculative virtual after-life, might itself suggest that nothing in art may now be considered an unsuitable candidate for virtual treatments. This proposed treatment itself runs in defiance of central museum world celebrations of the “authenticity” of museum objects. The recently retired director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, argued in “Whose Muse – Art Museums and the Public Trust” (page 153), that “it remains vital that the objects visitors come to see be original… Reproductions, no matter how good, cannot and will not ever replace originals.”
There is irony in this situation: it has been known for years within the conservation community that the effects of aging yellowing natural varnishes can be “virtually” eliminated simply by compensating increases of colder, bluer gallery light. If such appearance-altering practices are now to be considered legitimate and acceptable, then it will be tacitly conceded that many of those traumatic, destructive and bitterly contested solvent-sodden assaults of yesteryear on the vulnerable fabrics of unique and irreplaceable historical objects might never have been necessary. Even if the most restoration pro-active museums today were to contend that it would never have been practical to tailor individual lighting to all works in a large collection, another awkward question would hang: Why is it that museums did not, at least, adjust the lighting on individual works that were about to be restored? Had that been done as routine, photographs that better recorded the undistorted values of a painting at a precise point in time would have been available for comparison with the material results of restorations. Such comparisons would swiftly have established benchmarks of performance for restorers. Are there good reasons why such a beneficial methodological check was never routinely pursued?
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
The National Gallery, London:The World-Leader in museums’ online provision of photographic reproductions of paintings
Gareth Hawker, ArtWatch UK Journal’s Picture/Photography Analyst, makes his living as a portrait painter. In order to reproduce some of his paintings he has taken a keen interest in large-format inkjet (giclée) printing. To this end he has learnt both how to take photographs which are highly accurate in colour and how to print them with comparable accuracy.
Gareth Hawker writes:
Museum websites now provide an unrivalled resource for the student of paintings. Images may be called up with a speed and ease which would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. But how accurate are these images, and how far can they be relied upon? You might imagine that museum websites would all be offering an answer to these basic questions, that they would be proud to explain why the visitor should have confidence in their images, but the only museum I have come across which does so is the National Gallery, London. It provides thorough information about its images on this page:
http://www.nationalgalleryimages.co.uk/ImageInfo.aspx
If you want to know the colour of any area of paint on a painting from the National Gallery you can find it out very simply. Download a free colour reader like the one called Pixie (http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.php). Place your cursor on the spot which interests you, and read its colour specification. (See fig.1) This specification is expressed in terms of an internationally recognised scale of colour. But what if your screen is inaccurate? For example it might make all the colours look too red or too green. No need to worry, the inaccuracy in your screen affects what you see, but it does not affect the readings. They will always be accurate no matter how wrong your screen may be. Even with a monochrome screen you can take accurate readings. If you wish, you can compare them with readings from other paintings which have also been accurately photographed.
If your screen is correctly adjusted (calibrated) you will be looking at almost exactly the same colours as if you were in the Gallery itself. However this would be an unusual situation. Even full-time colour professionals, who spend considerable sums on screen calibration, are unlikely to have a screen which is totally accurate. You still need to see the real paintings if you want to experience the colour with total accuracy.
In principle, you could also display the colour very exactly by printing the digital file on your colour printer. However setting up a printer for accurate colour printing is a very onerous task indeed – one which very few people, even professionals, do correctly. So, even though the colours may be accurately specified in the digital file, they are rarely seen as accurately when they are displayed in print or on screen. Also the colours in the digital photographic file can never be absolutely correct. They are only accurate within certain tolerances. The webpage mentioned above deals with these tolerances in detail. None of this detracts from the value of such a substantial improvement compared with the old film and plate methods of recording paintings. These readings are far more accurate.
In contrast to the National Gallery’s site, most museum websites show photographs which, regarding colour, are little more than rough approximations. Many museums seem not even to be fully aware of what such accuracy involves, and often make a beginner’s mistake. If the colour of a photograph looks wrong when a photographer examines it on his screen, he will make adjustments in Photoshop until what he sees is acceptable in his judgment. This is useless as far as objectively accurate colour is concerned. However this practice, known as ‘visual editing’, is widespread:
http://www.cis.rit.edu/museumSurvey/documents/Benchmark_Final_Report_Web.pdf (p57)
It is far preferable to adhere to international colour standards. Accuracy does not then depend on personal judgement, but on objective measurement. This means that each time you photograph the painting you need to photograph a standard colour chart next to it.
In order to check the photographed values you can read them with a colour-reader (like the Pixie mentioned above), then compare them with known values. These known values are published. They are readings taken direct from the original chart using a spectrophotometer (- a light meter which splits light into bands of different wavelength, then measures the light intensity at each wavelength band).
If the values match (within defined tolerances), this means that the photograph of the painting is as accurate as the equipment can produce (fig. 2).
There are immense practical difficulties in photographing a large collection, so perhaps it is not surprising that other Museums have not caught up with the National Gallery in this respect. Most of the pictures on the website of the Metropolitan, New York, come as a disappointment if you arrive having just seen those on the National Gallery website. Not that New York is lacking in expertise. Some of the most advanced museum photography in the world is being carried in the USA. The high standards which characterise this work are exemplified in the following pdf which is concerned with photography at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC:
http://www.art-si.org/PDFs/TechnicalReportNGA_low.pdf
This high-quality work has not yet had a major impact on US museum websites. For example, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, offers no statement comparable to the one on the National Gallery website – no claim that its colours are accurate.
The amount of detail, too, on the National Gallery’s site is far superior. When you zoom in you see more detail, whereas, when you zoom in on pictures on the Met’s site, you often see no more detail, just the same, low-resolution image enlarged and blurred (fig. 3). (A number of museums have developed zoom systems for their websites. These merit separate discussion, but it may be worth mentioning one of the most impressive, Birmingham’s Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource. There is also Google Earth, which has produced a spectacular zoom representation of 14 paintings in the Prado. However, downloading the free Google Earth software and learning how to use it does take some time.)
The National Gallery’s full-screen zoom certainly lives up to its publicity and must count as one of the easiest to use:
http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/painting+%26+drawing/art70531
Is the National Gallery’s virtual gallery perfect? No. Some imperfections are inevitable given the limitations inherent in the medium. For example the range of colours available on a normal computer screen is not large enough to display very strong colours correctly. This question is discussed on the Gallery’s own webpage mentioned above.
Perhaps the most striking imperfection is that there is a limit on the number of pixels which may be used to display a single painting. This means that a large painting cannot be shown in as much detail as a small painting.
There are limitations, too, in the level of proof offered that the photographs are accurate. The National Gallery Company Online Picture Library will supply digital files, but these include only the Kodak Colour Control Patches and the Kodak Greyscale reference charts which are intended to help printers. More colour patches would provide a stronger demonstration of accuracy. But the webpage does assure the reader that, “Each image has been individually calibrated using the Gretag Macbeth 24-patch colour rendition chart.”
When considering these imperfections, it is easy to forget what an extraordinary achievement this virtual gallery represents. Think of all the glossy colour art reference books, all the reproductions made for hanging on walls, all the posters. Not one of them is as accurate as the images on the National Gallery website. Even if, by some remote chance, one of those reproductions elsewhere did turn out to be accurate, it would be extremely difficult to verify its accuracy. All sorts of complicated measurements would be needed – with light meters, spectrophotometers and so on. In contrast, if you wish to verify the National Gallery colours you can order a digital file which includes an image of the painting with Kodak colour patches alongside it (fig. 4). You may then place your cursor over the patches and check whether your readings match the published values. If they do, this proves that the photograph of the painting is accurate in colour (within specified tolerances). No previous photographs, from a public gallery, have come close to this level of colour objectivity nor been so available for scrutiny.
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
An Unreported Tragedy, Picasso’s Warning, a Dog That Didn’t Bark, Fried Peaches and Coloured Cleaning Swabs: The Sheldon Kecks’ Unexamined Restoration of ‘The Luncheon of the Boating Party’ – The Phillips Collection’s Fabled Renoir
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 16th 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
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Below, a printed reproduction of the same picture, after its 1954 restoration.
It should be noted that the photo comparisons here are greatly handicapped by the museum’s lack of cooperation. These are confined to reproductions of published reproductions where the quality of resolution in the older pre-cleaning state is markedly poorer than that found in the later, post-cleaning, photograph.
Response to Attack
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
A spectacular restoration own-goal: undoing, re-doing and (on the quiet) re-re-doing a Veronese masterpiece at the Louvre Museum
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 (5th Meetings of ARAAFU)
Michel Favre-Felix writes:
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 17th 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 18th 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 19th 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 19th 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 “19th 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 19th 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 19th 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 19th 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 21st 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 21st 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 13th 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.
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Click on any of the images for larger versions. NOTE: zooming requires the Adobe Flash Plug-in.
Romanian Heritage: the Struggle to Protect the “Protected”
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.
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Waste Much, Want Not: the feather-bedded public-sector avant gardists
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…
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
An Appeal from Poland
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.”
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.]
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
The New Relativisms and the Death of “Authenticity”
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 20th 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 17th and 18th 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”.
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
