Artwatch UK

Posts tagged “The Prado”

Two “As Good as New”, Colour Contrasting Velazquezs ~ Thanks to the Fundación Iberdrola

19th December 2011

Following the recent National Gallery restoration that launched a £1.5 billion Leonardo blockbuster, comes news of a brace of corporately funded restorations (- two pictures and a classical sculpture) at the Prado. The energy corporation Iberdrola is acting through its cultural off-shoot, “Fundación Iberdrola”, to “Raise awareness about the contribution of the IBERDROLA Group to society” by allocations of pre-tax profits dedicated “decisively to the promotion and dissemination of art and culture in the territories where IBERDROLA operates”. As part of its green image-building campaign of Good Works (which includes illuminating buildings at night and training young researchers in the energy field) the foundation has made itself “Protector Member” of the Prado’s “Restoration Programme” which encourages restoration research and trains restorers within the museum to the tune of 300,000 euros per annum.

Our prime fear with Art/Business relationships in the treatment of unique, historic and irreplaceable works of art has always been that the commercial tail might wag the custodial dog; might press for excitement and drama over minimalist judicious and restrained intervention; for more frequent rather than less frequent interventions – in effect, might expect big bangs for big bucks. A second concern is that corporate restorations receive over-hyped and propagandistic “Good News” promotion as instruments of miraculous “recoveries” and “discoveries”. This last practice compounds the problem of chronic unaccountability in art restoration. Restorers who work in-house at museums are, for obvious reasons, given full political protection for their actions however controversial or demonstrably harmful they might be. Museums rarely concede that even long-past restorations were harmful and almost never admit to recent – let alone current – injuries.

When reporting the Prado’s latest restorations, the online Artdaily.org, echoes Iberdrola’s own website account of the treatment of the monumental, paired paintings “Philip III on Horseback” and “Margaret of Austria on Horseback”. As the proselytising global energy giant puts it: “These paintings have been rehabilitated by the art gallery’s team of technicians with the backing of Fundación IBERDROLA as a supporting member of its restoration activity. The labour of specialists has allowed for recovering the original values of both portraits, which were significantly affected by the accumulation of dirt and the alteration of the varnish that had buffered the contrasts of colour”. Both accounts fail to appraise the Prado’s own before and after cleaning photographs which show changes that seem arbitrary and artistically injurious (see Figs. 1, 4 & 5). Such preparedness to accept on trust that the latest photographically recorded states are the best, most “advanced”, most reliably truthful – and even “original” – conditions of historic works of art reflects a wider and dangerous absence of properly critical appraisals of restorations. It would seem axiomatic that if works of art are to be altered (and then re-altered by the next generation) the processes concerned should be absolutely transparent and freely discussed. Artdaily trills that the paintings have been “fully restored to their original appearance” by the removal of a “veil” of dirt and “altered” varnish; and, that the restorers “allowed for the recuperation of [the pictures’] original values”. This is naive and illogical: if removing the “veil” had revealed the original paintwork, what would need to be recuperated?

The over-selling of restorations can distort scholarship itself. Where Artdaily describes the two pictures as having been painted by Velazquez with the help of assistants, Iberdrola speaks with possessive proprietary pride of “emblematic works of Diego Velazquez” now rightfully displayed in the same gallery as “Las Meninas” and “the other three renowned equestrian portraits of the artist”. This inflation traduces the labours of scholars. In her 1948 book “Velazquez”, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier (a member of the Hispanic Society of America) said of the Philip III that it is:

“by an unknown artist, or according to Beruete by Bartolomé González, retouched by Velázquez…Beruete wrote of Philip III’s portrait: ‘The greater part of the horse, the retouches of the armour, the horseman’s right arm, leg and foot; the stirrup, bit, the ornaments which hang from the horse’s croup, and the retouching of some parts of the sea-scape in the distance, are undoubtedly by his hand; one feels in them the lightness of his touch and his habitual precision and vigour. On the other hand, the forehead and the nostrils of the horse, as well as a great part of the background, were doubtless executed by the pupil Mazo.’ Beruete thought that Veláquez left the head of the King in its original state; others are of the opinion that he repainted it.”

More recently, in his posthumously republished Catalogue Raisonné (Taschen/Wildenstein, 1996), José Lopez-Rey describes a bewildering array of attributions and summarises that most scholars are agreed “on the strength of visual evidence that this equestrian portrait […had been] executed by a lesser hand and later reworked by Velázquez or under his direction”. Lopez-Rey adds that “Whoever the original painter of Philip III on Horseback, the painting has been visibly repainted, mainly the head, chest, forelegs and tail of the horse, possibly by Velázquez or an assistant in about 1634-35” and that by 1772 both Philip III and Queen Margaret had been extended from vertical to roughly square formats by additional vertical strips of canvas on both sides. Re Iberdrola’s hyperbole, Lopez-Rey draws distinctions between the entirely autograph Velazquezs “The Surrender of Breda” and the equestrian portraits of Philip IV and Prince Balthasar Carlos; the equestrian portrait of Queen Isabel, where Velazquez’s hand is “recognisable”, and the two recently restored works under consideration here, where that authorial hand is present only to a “lesser degree” in pictures “which were mostly executed by other painters”.

Given this consensus of uncertain authorial contributions, Iberdrola’s attempt to spin authentic Velazquez silk seems brazen when the Prado’s own before and after restoration photographs of the Philip III show so many artistically disturbing changes. During their latest restoration/recuperation, the sections of canvas that had been added to the sides of both paintings during the 18th century were cut off. Artdaily says that these additions had been made to make the paintings compositionally compatible with other works when installed in a new room in the Royal Palace in Madrid. The Fundación Iberdrola justifies stripping these historical extensions on the grounds that their removal has created a greater compositional contrast between the two pictures and the three great autograph Velazquez equestrian portraits of Philp IV, Isabel of Bourbon and Prince Baltasar Carlos. Artdaily describes the cleaning and the cropping together as having achieved the greatest possible recuperation of the “original perceptual conditions“. What is not acknowledged by either party is that this removal of historically resonant material has served to eliminate possibly discomfiting visual testimony to the original condition of the paintings (- at least insofar as it had survived into the 18th century) and made the task of gauging the effects of successive restorations almost impossible.

It can be assumed that when those strips were added, their values matched and seamlessly extended the then extant values of the two pictures (as with the repair to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes discussed in our April 1st 2011 post). What, therefore, might account for the mismatched values that had emerged and persisted (see right) until the recent twin restoration? The strips would likely have been painted by a single artist, in a single campaign and without need for making the numerous revisions and re-revisions by the assorted, variously attributed hands that are evident in the paintings themselves. It is unlikley that any paint layers in the extensions would have been made over already varnished paintwork and therefore be at risk of floating off during cleaning. Conspicuously, the most obviously exculpatory explanation for the mismatch of tones – that the additions had matched the values of the picture when under an old darkened varnish – has not been offered. The restorers reportedly attribute the mismatches solely to the technical fact that the bordering strips had been painted over darker ground colours than those in the paintings, and that this had somehow caused “the pigments in the two areas [to have] behaved differently over the course of the centuries”. This does not hold water: while darker grounds would certainly come to influence the values of the extensions as the overlying paint became translucent with age (as can most clearly be seen in the “see-through” of the first state of Philip III’s horse), it could not alone have done so to such striking (and varying) extents as have occurred in the two paintings. Whereas, the fact that darker grounds were used on the extensions would itself suggest an initial perceived need to match the then darker values of the paintings.

There is another reason for disregarding the current restorers’ explanation. If the dark ground theory were correct, the mismatch phenomenon would have arisen very slowly over time and not have – as the photographic record shows – lurched into being on successive restorations (see Figs. 2, 6 & 7). Artdaily has not shown before and after photographs of the Queen Margaret, which painting Lopez-Rey describes in the 1996 edition of his catalogue raisonné as having been restored in 1968. His post-1968 illustration is shown here in Fig. 2. However, in the 1978 edition of the book an apparently earlier (and presumably pre-1968 restoration) state is reproduced (see Figs. 6 & 7 for details of that state). At that date, the left-hand extension read only fractionally darker than the painting, and although the right-hand extension was appreciably darker it was less obtrusively so than was the case after the 1968 restoration. As described opposite, and as can clearly be seen in Fig. 7, the impact of the dark ground was neglible at the brightest part of the sky, on the horizon, where it might have been expected to be most evident. The original dramatically escalating darkness in the sky above those points should, therefore, properly be taken as part of the original tonal schema – and not as either accumulated filth or ground paint see-through. The similarity of the states in both paintings, as seen in Fig. 2, might suggest that the Philip too had been restored around the late 1960s. The differences between the pre and the post 1968 restoration states of the Margaret speak of massive changes of value being made during a single “treatment”. The horse, for example, was reduced from a deep rich chestnut to a tan colouring. That the earlier chestnut appearance had not been a by-product of some filthy misleading “veil” is demonstrable: the whites on the horse’s muzzle and upper left leg read as white not yellow or grey or brown. Whatever might account for the radical changes, it was not consistent with the removal of some overall disfiguring layer.

Characterising the surgical elimination of material that bears awkward testimony of an earlier, now irrecoverably lost state, as a recuperation of a painting’s “ original conditions” is naive and seriously misleading. With every restoration – however funded – the most urgent critical question must always be: “did it do any harm?” To answer it, we must begin by using our eyes and, perhaps, by heeding the advice of artists, one of whom reportedly asked “What’s that dirt called that the restorers clean off? Oh, that’s right – burnt umber.”

Michael Daley

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

Printer-friendly PDF version of this article

Above, Fig. 1: “Philip III on Horseback”, before (left) and after (right) its recent restoration as shown in artdaily.org, with photographs by courtesy of the Prado. Consider this: if restorations did no more than simply remove dirt and discoloured varnish, then with each restoration a work would be returned to its condition when last cleaned. This does not happen – every restoration produces a new, different work – but were it to occur, there could be no news-grabbing claims about miraculously recovered original conditions. Were it to occur it would also be possible, by placing photographs of today’s restored works against photographs of the works when last restored, to reassure art lovers that nothing untoward happened during restoration. Such photographic comparisons are not volunteered because they cannot be; because, as frank curators admit, in every restoration there are losses as well as gains; there is always a trade-off between improved legibility and losses or corruptions of artistic content.
Above, Fig. 2: “Philip III on Horseback” (left) and “Margaret of Austria” (right) as shown in the 1996 Taschen/Wildenstein edition of José Lopez-Rey’s “Velazquez ~ Painter of Painters”. With regard to the reliability of these photographs, unless otherwise established, we take them to have been judged by the authors and publishers to have derived from reliable sources and to constitute fair depictions. Concerning the testimony of photographs generally, they do not need to be absolutely accurate and truthful (although that is, of course, a desirable goal – see Gareth Hawker). In two respects their testimonial value is essentially relative. That is, it is the patterns of values within a photograph that are crucial – the linked ratios of tone/hue values. (If a tone which goes into a restoration darker than its neighbours emerges lighter then there is, ipso facto, cause for investigation and explanation.) Similarly, much of the testimony of individual photographs lies in their appearance vis-a-vis earlier and later photographs. Both of the two photographs above are markedly different – and in the same way – from their earlier counterparts in the 1978 Italian edition of Lopez-Rey’s book. Both of the paintings then were much darker (and handsomer – see Figs. 6 & 7), and in both cases the discrepancies between the original paintings and their 18th century extensions were then less pronounced and artistically disruptive. In the photographs above we can see that although the extensions are now markedly darker than the centre sections, they are not uniformly so. The darkest passages occur in all of the corners of the Philip and in three of the corners in the Queen Margaret picture. At that date artists worked hierarchically, with figures – especially monarchs – pre-eminent, and backgrounds (landscapes, seascapes, skies) subservient. The lighter tones of heads and their fineries were commonly thrown into relief and pictorial promininence by conveniently dark clouds or foliage (see Fig. 6). Artists did not transcribe their values from camera obscuros, they manipulated them to suit their own purposes. Had the darkness of the extensions been a consequence of underpaint show-through, its disfiguring presence would have been most apparent where the lightest values fall, which is in the bottom of the sky at the horizon. In fact, any see-through distortion is least apparent at those points (see below). It seems safe to conclude, therefore, that paint, previously present elsewhere, has been lost. By an accident of chemistry, it is the darker pigments, such as burnt umber, that are most vulnerable to cleaning solvents.
Above, Fig. 3: “Philip III on Horseback”, attributed to Velazquez and others, as shown in the 1996 Lopez-Rey. To appreciate the scale of changes that restorers’ make, the photograph above, which predates 1996, has been cropped to the format shown in the before and after photographs shown above and below (Figs. 1, 4 & 5) which record the effects of the painting’s recent treatment and surgery. The shifts of value are enormous. The surgery was radical – the 18th century additions were removed. The claims made by the restorers’ are matchingly enormous. These paintings are said to be “fully restored to their original appearance”. It is claimed that “While it was previously difficult to appreciate the merit of these works within the group (other than for their purely iconographic merits) , these are now absolutely evident.” It is specifically claimed that a new dynamism has emerged in the Philip III and that this has been transmitted “through the foreshortening of the horse and the luminous sky behind the figure“. The foreshortening of the horse was a done deal before this restoration began. As can be seen in Fig. 5, however, the painting has acquired an overall, florid colouring. The sky may be a cooler more uniform blue but it has lost its previous theatre and differentiations. The lights in the painting came from two sources. There was a brilliant, off stage-right “spotlight” that lit the front of the horse and the monarch, whose own brilliantly illuminated and modelled leg bisected the horse’s primary lights and shades. Additionally, there was a raking general light from the horizon that reflected in the water, throwing the horse’s darker tones into relief. These effects, as they survived in Figs. 3 & 4, have not been enhanced by restoration or recuperation, they have been weakened. By liberating blueness at the expense of tonality, the sky, instead of receding and throwing the horse and rider into relief, now simply obtrudes.
Above, Fig. 4: “Philip III on Horseback”, before the recent restoration, as shown in artdaily.org. One the hardest things to establish in restorations is the extent to which restorers wield their own brushes. To spot their tiniest but often crucial interventions (on the most sensitive and expressive parts of faces, for example) requires the provision of detailed photographs recording after-cleaning and after-cleaning-and-retouching states. The two artdaily photographs are sufficient, however, to show that massive retouching (“recuperation”?) occurred in one zone. Before this last intervention, the originally positioned baton carrying arm of Philip showed through the painting of the sky. Now (as seen below) it does not. What other additions were made? What proportion of this now “fully restored to… original appearance” painting is a product of the 21st century?
Above, Fig. 5: “Philip III on Horseback”, after the recent restoration, as shown in artdaily.org. One noteworthy injury in this painting can be seen at the horse’s left knee. Previously, as seen in Figs. 3 & 4, the contour of the leg was articulated by the contrast between the light upper surface of the leg and the adjacent dark of the distant town across the water. With the eradication of that strategically placed, pictorially functional dark zone, an ungainly thick dark bar has emerged that attaches to neither the horse nor the town but instead floats on the picture surface. In all probability its original function at an early stage of painting had been to serve as a shorthand guide to the artist of the tonal requirement that would later be needed to throw the advancing horse into relief.

Above, Fig. 6: Artdaily does not show photographs of the restored Margaret but an earlier restoration seems apparent in a comparison of the plates in the 1978 and the 1996 editions of José Lopez-Rey’s book. We see in the details above left and below left the painting before its 1968 restoration. The differences between them and their later counterparts are remarkable. No educated eye could equate the differences between these states with a straightforward removal of an overall film of dirt, or discoloured, “veiling” varnishes. The changes are variously too abrupt, too arbitrary and too injurious to the force and strength of the picture. No overall covering could return the washed-out post-1968 restoration state to its former vigour. No discoloured varnish could now “recuperate” the former chestnut of the horse from the succeeding tan colouring, on the one hand, and/or simultaneously restore the wooded valleys of the bottom right to their former vigour and panache. A single, seemingly intractable passage of paint gives the lie to successive treatments of this picture. We see in the tiny recalcitrant dark remnants of trees that still cling to the edge of the side of the second hill down from the horizon, the last corroboration of the values in the original picture that had been matched on the extension canvas. We see them here, as in the aftermath of the 1968 restoration, but will not, presumably, see them again, given the recent “recuperating” removal of this mute information-rich canvas extension.

Above, Fig. 7: the right-hand extension of the “Margaret of Austria on Horseback”, before (left) and after (right) the 1968 restoration.
Click on the images above for larger versions. NOTE: zooming requires the Adobe Flash Plug-in.

<

December 6, 2011 | Categories: blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Leave A Comment »

Why is the Metropolitan Museum of Art afraid of public disclosures on its picture restorers’ cleaning materials?

March 9th 2011

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

Printer-friendly PDF version of this article

Above: a detail of the Metropolitan Museum’s undated and untitled booklet on the acquisition of Velazquez’s Juan de Pareja and Hubert von Sonneburg’s secret restoration of it at Wildenstein and Company in 1971. Below: the front cover of the booklet, and a further detail below.
Above: a detail of the Infanta Margarita’s costume in Velazquez’s Las Meninas before the restoration of 1984; below, the same detail after restoration.
Above: a detail of the Infanta Margarita before restoration by John Brealey. Below, the same detail after Brealey’s restoration.
An editorial in the January 1985 issue of The Burlington Magazine, then edited by Neil MacGregor, observed that “Cleaning controversies are probably the livliest, and they are certainly the hardiest, of the art world’s topics of discussion.” The editorial acknowledged that the cleaning of Las Meninas had “provoked months of violent debate in the Spanish press”. One press commentator had complained “‘Las Meninas’ son sagradas” and there was not even an anniversary or an exhibition to to authorise tampering with the taboo. The editorial seemed to see no connection between the fact that the painting “had not had serious conservation this century” and that it was found to be in “excellent condition”, which state allowed Brealey’s campaign to “proceed so fast and, relatively speaking, so easily”. The American painter, Peter Arguimbau, had access to the restoration through the good offices of a friend who was a curator at the Prado at the time. He retains vivid and painful memories of the shock on seeing the great work in “restoration”: “He did it in two weeks with fist-full swabs of cotton, acetone and rubber gloves that so destroyed the illusion of the painting that articles were written in Spain on how the country had been brought to tears in mourning the devastation”. Neil MacGregor, when director of the National Gallery was a steadfast defender of restorers and restorations throughout his reign (1987-2002). His resolve seemed to suffer a momentary lapse in 1990. In his foreword to the re-publication of Kenneth Clark’s book One Hundred Details from Pictures in the National Gallery, London Mr MacGregor acknowledged that Kenneth Clark (who had provoked violent controversy with his own cleaning in 1936 of Velazquez’s Philip IV of Spain in Brown and Silver), had been “fearful of what might be found if the golden veils of dirt and varnish were ever to be removed”. Moreover, he added, “The reader who can compare the earlier edition with this one will decide how much is gain, how much loss.”

Click on the images above for larger versions. NOTE: zooming requires the Adobe Flash Plug-in.

March 9, 2011 | Categories: blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave A Comment »

wibble!