Conserving Modern Art

A number of years ago there was an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., devoted to the issue of the conservation and preservation of art made of experimental materials and in innovative styles that don’t age well or lend themselves easily to cleaning.  (My mother and I had gone to see Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited, 20 September 2007-6 January 2008, and this coincident exhibit was in the next gallery) and I’ve never forgotten the point: as artists were experimenting with new media and techniques, they never considered how those things would change over time—10, 20, 50 years—or how they could be cleaned and maintained as they collected dirt and dust from the environment.  This created sometimes immense challenges for museums and conservators (not to mention private owners with fewer resources) long after the artists had probably died.  (I posted a report on the Morris Louis show on Rick On Theater on 15 February 2010.)

Writing an article for an alumni newsletter about some art I gave to my undergrad alma mater made me think about the “unusual” pieces of art that are in my parents’ collection (discussed in “A Passion For Art: My Parents’ Art Collecting,” posted on 21 November 2017) and mine, too, to a smaller extent.   I also thought of this when I went to the David Wojnarowicz (1954-92) retrospective at the Whitney a couple of months ago (see “History Keeps Me Awake at Night,” 19 October 2018). I wonder how many people consider this when they see modern art in museums or galleries.

The on-line Encyclopedia Britannica defines art conservation and restoration as “any attempt to conserve and repair architecture, paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and objects of the decorative arts . . . that have been adversely affected by negligence, willful damage, or, more usually, the inevitable decay caused by the effects of time and human use on the materials of which they are made.”  (Britannica makes a distinction between conservation, “the maintenance and preservation of works of art and their protection from future damage and deterioration,” and restoration, “the repair or renovation of artworks that have already sustained injury or decay and the attempted restoration of such objects to something approaching their original undamaged appearance.”  In this article, I’ll consider both as forms of conservation—as Britannica adds, “The techniques and methods of art conservation and restoration go hand in hand”—with the distinction that the former is designated “preventive conservation” and the latter “conservation treatment,” as I discuss later.  These are the terms most art museums, including the Smithsonian art museums and the National Gallery of Art, seem to use and I’m following their lead.) 

The encyclopedia goes on:

The methods of art restoration used in earlier periods were closely linked to and limited by the art production techniques known at the time.  Advances in science and technology and the development of conservation as a profession in the 20th century have led to safer and more effective approaches to studying, preserving, and repairing objects.  Modern conservation practice adheres to the principle of reversibility, which dictates that treatments should not cause permanent alteration to the object.

Morris Louis (1912-62), a  founder of the Washington Color School, experimented with pouring pigment directly onto unprimed canvas, staining the canvas with bright, vivid colors.  The artist worked first in oils (diluted with solvents so it would pour), then later in the newly-developed acrylics (originally invented for house-painting, not art—this was an off-label application).  Some of his work, which spanned from the early 1950s to his death in 1962, was approaching 50 years old.  The exhibit tacked on to Morris Louis Now was intended to offer “insights into the Hirshhorn’s groundbreaking conservation techniques developed to preserve and restore poured-paint canvases by various artists.”  The curators also asserted that the conservation display would allow museumgoers to “experience the richness of Louis’s canvases with the added perspective of how the innovation of his methods has [led] to similarly innovative approaches to caring for these vibrant, delicate works of art.”

(Some years earlier, the Hirshhorn had mounted another exhibit on this issue, Conservation of Modern Art, 2 February-31 March 1985, in which 17 works of more than half a dozen artists from the museum’s own collection—Arshile Gorky, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Larry Rivers, and others—that had undergone conservation treatment were shown.  The conserved pieces were accompanied by photographs depicting what they had looked like before the treatment.  A later Hirshhorn display, How Does Museum Staff Care for Modern and Contemporary Art?, 25 July 2003-31 January 2004, was “intended to address the interaction of principle, practice, materials, techniques and ideas, which characterizes the preservation and care of contemporary and modern art.”)

I had a serious problem of this nature with a painting from 1958 that began to deteriorate because of the innovative technique the artist used to create it.  The fate of my little Abstract Expressionist painting, Intermezzo (1958) by Norman Carton (1908-80), is a simple, but perfect example of what the issue here is.  The 18-inch-by-16-inch, heavily impastoed, multi-colored work in oil on canvas, purchased in December 1960 by my folks as a 14th-birthday gift for me, is one of the most cherished pieces I have—because I love the painting for itself, because it’s the first piece of art I ever owned, and because it was a specially selected present from my parents (bought from  “our” art gallery; see “Gres Gallery,” 7, 10, and 13 July 2018).  I took Intermezzo with me every time I moved, except when I went to college and the army (when it stayed in “my” room at my parents’ Washington home). 

In the 1980s, the painting began to deteriorate.  The oil paint—Carton made the painting before new pigments like acrylics were invented—had just begun to dry on the inside of the thick gobs the artist had applied to the canvas with a palette knife.  Who knew it would take three decades for oil paint to dry inside large clumps?  As the paint dried, the globs shrank and pulled away from the canvas, not only threatening to come off, but causing cracks and flakes (called “cleavage,” “flaking,” “blistering,” or “scaling”) in the primer (known as “ground”) and flatter areas of paint on the canvas.  I knew that if I didn’t do something, I’d lose the painting.  I was frantic.  I even went so far as to write to the administration of New York’s New School for Social Research (now known simply as The New School), where Carton had exhibited and taught, because on the third floor of the old main building at 5th Avenue and 14th Street (razed in 2010 and replaced in 2014), the school displayed a larger Carton canvas in the same style as my small one.  I asked if they had encountered the same problem and, if so, what they did about it, but I never received an answer.

At the time, my father was a docent at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in downtown D.C.  I asked him to use his contacts at the museum to find a conservator who might be able to save Intermezzo and he did, a gallery he and Mom had used for years for framing and evaluations.  In 1987, I ended up paying five times the painting’s purchase price—but a quarter of its estimated value at the time—to stabilize it to prevent further deterioration.  (This incident always reminds me of an anecdote in Sammy Davis, Jr.’s 1965 memoir, Yes, I Can, in which he relates how he’d buy $5 jeans and then spend $20 to have them tailored to his style )  To this day, I don’t regret the expenditure for a New York second.

Other pieces I have are suffering smaller problems and pieces in my parents’ collection are also susceptible to this issue, such as monoprints, one mine and one my parents’, by Sam Gilliam (b. 1933).  Petals and Flowers (both 1989) are three-dimensional constructions of hand-made paper with edges and surfaces that serve as dust-collectors.  Mom and Dad had another work on paper that has a 3D aspect, Stanley Boxer’s (1926-2000) Highfromblare (High From Blare, ca. 1987), enclosed in a Lucite box because they were afraid it would have problems if exposed to airborne grime or inappropriate touching.  (The trade-off for protecting Highfromblare against environmental damage is that the work, which is pretty big at 52½ by 41 inches, is heavy and unwieldy in that plastic box, hard to move and hang.  Ironically, it was one of Mother’s favorite pieces.) 

Artists, of course, aren’t thinking of maintenance or aging years down the road when they start experimenting with new materials and techniques; it’s not really their jobs, after all.  No one had any idea how the innovative and non-traditional media would age.  (This is not the same as the Conceptual Artists who made art with deliberately perishable materials—the rot was part of the “concept.”  It’s also different from Banksey’s self-destructing Girl With Balloon back in October.) 

Difficulties derived from innovative art techniques are not new, of course.  I imagine Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine artists made works that disintegrated, faded, or peeled away before any modern person got to see them; I won’t even speculate about prehistoric cave-painters.  One early example we know about is from the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci’s famous lost mural, The Battle of Anghiari (1505). 

Commissioned to paint a fresco on a wall in the Hall of the Five Hundred in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, da Vinci (1452-1519) used an experimental technique called encausto or “encaustic painting.”  Also known as “hot wax painting,” this is a method of painting in which color agents are added to beeswax.  While the color medium is still warm and soft, it’s applied to a surface—in the case of Battle of Anghiari, a plaster wall.  As the encaustic medium cools, it hardens, setting the colors, but the palazzo hall was so vast that da Vinci set huge braziers to keep the wax soft long enough for him to finish the application before it cooled—but the wax-based pigment basically melted from the heat from the braziers and ran down the plaster, blending all the colors and essentially dissolving the painting before it could even be finished.  All that remained were da Vinci’s original “cartoons,” the drawings of his planned fresco.

Of course, this disaster happened right away.  The subjects of the Hirshhorn’s exhibition only demonstrated their problems years and even decades later (like my little Intermezzo, which showed its deterioration about 30 years after it was painted). That’s the province of today’s conservators, and since the advent of modern art—you can put your own date on that, but in terms of conservation, it has to do with the advent of non-traditional materials and methods used in making art—and especially over the last, say, 45 years, when experimentation took off like a rocket and never-before-imagined media were invented.  Think of acrylic paint, Mylar, new plastics like Lucite, or polyurethane sealants and coatings, among other developments.  (My parents owned a pair of 1972 “sculptures”—that’s what the artist called them—by José Bermudez, 1922-1988, made from old-style copper computer tape.  Who could possibly guess what would become of that?)  There’s also the matter of artists’ using old materials in new ways as well as unconventional substances not previously considered the components of art.  (David Wojnarowicz’s Bread Sculpture, 1988–89, is made out of an actual loaf of bread!)

I’m only going to touch on the issue of ordinary wear and tear—everything ages, of course, and the environment (light, temperature, humidity, and pollutants) takes its toll on practically every substance known to humankind.  I’m not even going to consider the effects of weather and the atmosphere on outdoor art because that’s been a known problem for centuries—perhaps not acid rain or exhaust fumes from internal-combustion engines, but generally speaking.  

Another category of preservation concerns I won’t discuss here is the obsolescence of what conservators call “time-based media,” by which they mean film, video, digital, audio, computer-based, web-based, performance, and installation art.  The problems here don’t just include deterioration of the medium, but also the potentially more devastating matter of the loss of the technological mechanisms for retrieving the art.  (I have several old-fashioned floppy disks that I can no longer read, for example, and even some CD-ROM’s my current computer model can’t access.   There are also VCR tapes and cassette audio tapes, not to mention long-playing record albums the technologies for playing which will soon be unavailable, if they aren’t already.)  

Conservators do have to contend with all these problems and predict similar ones that will come into play in the (very near) future, but I’m going to stick with the base issue of the unpredictable changes in new, experimental media and materials—like the drying of the 30-year-old oil paint in my Norman Carton. 

There are essentially two branches of art conservation.  One,  preventive conservation, devises conditions that mitigate the deterioration and reduce the danger of physical harm from atmospheric action, pest infestation, age, or human interaction (including vandalism) to art on display, in storage, and in transit.  That’s proactive.  If instigated effectively, preventive care reduces the need for restoration and repair efforts.  My parents’ Boxer encased in its Lucite box is an example of preventive conservation; so is an antique Chinese scroll they brought back from the People’s Republic, also  displayed in a Lucite case because of its age—100 to 200 years old—and its innate delicacy. 

The problem of preventive care of art is exacerbated in contemporary artworks because even expert conservators often can’t predict how experimental or innovative media will react to age-old threats.  Effective preventive conservation requires constant vigilance because the threats occur continuously and are cumulative over time.  It also demands coordination by the conservators with other museum employees, such as curators, art handlers, maintenance personnel, building engineers, and protection staff.

Reactive tactics, called  conservation treatment, becomes necessary when preventive care fails or is insufficient.  It involves the cleaning, stabilization, repair, and restoration of art that’s already been damaged by the “agents of deterioration” I named above.  According to the National Park Service Museum Management Program, “conservation treatments are done as a last resort, kept to a minimum, and should be reversible.  This approach reduces the chances of compromising the . . . integrity of objects.” 

An example of conservation treatment is the monumental tapestry Woman (1977) created by Joan Miró (1893-1983) for the atrium of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  Also known as Femme, the 96¼-by-66¾-inch wool-and-cotton tapestry was displayed from 1978, when the I. M. Pei building opened, until 2003, when it was removed for cleaning and a respite from constant exposure to light. 

Preventive conservation is currently considered the preferred way of ensuring preservation of art.  Conservation treatment is inherently risky and generally requires more resources (and, hence, more money) and time.  In past eras, even well-intentioned conservation treatment had adverse impact on pieces of art, doing more harm to the work than no action at all would have.  (Consider, for example, the varnishing of paintings that was a common practice in the 19th and early 20th century, but which eventually darkened and obscured the original vividness of the colors.)  It’s for this reason that modern techniques should be reversible if at all possible, and that preventive care is favored over treatment.  (The NPS museum program advises that, though reversibility is a goal for several reasons, including unsuccessful application, “no treatment is completely reversible” and that “some cannot be reversed at all.”)

Sometimes conservation treatment isn’t initiated in order to reverse or repair damage but to enhance a work of art for effective display.  For instance, a metal vase which has an incised design can be cleaned so that the markings are revealed more perceptibly.  My parents’ collection includes an untitled tapestry (#20, ca. 1971) by Victor Vasarely (1906-1997), one of my favorite pieces in the collection.  The problem is, the op-art piece was sold as a rug and my folks planned to hang it on a wall.  A suitable hanging bracket which could support the 64-by-65-inch wool square had to be devised and fastened to the back of the artwork so that it not only would hang straight and flat, but would be securely mounted where my parents wanted to position it.

Both of these conservation strains start with research into the techniques and materials artists use to create their art, to analyze them and determine their properties with an eye on preserving the art for perpetuity.  (A side benefit of such study is that we sometimes gain new understanding of the artworks’ meanings, their context within the artists’ bodies of work and creative careers, and the creators’ artistic processes.)  Much of this analysis is science-based, using all kinds of technology, such as x-rays, infrared and ultraviolet light, photomicrography (photographs taken through a magnifier), and scanners, but sometimes the conservators also have to take a more metaphysical view of their goal, deciding how much change from age and exposure the artist might agree to and how much the public might accept and still appreciate the work. 

No work of art remains pristine, of course; just like us, everything humans create ages.  Are the consequences of that aging part of the work’s innate quality, like the patination of a bronze sculpture, or are they something that should be halted and even reversed?  If the latter, conservators often have to develop individualized means of cleaning and restoring artworks to avoid causing unforeseen harm to the materials in use.  With experimental media, this often requires discovering or inventing new and improved cleaning products that are compatible with the art materials in use which the conservators may never have encountered before. 

Testing and experimentation are often necessary, but that’s also a fraught process.  Art objects are unique—a conservator can’t very well try out a cleaning solution on one sample and then move on to another, like  testing a cutting from a bolt of cloth before using a process on the dress made from that material.  You could end up with a ruined painting or collage.  Knowing the materials used by the artist can be a vital step in the conservation treatment.  It’s more like cutting a diamond—there’s a lot of studying before any irreversible step is taken.  

Conservators gain insight either by analysis of the art object or related work, or from the creator’s input, including information directly from the artist (or the studio or foundry that made the piece under the artist’s supervision), notes, diaries, published interviews,  and other documentary sources.  Vincent van Gogh’s letters from Arles to his brother Theo, for example, often included detailed descriptions (and sketches) of paintings on which he was working, including the specific colors he was using for various images.  The National Gallery made a video of the creation of Woman, the Miró tapestry I wrote of earlier, with considerable detail about how it was woven and the fabrics used.  (It’s even available on line on a number of sites.)

Still, even with an nth degree of care and planning, there’s still the almost-unavoidable chance that even a simple surface cleaning will alter the painting, tapestry, or sculpture.  The sole guiding principle for conservators is to maintain the artists’ creative vision for the works—but how can they know that with any certainty, especially for deceased artists?  A byproduct of the analytical study of the piece of art and the artist her- or himself can help here, but it’s still something of a SWAG—a “scientific, wild-ass guess.” 

(What can also happen is that, when cleaned and restored, a painting will seem so different from what viewers had become used to, with brighter, more vibrant colors, that they are shocked, even to the point of vocal protests—even though the resulting artwork is what the artist had created, or nearly so.  This phenomenon has occasionally occurred with restored paintings from the Renaissance or Middle Ages that had collected centuries of grime and atmospheric pollution. 

(In 2017, after a restoration project of eight years and $18½ million that had been intended to return it to its 13th-century appearance, the Chartres Cathedral looked so different from what modern visitors had come to expect of a Gothic church that art historians and architecture critics denounced the results.  Many experts argued that the patina of filth should have been left on the walls to retain the “authentic” Gothic ambiance and stand as a testament to history.  The restorers and their supporters, as you’d expect, contended that they had recreated the original architects’ vision.  Of course, no one’s around from 1220 to attest to their accuracy—or deny it.)

Some alterations from time, use, or wear is deemed to be part of an artwork and while stabilization may be warranted, preventing the piece from deteriorating further, restoration or repair isn’t desirable.  Objects made for everyday use, rather than for pure aesthetic appreciation, are frequently of this type once they’re removed from regular use.  Among the art I have are a number of African pieces, including a carved wooden twin figure from the Yoruba people of Nigeria.  Twins are revered among the Yoruba and  when a twin dies, a figure is carved to represent its spirit,  The carving is ritually painted and decorated by the family and the figure I have still bears remnants of blue paint, but it would be inappropriate to restore the wooden figure to the pristine appearance the carver created before the family decorated it.

The basic principles and processes for conserving art are the same now as they have always been, but the pace of experimentation with materials and methods has challenged art conservators and exhibitors when it comes to keeping the art accessible, substantially unchanged, and exciting for art lovers in perpetuity—or as close to that as we can humanly come.  As artists come up with new ways to make art and new media out of which to make it, people who love art and want to preserve it for the enjoyment and enlightenment of generations to come will continuously have to come up with new ways of conserving the artists’ creations.

Banksey, of course, notwithstanding.