The Getty is using visitors’ mobile devices to educate about high-tech examination revelations

Excerpts from CNET by Daniel Terdiman:

At Getty Museum, revelations of art via tech.  Known for its collection of classic European art, the Getty Museum in L.A. uses technology to enhance visitors’ experiences and to study its masterpieces. CNET Road Trip 2012 stopped by…

While visitors will use their mobile devices to learn more about the artworks they encounter at the Getty, they’re also being encouraged to learn how the museum’s scientists use technology to study and maintain art there.

This is currently being showcased in the presentation of Dutch artist Maerten Van Heemskerck’s 1544 triptych “Ecce Homo,” which is on loan from the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland. Located in a special gallery at the Getty, “Ecce Homo” offers visitors the chance to see how conservators use technology like X-Rays, stratiradiography, infrared reflectography, and multispectral and hyperspectral imaging to examine every element of the masterpiece — the front, the back, and even below the paint.

X-rays, explained Yvonne Szafran, the Getty’s senior conservator of paintings, are useful because the technology can provide a glimpse of the structure of a painting, and how an artist applied paint to it. That works, Szafran explained, because the pigments in paint vary in their radio-opacity. So, for example, anywhere Heemskerck used lead white paint shows up in an X-ray as very dense. 

With stratiradiography, Szafran and her team can examine a painting at an angle while spinning it around in order to see if there are elements that have been obscured. For example, with “Ecce Homo,” she was able to determine that on the back side of the triptych’s left panel, Heemskerck had originally included a swan, and then painted over it.

By using infrared reflectography, Szafran explained, it’s possible to see just below the layer of paint, but not all the way to the wood below, something that’s particularly valuable in trying to see the artist’s original drawing. With “Ecce Homo,” Szafran said, it’s possible to see that the drawing below the painting was done with black chalk.

Conservators also use ultraviolet light to discover post-painting restoration, as well as to identify certain kinds of pigments.

Finally, Szafran and her colleagues can use multi-spectral imaging and hyper-spectral imaging to identify the different kinds of materials used in an artwork without having to take a sample.

Read the full article here.

Jackson Pollock’s ‘Mural’ arrives at Getty’s conservation lab

Excerpt from the LA Times, by Christopher Knight

“Mural,” the critically important painting in Jackson Pollock’s development as a major American artist, has arrived in the conservation lab at the J. Paul Getty Museum. A visit Wednesday to see the monumental 1943 canvas, which is in the collection of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, shows why conservation work is imperative.

What the artist called “a stampede” of shapes, lines of force and rhythmic colors across the canvas had a profound effect on American art, sweeping away the nativist ethos of his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton.

But a pronounced sag can now be seen in the center of the painting at the top. Unframed, “Mural” is roughly 8 feet tall and 20 feet wide. The downward weight in the middle is pulling up the bottom edges of the canvas at the right and left. Rather than a wide rectangle, “Mural” is showing modest but clear signs of a broad, downward curve.

What caused the sagging? At some point, a new lining on the back was added to reinforce the canvas. Re-lining, a common procedure, employed a wax adhesive. Given the picture’s size, considerable weight was added to the painting.

Museum conservators will work with scientists at the Getty Conservation Institute to determine how to rectify the problem. They also plan to remove a layer of varnish from the painting’s surface, apparently added in the 1970s, which creates a slight sheen.

Tests will also be done to catalog the paints Pollock employed. It might even be possible to figure out whether the legend that says Pollock painted “Mural” in a single day is valid. Drying times for paint layers, many of which are visibly crisp and clean and plainly were not painted wet-on-wet, might yield clues.

Read the complete article in the Los Angeles Times here.

Jackson Pollock's "Mural"

A keen-eyed conservator identifies the true artist

Excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

We are introduced to van Aelst by what must be one of the most ostentatious of “ostentatious still lifes” and, at 6½ by 5½ feet, one of the largest. “Pronk Still Life With Armor” (c. 1651) is a riot of richly embellished, highly polished metal, cascading from table to elaborately upholstered chair to floor, glowing against a dark background. There’s a breastplate, a helmet surmounted by a golden dragon, a sword and a dagger with lavish scabbards, miscellaneous ornate gold serving pieces, a nautilus cup and more, amid a waterfall of gleaming fabrics and a staggering amount of gold fringe. (There’s also a gold medallion with van Aelst’s monogram, spotted by the National Gallery’s conservator Melanie Gifford, that confirms his authorship; previously the painting was assigned to van Aelst’s fellow pronk specialist, Willem Kalf.) No surprise to learn that this astonishing picture was commissioned by a French aristocrat.

 

Read the entire article here: The Glitter of a Golden Age

 

Titian’s ‘La Bella’ on display and looking beautiful thanks to good maintenance

Excerpts from The Oregonian.

After a lifetime in Italy (except for 15 years at the Louvre in Paris, where she was taken in 1800 as booty from the Napoleonic Wars), [Titian’s “La Bella” has] crossed the ocean from her luxuriant quarters in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence for a brief tour. Following stops at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, she’s taken up lodging through Jan. 29 at the Portland Art Museum, in a second-floor gallery that is ordinarily given over to the display of ancient and classical objects and art.

In the 16th century or the 21st, La Bella is beautiful. For many visitors, that will be enough. For historians and other scholars, who want to know everything about the past and are dauntingly aware that much, probably most, of it will forever be a mystery, the stakes seem higher.

… Titian used this model, or this invented idea of beauty, in several paintings. The face of “La Bella” is also recognizable in his famous reclining nude, “Venus of Urbino,” at the Uffizi in Florence, from 1538; in the bare-shouldered and bare-breasted “Woman in a Fur Coat,” at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, from 1536; and in the same year’s “Woman With a Plumed Hat,” at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

One of the reasons “La Bella” is visiting the United States for the first time is to show off her most recent conservation, which has literally put the blush back in her cheeks.

Titian’s portrait has had the good fortune over the centuries to be cleaned both regularly and carefully — “rather than being subjected to complicated and invasive restorations, the painting has instead been the object of constant maintenance,” Gabriella Incerpi writes in the exhibition catalog — and that meticulousness has made things easier for modern conservators, who seek the least obtrusive ways to strip away the dulling effects of decades of varnish and restore a painting’s original brightness and tones.
The process can be controversial, as the uproar over the gleaming new colors in the Sistine Chapel suggests: In cleaning an old work of art, do conservators also eliminate its history? As Ferriso puts it: “You don’t want to strip away the pigment. On the other hand, you do want to be able to see the painting.”

You can see “La Bella” — beautifully. And, despite the restored brilliance of her colors and the immediacy of her presence, in no way as if she were born yesterday.

Up close, you can glimpse the painting’s craquelure — the tiny patterns of cracking in the oil paint as it gradually shrinks on the canvas — but not overmuch. It ages but does not dilute the painting, which with its restoration has become not so much new as revivified, showing its age in the best possible light.

Whoever she was, “La Bella” has aged well. She’s still a looker.

A Conservator takes a crack at a Gustave Baumann mystery

Excerpt from http://www.nmhistorymuseum.org/blog/

Artist, printmaker and woodworker Gustave Baumann has a well-deserved “beloved” status in Santa Fe, his home for the final 53 years of his life. The Palace Press at the History Museum re-created his studio, using his original materials, tools and furnishings. The New Mexico Museum of Art owns a number of his prints (some of them on display in an exhibit right now) and the replicas and originals of marionettes he carved for theatrical performances.

So what’s a conservator from Indiana doing here this week prowling around his legacy? She’s trying to solve a couple of lingering mysteries that Baumann left behind.

“We’re going to do a museum exhibit of his prints, drawings and paintings in 2014,” said Claire Hoevel, senior conservator of paper for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which holds a complete set of prints Baumann made during his youthful stint in that state’s Brown County Art Colony.

“Attached to that exhibit is a huge analytical project to find out exactly what his materials were — pigments, bindings, gessos, the fibers in his papers. Our hope is to gain a very thorough understanding of Baumann and his processes, how he worked, and his enormous accomplishments.”

Thanks to the bottles, cans and jars of materials Baumann left after his 1971 death — materials that are now part of the Palace Press’ exhibit — Hoevel has an opportunity rare in conservator circles. …

Life & Death in the Pyramid Age: The Emory Old Kingdom Mummy’ at Carlos Museum

Excerpt from AJC:

Recently conserved after almost a century-long hibernation in storage, [a mummy] is the star of and impetus for the museum’s “Life & Death in the Pyramid Age: The Emory Old Kingdom Mummy.” Egyptologist Peter Lacovara conveys the historical, religious and geographical context for the prized artifact through tomb objects from the Carlos collection — many acquired with this show in mind — loans, large-scale photographs and informative texts.

The exhibition designers created a particularly dramatic tableau by transforming a gallery doorway into the entrance to a tomb. The visitor walks through it, just as an ancient Egyptian bringing an offering for the deceased would have done, to reach the offering plate (one of the new Carlos acquisitions), which sits in front of an actual “false door” door of a tomb.

Off to one side, a wooden sculpture — a repository for the tomb-owner’s soul — “watches” the proceedings through a backlit slit in the wall.

The video about the mummy’s conservation, definitely a highlight, recounts the lengths to which a multidisciplinary team went to reassemble and secure the severely deteriorated mummy — a prospect a daunted conservator described as the equivalent of piecing together a bag of crushed potato chips.

 

In some respects, conservation was uncharted territory. The mummy represents a period in which Egyptians were still experimenting with the process and conventions of mummification — before they arrived, for example, at the stiff prone position to which we are accustomed.

It’s fascinating to see how creatively Carlos conservator Renee Stein and colleague Mimi Leveque solved structural problems inherent in putting a 4,000-year-old Humpty Dumpty back together, and how they made use of discoveries Lacovara reported from the field during the process. (Hint: ears and mittens.)

Read the full article here.

New Publication from MCI: Biocolonization of Stone

Smithsonian Institute’s Museum Conservation Institute (MCI) is pleased to announce the second in the series of the Smithsonian Contribution to Museum Conservation, “Biocolonization of Stone: Control and Preventive Methods: Proceedings from the MCI Workshop Series” is now officially published. The full-volume PDF is available from: http://www.scholarlypress.si.edu/index.cfm or http://si-pddr.si.edu/dspace/handle/10088/16617.

 

The Watts Towers, Sturdy Survivors

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal revisits the Watts Towers.  We learned last summer that LACMA has a contract to oversee the conservation of the iconic Watts Towers, but this article by Arnie Cooper starts at the beginning, introducing the Towers’ eccentric artist, Simon Rodia, and speaks with conservation scientist Frank Preusser to uncover details about the construction and ornamentation.  The following is an excerpt:

Rodia worked with no plans or drawings and certainly no permits. He didn’t use nails, bolts or even a simple drill. In the 1957 documentary “The Towers,” made by William Hale, Rodia can be seen bending a piece of steel on the nearby railway tracks. According to Mr. Preusser, Rodia used “everything” to build the structure, including water pipes, chicken wire and welded mesh. “He’d put steel bars together, add some wire mesh and tie it to the structure, put cement around it and then add the ornaments.”

Amazingly, though, the towers are structurally sound, as proved during a much-publicized load-bearing test in 1959. A winch truck exerted a 10,000-pound pull on the tower—to no avail. The structures even withstood the 1987 Whittier and 1994 Northridge earthquakes, with only a slight tilting of one tower noticeable.

“Considering its age and the way it was constructed and the materials used, it’s in remarkably good condition,” says Mr. Preusser, who first got involved with the project back in 1984.

Not that the towers don’t need some work. This involves, says Mr. Preusser, “not only restoring Rodia’s original artwork, but also addressing the three major past restorations.”

Rodia used mostly found or “borrowed” objects as structural elements. The shiny green bottoms of 7-Up bottles figure prominently here. And since Rodia was a tile cutter and setter, visitors will note several specimens from the Malibu Tile company, as well as numbered tiles that had once been catalog material. They’ll also encounter china fragments of every possible shape and color, sea shells, cooking utensils, mirror pieces and larger forms like mortar “gardens,” “the ship” and hearts fashioned out of concrete. There’s even a wall made of slag and frit, the raw materials for making glass.

Ms. Anderson draws our attention to the tower floor, which features lacy designs courtesy of the backs of wrought-iron chairs. Thanks to Rodia’s experience with cement, such impressions extended to the walls, one of which includes imprints of Rodia’s simple tools: a set of wire clippers and various hammers, all artfully assembled amid hose-nozzle “flowers” and the artist’s initials.

“Some of these impressions are still pristine,” says Mr. Preusser, pointing to a wall displaying the pattern left by a straw mat. “This is why we’re saying the state of conservation is still remarkable. Rodia knew how to make a good cement.”