From the New York Times: Acropolis Maidens Glow Anew.

Caryatid Statues, Conserved, Are Stars at Athens Museum

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By LIZ ALDERMAN. JULY 7, 2014

Using specially developed laser technology, conservators at the Acropolis Museum stripped centuries of grime from the Caryatids statues, among the great divas of ancient Greece. Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times
Using specially developed laser technology, conservators at the Acropolis Museum stripped centuries of grime from the Caryatids statues, among the great divas of ancient Greece. Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times

ATHENS — For 2,500 years, the six sisters stood unflinching atop the Acropolis, as the fires of war blazed around them, bullets nicked their robes, and bombs scarred their curvaceous bodies. When one of them was kidnapped in the 19th century, legend had it that the other five could be heard weeping in the night.
But only recently have the famed Caryatid statues, among the great divas of ancient Greece, had a chance to reveal their full glory.
For three and a half years, conservators at the Acropolis Museum have been cleaning the maidens, Ionic columns in female form believed to have been sculpted by Alkamenes, a student of ancient Greece’s greatest artist, Phidias. Their initial function was to prop up a part of the Erechtheion, the sacred temple near the Parthenon that paid homage to the first kings of Athens and the Greek gods Athena and Poseidon.
Today they are star attractions in the museum; the originals outside were replaced with reproductions in 1979 to keep the real maidens safe.
Over the centuries, a coat of black grime came to mask their beauty. Now conservators have restored them to their original ivory glow, using a specially developed laser technology.
To coincide with the museum’s fifth anniversary, the women — minus one — went on full display in June, gleaming from their modern makeover. The missing Caryatid is installed at the British Museum in London, which acquired it nearly a century ago after Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, had it sawed off the Erechtheion’s porch, along with shiploads of adornments from the Parthenon to decorate his mansion in Scotland before selling the pieces to pay debts.
Greek and British authorities have long fought over the return of these so-called Elgin marbles, a dispute that heated up again recently when the actors George Clooney, Matt Damon and Bill Murray came out in support of the sculptures’ being returned home during an appearance in London for the movie “The Monuments Men.” That ignited a firestorm in Britain, which maintains that Lord Elgin saved the marbles from destruction, and acquired them fairly.
“Someone needs to restore George Clooney’s marbles,” London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, retorted. The controversy may flare anew as the British Museum plans an exhibit of the human body in Greek sculpture for next spring, using some of the marbles from the Parthenon.
Greeks have not been shy about using the Caryatid restoration to help press their case. While the Caryatids’ restoration is not part of a specific campaign to get the marbles back, the fresh cleaning shows that the museum can support their return, said Dimitris Pantermalis, the president of the Acropolis Museum.
“We insist on a solution” to the Elgin marbles, Mr. Pantermalis said. “A country must be ready when it claims something, and the Acropolis Museum has completed this.”
In the meantime, the missing Caryatid is glaring in its absence from the platform, a subversive display of resistance that is reflected one floor up in the museum, where large swaths of the Acropolis frieze owned by the British Museum are represented as chalky plaster copies of the originals. On a recent weekday, Mr. Pantermalis wove through crowds who stood enthralled around a special dais on which the five remaining Caryatids were displayed. “With the pollution erased, we can read more about the history of the last 2,500 years,” he said.
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Knots of people were glued to a video screen showing footage of the cleaning project, which was set up on the floor of the museum. Conservators wearing dark goggles wielded a dual-wavelength laser developed by the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas in Crete, a system that was also employed to restore the Parthenon’s west frieze and the high-relief metopes that adorned the east entrance. Beams of infrared and ultraviolet radiation pulsed across the hem of one Caryatid’s robes, burning soot millimeter by millimeter to reveal the apricot-tinted patina of the original marble.
Starting in 2011, a team of six Greek conservators focused on one Caryatid at a time, setting up fabric rooms around each statue and mapping its surface before attacking an ebony mantle of pollution that had thickened when Athens became a modern metropolis filled with car exhaust, factory fumes and acid rain. Along the way, the conservators found traces of an enormous fire set in the first century B.C. by the Roman general Sulla, and chunks of marble from clumsy repair jobs attempted centuries ago.
It took six to eight months to transform each statue from night into day, with the crews rotating shifts to avoid fatigue. The in-house restoration costs were minimal and funded with income from ticket and museum shop sales, said Costas Vassiliadis, a conservator who heads the restoration team.
“It looked almost like tattoo removal,” said Shawn Hocker, a tourist who had traveled to the Acropolis with his wife and friends from Wilmington, N.C. “You can imagine what they looked like in the ancient world.”
The museum plans to clean a number of other architectural sculptures from the Acropolis, using the laser technology, Mr. Vassiliadis said, although he declined to give details because the new projects had not yet been announced.
In their original setting, the Caryatids stood on the porch of the Erechtheion, with a sweeping southern view toward the Aegean Sea. They rested in contrapposto poses, three of them standing firmly on their right legs, demurely bending their left knees beneath diaphanous robes. The others stood in opposite pose. Together they held up a part of the temple’s massive roof.
The Caryatids’ origins were less poetic: According to one legend, Mr. Pantermalis said, the statuesque maidens were not intended to be glorified, but condemned to stand in penance at the temple for eternity to atone for an ancient treachery committed by their hometown, Caryae, a Greek city near Sparta that took the side of the Persians against the Greeks during the Peloponnesian War. Other historians say young women from the city who danced for the goddess Artemis were inspirations. The statues remained nameless, and even today they go simply by the letters A, B, C, D, E and F, Mr. Vassiliadis said.
Under the Ottoman Empire, the Erechtheion was converted into a harem, an indignity that the Caryatids survived. Soon after, in 1687, they were nicked by bullets and debris when the Parthenon was shelled during a battle between the Turks and the Venetians.
But officials say the modern equivalent of that destruction is the gaping hole that was left when Lord Elgin made off with the statue.
Mr. Pantermalis glanced out the window toward the Parthenon, leaning into the sky from the soaring rock of the Acropolis. “It’s been 200 years,” he said, returning his gaze to the Caryatids. “We think in the framework of the new museum, it’s possible to reunite our treasures.”

It seemed wrong and it was—just not the way I thought

On Wednesday June 18th, the day before David W. Dunlap’s article, “A Gilded Monument Is Mysteriously Shedding Its Brand-New Gold” appeared in The New York Times, I was riding in a bus down Fifth Avenue and passed the regilded William Tecumseh Sherman monument glittering in the sunlight. There was something wrong about it. It looked garish and harsh—not at all like the understated monument I had gotten used to seeing over the years. And there was something wrong with it—just not what I perceived. It was shedding its recently applied gilding. Something went terribly wrong in the gilding process and the gold leaf did not properly adhere to the sculpture.

It makes one wish she was going to London this summer

“50 Shades of Almost Everything”, by Mary M. Lane (The Wall Street Journal, June 14- 15, 2014), provides a tantalizing preview of the National Gallery (London) exhibit, “Making Colour” which will open on Wednesday, June 18th. What the many visitors who are sure to come to the museum will find are beautiful paintings and in depth information about the development, manufacture and use of pigments in the years 1300-1900. It makes one wish she was going to London this summer.

It may be June, but it is worth checking out these articles published in May

May 2014 was the month for newspaper articles about outdoor monument preservation projects. The New York Times published two articles about monument cleaning projects—“For ‘Cleopatra’s Needle”, a Cleaning Meant to Last”, by Lisa W. Foderaro in the May 8, 2014 issue and “Outlasting Dynasties, Now Emerging From Soot”, by Edward Wong in the May 18th issue. Foderaro, writing at the start of a several month long project to clean the obelisk which is a Central Park landmark, notes that the lasers being used to remove surface deposits will be much more gentle on the stone than the scrapers used when the monument was last cleaned in 1881. Wong, writing at the end of a multi-year project to clean the statues in the Yungang Grottoes and remove the sources of air pollution that were destroying them, notes that this project is seen as a model for future preservation projects in other parts of China. Both projects incorporated extensive visual documentation. A third article published in May 2014—“Scanning a Slice of Queens”, by Nicholas Hirshon (The Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2014)– describes the use of 3-D laser scanners to document the dire condition of the New York State Pavilion, a relic of the 1964 World’s Fair.

It is a fun game to play, but is it desensitizing us?

In the May 21, 2014 issue of the Hyperallergic Newsletter (http://hyperallergic.com), Jillian Steinhauer reports that Grayson Earle has created an online game called “Ai Weiwei Whoops!” (http://aiweiwhoops.net) in which you are invited to drop and break vases whose digital images look like Ai Weiwei’s painted Han Dynasty urns. When you enter the field of the game, your mouse arrow becomes a vase which a simple click sends crashing to the ground. At that point another vase pops up. When the vases hit the floor, they make a shattering sound and send pixels flying. For each broken vase, you rack up “approximate property damage” of somewhere between $900,000 and $1.1 million. While this game is fun and cathartic (I tried it), is it desensitizing us to the tragedy of the willful destruction of works of art?

It doesn’t have to be published in The New York Times to be useful for conservation outreach

I recently saw the profile of textile conservator Sandra Aho that was published in the Manchester Extra section of the Hartford Courant (“She Gives Old Textiles New Life”, by Michael Walsh, April 17, 2014) and it made me think about the role of local media in conservation outreach. A well thought out and well written article related to conservation in a major national or international newspaper like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal is always a welcome and valuable outreach tool. However, because of its personal connection to the readers, might a profile of a local conservation project in a local newspaper not have a greater impact on the people who see it?

Imagine how much we would know if every museum had a scientific research program like that of the Art Institute of Chicago

On April 22, 2014, The New York Times published in its Science Section an article by Kenneth Chang titled “How This Renoir Used to Look”. The article discussed the changes in color of the background of the Art Institute of Chicago’s 1883 Renoir painting, “Madame Leon Clapisson” since it was completed, explaining that the cochineal which gave the background a scarlet-purple color had faded. This study is just one of many undertaken by the Art Institute of Chicago’s conservators and scientists during the past few years. Imagine how much greater an understanding of artists’ materials and intentions we would have if every museum had a scientific research program like that of the Art Institute.

The confusing (to the art buyer) vocabulary of art production techniques

In his discussion of insider art vocabulary (“Do You Speak Art?”, The Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2014), Daniel Grant highlights the difficulties that art buyers have understanding the meaning of the terminology used to describe contemporary print, photograph and sculpture production techniques. Perhaps before spending their money, mystified buyers should consult with conservators who understand the language .

If not for Faye Wrubel, we’d be lacking in our understanding of Gustave Caillebotte’s relationship to Impressionism

According to an article by Kyle Macmillan in the April 18, 2014 issue of The Wall Street Journal (“An Impressionist is Unmasked”), in October 2013 Faye Wrubel, a paintings conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago began a routine cleaning of Gustave Caillebotte’s “Paris Street: Rainy Day”. Her discovery through testing and research that underneath what turned out to be a layer of later yellow overpaint was an airier, bluer, more atmospheric sky led to the understanding that Caillebotte was an Impressionist in his approach to the depiction of specific atmospheric conditions.

PBS NewsHour new series: “Culture at Risk”

PBS NewsHour examines how development will impact Myanmar’s architectural & archaeological heritage in the first of a new series: “Culture at Risk”
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
“Culture at Risk” will explore the impact of war, climate change, neglect and more on cultural artifacts around the world.

Rush hour in downtown Yangon means commuters jam small motor boats to cross the Yangon River. Photo by Mary Jo Brooks/PBS NewsHour

For years, the people of Myanmar were cut off from the rest of the world, isolated by strict military rulers. But a recent cease fire has ushered in a period of calm, which is opening up the country and creating new opportunities. Many in Myanmar are eager to embrace the modern world, but others worry that its cultural heritage may be lost in the rush to modernize. As part of the new series, “Culture at Risk,” Chief Correspondent for Arts, Culture & Society Jeffrey Brown explores Myanmar’s efforts to preserve the colonial-era architecture of Yangon and restore the Buddhist architecture in Bagan all while building a 21st century future – Tuesday, April 15th, 2014 (check local listings).
Brown takes viewers through the grand buildings of downtown Yangon, hearing from Thant Myint-U, the founder and chairman of the Yangon Heritage Trust. “What we have now is a physical landscape that’s starting to change,” Thant Myint-U says, “but also this opportunity to remember this history, and to try to begin to save what we can, before it’s too late.” The pressure comes as outside investment flows into the country and all the benefits and ills of urban development begin to play out. Yangon’s population is expected to quadruple in the next twenty five years and, as developer Moe Zat Mone relays, “[w]e need more infrastructure, more hotels, hospitals, and more service apartments and office rentals.” Brown concludes his report among the archeological wonders of Bagan, the site of what’s said to be the highest concentration of Buddhist architecture of any place in the world, where balancing the demands of tourism and preservation raises additional questions for Myanmar’s future.
Online:
– Jeffrey Brown and Thant Myint-U take an extended video tour through a neighborhood with colonial-era architecture.
– A slide show about Bagan, the capital of a former Burmese Kingdom and said to contain the highest concentration of Buddhist architecture of any place in the world.
“Culture at Risk”
The NewsHour’s reporting from Myanmar is the first in a series of wide-ranging reports, titled “Culture at Risk”, that will explore both problems and solutions to visual arts that are in danger of being lost. Each installment will be led and reported by Chief Correspondent for Arts, Culture & Society Jeffrey Brown.
“Culture at Risk” will explore threats to cultural artifacts that include war, natural disasters, demographic and technological change, evolving artistic and architectural sensibilities, environmental degradation and climate change, and other factors. The series will connect news developments involving art and culture, examining the intersection of public policy and the arts, as well as decision-making around preservation and payment for the arts. Taken together, the series is intended to present a portrait of the many ways that culture is at risk while also capturing a range of ongoing and potential responses.
Read more: Is culture at risk in Myanmar? BY JEFFREY BROWN
PBS NewsHour’s “Culture at Risk” coverage is funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust.
The J. Paul Getty Trust is a cultural and philanthropic institution dedicated to critical thinking in the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Through the collective and individual work of its constituent Programs—Getty Conservation Institute, Getty Foundation, J. Paul Getty Museum, and Getty Research Institute—it pursues its mission in Los Angeles and throughout the world, serving both the general interested public and a wide range of professional communities with the conviction that a greater and more profound sensitivity to and knowledge of the visual arts and their many histories are crucial to the promotion of a vital and civil society.
PBS NewsHour is seen by over four million weekly viewers and is also available online, via public radio in select markets and via podcast. The program is produced with WETA Washington, D.C., and in association WNET in New York. Major corporate funding for PBS NewsHour is provided by BAE Systems, BNSF and Charles Schwab with additional support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Friends of the NewsHour and others.