More Conservation Concerns

I have posted a couple of articles over the past few weeks from the Art Newspaper on the decline of conservation. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article on the aging population of skilled conservators. The article gives good detail on the balance between art and science, and how both are needed and required in the conservation field. It is also interesting that the article also touches on non artistic areas of conservation, such as nuclear weapon maintenance and aging components in the space program.
The article was written by WSJ science columnist Robert Lee Hotz, and also contains a short video (excuse the short advertisement at the beginning). Lets hope conservation of material culture does not become a forgotten science.

The article states Through mentoring efforts and knowledge-transfer programs, though, many national laboratories and technical organizations are trying to stave off amnesia by passing on the knowledge of their aging experts before it is too late. To that end, the Getty Foundation, in conjunction with the Getty Conservation Institute and the Getty Museum, has launched a global program to train a new generation of panel conservators.

In recent decades, the Getty has helped protect some of the world's most fragile cultural monuments. Its field projects include the tomb of Queen Nefertari in Egypt, the wall paintings of the Mogao Grottoes in China, the Roman city of Herculaneum, and a 3.6 million-year-old trackway of hominid footprints in Tanzania.

By seeking to preserve the expertise of panel conservators, Getty experts hope to protect the cultural memory embodied in paintings on wood, such as the Mona Lisa.

The article continues Looking even deeper, the conservators used infrared light to highlight the material differences between the painting and its background surface. This scan detected traces of the preparatory drawings that the artist made to refine his ideas about the portrait's composition and where he changed his mind.

To understand the paint itself, they analyzed the pigments through scanning electron microscopy and a technique called X-ray fluorescence analysis. In the cross-section of one typical sample, they identified 10 separate layers of paint. Not all of them are visible under normal light.

By itself, so much scientific data are still no substitute for the wisdom a conservator gains through experience, Dr. Bisacca says. "You develop a sensitivity that helps enormously in understanding the difference between what you can do and what you should do."

To read the WSJ article and view the video click HERE.