Conservators on Display

The NY Times recently posted an interesting article on the growing popularity of allowing visiotrs to watch conservators at work.  Some are building glass enclosed cubicles with conservators working inside and museum patrons walking through and observing. According to the article, conservators on display has become a very popular attraction for the public.

The NY Times reports

PARIS — It’s showtime at the Musée d’Orsay — the electric moment when visitors pause in the grand public art galleries here, all to watch varnish dry.

They gather in silence to gawk at the paint whisperers — small teams of conservators poised on scaffolding and encased in two glass cubes. From these makeshift stages, they swipe away centuries-old dark grime on precious works — from Gustave Courbet’s enormous oil painting of his crowded studio to Auguste-Barthélemy Glaize’s violent battle of a stone-throwing female revolt against Roman invaders, “The Women of Gaul.”

Ordinarily such a delicate task is carried out in the tranquillity of a laboratory. But the once mysterious craft is increasingly turning into a high-end reality show — long-running spectacles that appeal to donors who lavish money on makeovers, but trouble some conservators accustomed to quiet and absolute concentration.

In Cincinnati, the city’s public museum featured its chief conservator, Serena Urry, last winter in a three-month exhibition, “Conservation on View: Zaragoza’s Retablo of St. Peter.” She worked in a white lab coat in the middle of a public gallery across from a cafe — her work table spread with tools and swabs to remove varnish and overpaint from a gilded, 600-year-old Spanish altarpiece.

“People were really enjoying it, but it’s not something I would do again, Ms. Urry said. “Conservation is not performance art.”

She was startled sometimes by loud voices across a simple wood barrier; one day, her pashmina scarf mysteriously vanished.

In the slow-moving drama of restoration, fishbone cracks vanish, figures that were muddy sepia become radiantly blush, and yellow clouds, thick with old varnish, transform into white gauze tinged with rose. The results are a publicity bonanza for museums; they tell a before-and-after narrative that attracts media attention and appeals to crowdfunding campaigns and companies that have never donated to art projects before.

One of the earliest attempts to offer the public a window on restoration dates to 1994, when Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring” was restored in a temporary studio at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, according to Ian McClure, director of Yale University’s Center for Conservation and Preservation. In 2006, the Smithsonian also added a window so the public could view restorers at work in their lab.

“Viewing painting conservators at work does counteract charges that conservators are ruining objects by careless over cleaning,” Mr. McClure said. But he added that it could also make restorers self-conscious — “thinking of your appearance, the impression you make to onlookers. This will affect your work.”

But the work itself is changing. Many art conservators are evolving into museum ambassadors — the subject of in-house blogs, videos and special lectures. And that even includes the taxidermists.

In France this year, small donors raised more than $23,000 in a crowdfunding campaign for the public makeover of Napoleon Bonaparte’s stuffed steed, Le Vizir. Over four weeks in July, Le Vizir got a tuneup in a gallery of the Army Museum in Paris: two taxidermists spread putty to mask a jagged shoulder crack and rehydrated and recolored the white Arabian stallion that was a gift to Napoleon in 1802.

The Musée d’Orsay, meanwhile, is carrying out a series of public restoration projects, with 150,000 euros (more than $180,000) raised in a crowdfunding appeal, to rejuvenate the Courbet masterpiece “The Artist’s Studio.” Bank of America Merrill Lynch is also helping to finance the project, which is expected to cost almost a million euros and take more than a year.

The Courbet restoration has proved so successful with donors that the museum is exploring its reserves for other works in need of repair, according to Olivier Simmat, director of sponsorship. But potential donors prefer famous names to salvage.

“They tell us they adore the idea and want to give money to restore a van Gogh,” he said. “Forget that. Those are fine.”

But the museum did have a number of deteriorating 19th-century paintings in the French Academy style that do not have the same cachet of Post Impressionist art. Since 1982, “The Women of Gaul” had languished in the museum’s reserves — too damaged to display. It was such a large painting that it was rolled up and stored for years in a city museum in Autun, France, where cracks and flaking developed.

Crédit Agricole, a French bank that had never contributed to art restoration before, donated 450,000 euros (more than $500,000) to repair three Academy style works. Nathalie Mourlon, who leads business development at Crédit Agricole d’Ile-de-France, said the makeover had a particular appeal.

“What we liked about it enormously is that the process is visible,” she said. “It makes the works more accessible to the public.”

For the conservators — a profession dominated by women — the attention to such a solitary métier is gratifying. But they were trained to use swabs and tools to thin and swipe away old varnish. Many found it difficult to cope with waves of noise, abrupt public announcements and, sometimes, rapping against the protective glass cube. Not to mention the limits on their use of chemical solvents because of their proximity to the public.

Laurence Didier, who leads the independent team of 13 conservators restoring “The Women of Gaul,” had never worked in public before. She said that it took time to become accustomed to an audience, even though conservators faced the canvas with their backs to visitors.

“Everyone is different and has their own style,” she said. “I need absolute calm, and so I have my headphones playing Baroque music or Vivaldi.”

Cécile Bringuier, who leads the second team on the Courbet restoration, also said she is not a fan of conservators on display. “Would you like to be watched while you work?”

Other museums are considering the same public approach, but with reservations.

Le Petit Palais, a Paris city museum, owns an enormous 1851 Courbet painting, “Firemen Running to a Blaze,” which is so dark with old varnish that firefighters have receded into the shadows. The museum estimates the cost of erecting a pop-up glass cube at about 200,000 euros — more than the cost of the actual restoration, said Christophe Leribault, the museum’s director.

“Is that price justified by the public show?” he said.

Instead, the museum settled on an unglamorous alternative: repaint the white walls of the gallery an oatmeal color to reduce contrast and install new lighting.

Source: The NY Times