Conserving Canvas Real Time: Day 7

Today we were given a VIP tour of Centre Pompidou, which is France's National Museum of Modern (and Contemporary) Art (once again, escorted through the staff entrance, skipping the queue).  I call it the "Super Mario Building" because the architecture has all the water, ventilation, and electrical pipes and ducts on the exterior of the building: I imagine jumping into one of those pipes and being transported to another one on another side!  While contracting approximately 60 freelance conservators per year to handle both internal conservation treatments and preparations for their roughly 6000(!!!) loans annually, this museum does have a small permanent conservation staff, and our tour was led by two of these staff conservators.  Now, this tour was particularly juicy, because our guides walked us around and focused their presentation on paintings that were damaged by heavy-handed or inappropriate structural "conservation" treatments from 1950, all the way to the late 1990s.  This was so fascinating - because in North America, we tend to view the latter half of the 20th century as a "golden age" of conservation: heralding the invention of most of the dimensionally stable synthetic materials and products we use today, the establishment of our post-secondary conservation programs across the continent, the establishment of our professional associations (AIC, CAC, and CAPC), and institutions like the Canadian Conservation Institute, the world-wide impact of the Greenwich Conference on Comparative Lining Methods in 1974, and the establishment of professional codes of ethics, and policies around minimal intervention and preventive care measures for the preservation of cultural heritage.

But there was a darker side to this time as well, which included reckless use of these new materials without properly testing them first, and "experimental" treatments on very important paintings, which turned out later to not only fail after a very short time, but also applications were irreversible, rendering the painting challenging, if not impossible, to re-treat in later years.  Our tour started with gluepaste linings.  I've already mentioned in previous posts that our instructors told us this method does not work on paintings from the industrial revolution onwards.  This is established knowledge in our current day, but there were many years when private studios in France were brazenly executing this method on any painting that entered their studio.  We were shown a Matisse painting that was painted in 1940, and then transferred and gluepaste lined in the 1950s or 60s.  20 years is an incredibly short period of time to be lining a painting after its creation, let alone removing the paint layer from the original support altogether, and transferring it to a new canvas.  It is hard for us now to understand what the practitioner was thinking, and why he felt it was necessary to do this.  They showed us the extensive amount of inpainting of losses on the surface of the painting (only visible under ultraviolet light), which were most likely a result of the transfer. Additionally, the artist's original surface was lost. They told us that Matisse left his paintings mostly unvarnished, but then used resins to saturate only select areas of the composition, like black outlines of the subject, and some patterning in the artist's rendering of the fabrics.  A traditional gluepaste lining necessitates the protection of the paint layer with varnish prior to treatment, or else you risk blanching the oil paint layer permanently because of the use of water in the process.  So this practitioner saturated the surface with varnish, which meant those select varnished areas by the artist were obliterated.  The surface of this painting is also flat now - a flat surface was desirable for old masters paintings, which were originally painted with a glassy flat surface, but modern paintings were meant to have texture and impasto, which was not retained during this damaging treatment.  A few other examples of gluepaste lined paintings in the modern art collection showed that the practitioner not only cut off the margins of these paintings, but sometimes shrunk the overall format, possibly if there were excessive losses near the edges that he decided to simply eliminate instead of retouching. One painting has an artist inscription in the bottom left corner of the composition, including the title of the painting "Prismes" - however now it says "rismes" because the "P" was cut off entirely, along with the entire length of the left edge.

There is one idea or suggestion that around the time when these modern paintings were first being painted, they weren't treated with as much respect as old masters if the practitioners treating them didn't like them as much, or think they were equally valuable, especially if they saw them showing signs of degradation so soon after their creation - the artist might have been viewed as having "flawed technique", and possibly their artworks were not treated with as much care.

So it was eventually properly established that gluepaste linings were not appropriate for modern artworks. But the damage doesn't end there. In the 1980s, conservators were attempting to line paintings using PVC (poly vinyl chloride) adhesives and Neoprene contact adhesives, both of which soon after proved a failure, but were not reversible.  In the 1990s a fad developed where conservators were saturating the canvases from the verso with Plexisol as a consolidation method - but very soon after, it was found the treatment was not successful: the paint layers were not consolidated (or "refixed" in French) and the paintings continued to show problems, but now further treatment options were limited because they couldn't fully remove that Plexisol from the reverse of the canvas.

This time - not so long ago - seems almost like the "wild west" of conservation, with conservators trying all sorts of things, without proper testing / research, or sensitivity towards reversibility.  In 2002, the French Government established the requirement that conservators working on cultural heritage from collections of any of the Museums of France must show qualifications received from one of only 3 public institutions in France: La Sorbonne, Avignon Higher School of Art, or Institut National du Patrimoine, even though there are many other private universities offering extensive training programs in cultural heritage conservation.  If you receive your training from another school, or another country, and then want to come work on museum-owned paintings in France, you must have your qualifications validated from one of the three above-mentioned schools - and they might require you take additional training if they don't feel your qualifications are equivalent.  Seeing some of the damages the art has endured, I suppose I understand now where they're coming from, even if I do think their system is a little harsh or unfair to other equally trained and qualified candidates.

Conservators working on modern and contemporary art now work extremely cautiously and minimally, doing the utmost in preventive care, and intervening with major treatments only when completely necessary to save the structural integrity of an artwork.  They've also become more flexible with their idea of acceptability with the final post-treatment aesthetic of an artwork: they showed us a huge modern painting (probably 15 x 15 feet in size) with slightly cupped structural cracks throughout the entire paint layer.  They told us this painting has been lined (doublage, not rentoilage) using Mehra's method, using his typical acrylic adhesive, and they say they are satisfied with the results; even though all the cracks are still visible, it has been stabilized.  I don't personally think that result would be satisfactory for many of my clients, but it was still very interesting to see this perspective, and their approach.  This tour was very thought-provoking, and an excellent counterpoint after a week of hearing our instructors sing the praises of the gluepaste lining.  Conservators today are entrusted with an incredible amount of  variability and nuance.  I've heard people scoff when they hear becoming a conservator often takes just as long as becoming a doctor - but the amount of knowledge required to approach every unique artwork with sensitivity and care and wisdom about the best treatment direction is incredibly complicated, and there is only one of each painting - so we must get it right the first time!