Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Max Beckman’s “Blind Man’s Buff” is one of the highlights of the MIA’s collections. His tryptychs are a wonder and the MIA’s may be the best of the batch. Here’s the fun part. It’s about to undergo conservation and this conservation will not be hidden away in the sub-basement devoted to the Midwest Art Conservation Center, but done right in the gallery over the next few months.
This is an extraordinary opportunity to learn about this painstaking, delicate and sophisticated aspect of museum life. I’ve had the opportunity to tour the Center twice and heard lectures from them at other times. Most museum goers don’t know of its existence, I imagine, but it got special attention during the design of the Grave’s Target Wing. It needed it. Before it had been jammed into rooms and spaces not being used by the MIA.
Its print and paper conservation room had the most peculiar space up a short flight of stairs and entered through a half-height door. Here’s an odd bit of history. An MIA museum guard wrote a successful movie that had this door as a key conceit: Being John Malkevich. If you saw the movie, you’ll recall that actors entered his brain through a tiny door.
Conservation and restoration are tricky concepts in the world of art and antiquities, the current era different from the near past and very different from the times before that. In the near past conservation and restoration had a bad time because earlier conservators had sometimes chopped up paintings to fit new frames, filled in colors or removed layers of paint to show an underpainting. In buildings like those at Angkor the previous era of restoration fixed the buildings, tuning them up to the then current understanding of what they would have looked like. In both instances conservators and restorers often used permanent materials that could not be distinguished from the original and/or modified the original in substantial ways.
The near past’s reaction against that was to leave objects in their found state, to eschew all but the most necessary (particularly in painting and sculpture) interventions. The current thinking is to restore, if necessary and deemed advisable, only in concert what the very best investigative work can determine consonant with the original. And then, here’s a key move, to use only materials easily identified as added and also easy to remove without causing harm to the work or the building. This allows restorations to reproduce a work’s original look in a way that preserves the artist’s original intent, yet not to alter the original in ways that cannot be undone and undone without injuring the work. Scholarship in the future may change the view of the object.
We had a large painting conserved by them a few years ago after we ripped it during renovation of our kitchen and living room area. It was not cheap, but neither was the painting. They treated our painting with as much care as they would a museums. The result was quite impressive. You’d never know it was done. Which in this case was the point. They cleaned it, too.
