Re-Constructing Silver Objects from the Staffordshire Hoard

 

Conservation and Discovery at the National Gallery

Great video from the National Gallery of Art up on Art Babble on the cleaning of a 17th c. Dutch painting which held a little surprise for the curators.

Update: if the video below isn’t loading, try the link above.
http://files.artbabble.org.s3.amazonaws.com/embed-player.swf

New washi tape for all of your…conservation decorating needs?

Who hasn’t dreamed of rolls of remoistenable washi in a variety of colors and sizes for use in routine treatments?

Well, you’re not going to find it at Sinco-MT, but you will find rolls of decorative wall tape.  Well, it looks like contact paper, but I can’t quite sort out the Japanese. I very much doubt that this is handmade Japanese paper.

via

This could count as socialism, right?

According to an article in The Times of Malta, a private seller has attempted to list an “antique” amphora (photo at left) recovered from a shipwreck, age and exact cultural provenance unspecified, on the local all-purposes classifieds website maltapark.com. A local diver and “marine activist,” one Antonio Anastasi, expressed outrage at this theft of perceived ‘national heritage,’ and seemed readily able to cite local law dictating that nothing over 50yrs old (i.e. “antiques,” including more ancient antiquities) could be privately claimed or sold in Malta. Apparently, police and the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage have been notified, an investigation has been launched, and there’s hopes that the artifact might soon end up in a local museum (where at the very least, more archaeologically relevant details and context can be presented to the public).(from Safe Corner)

Reading this, all I can think is that even I own things over 50yrs old.

Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain, released 51 years ago.

Photoshop is not restoration.

Semantics are semantics, and perhaps the field of conservation in America is a little too caught up in drawing clear ethical lines between conservation and restoration, but ultimately, words have meanings.  These words “Restoring a Photograph from the 19th Century” do not describe the rest of the post:

My standard operating procedure is to use an ultra-high resolution camera combined with a top-of-the-line macro lens to photograph tintypes. I use strobe lights to illuminate the artwork. Strobes produce “hard” light, much like the sun on a clear day.  In addition to the strobes, I place a polarizer over the camera lens and polarizer gels over the strobe lights. This eliminates all reflections and enables the camera to pick up a greater tonal range along with more detail…

From here, I began the laborious process of restoration, which involved a prodigious amount of retouching. The process took about four hours. The client requested that I eliminate the hackneyed rose color from the cheeks and chin that the photographer had applied to the original…

I printed the restored image on 100% cotton paper. The print should last for a couple hundred years if it is stored in an acid-free and climate controlled environment. If it is matted and framed properly behind UV blocking glass and displayed out of direct sunlight, it will last for generations…

Click through to see the “restored” images for yourselves.

Scanning, Photoshopping, and printing a retouched surrogate is a wonderful way to provide a family with a display image that they can hang on their wall, but the original photograph hasn’t been restored in the least.  And of course, the surrogate copy may last a couple of hundred years or it may last five depending on how well the “restorer” read his Wilhelm Imaging research guidelines.

(via)

Chasing Aphrodite, the Getty in the crosshairs

Chasing Aphrodite: the hunt for looted antiquities at the world’s richest museum by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino is a well written and insightful look into the string of acquisition scandals at the Getty Museum’s Antiquities Department beginning with an early tax scam that would soon feed into the ethically…troubling…questionable…wrong acquisitions.  Most of the book revolves around the purchase and donations of looted Greek and Roman statues, vases, and jewelry, a story previously told by the author’s in their Pulitzer Prize nominated series for the LA Times in 2006.

How does a new museum with lots of money grow to become one of the best museums in the world? Not without cutting some corners.  But the interesting part of the tale is in how the Getty and/or its curators, staff, and board conspired with looters and dealers to overlook and overcome the legal and ethical barriers to buying and importing goods of unknown provenance.  For that you will have to read the book, which I do recommend.

Two points of note: first, the conservators and the Getty Conservation Institute come out looking smart and responsible (if weak in the face of curatorial control); second, the book is a little all too neat of a story.  The authors never challenge the ethics of national patrimony laws and seem a little too quick to paint some actors as the “bad guys” and others as mislead, but a book rarely can tell the whole story.

The future of tape removal?

Removing pressure sensitive tapes would be the part of my job that I would most like to automate, perhaps with a machine like this?

Via NPR’s Planet Money Blog

Founding Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage

Very exciting news out of New Haven:

Yale University President Richard C. Levin today announced the creation of the Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, funded by a gift of $25 million from Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin ’78. The Institute, to be housed on Yale’s West Campus, will unite the vast resources of the University’s museum and library collections with the scientific and technological expertise of Yale’s academic departments to advance conservation science and its practice around the world.

“This extraordinary gift enables a breakthrough in the global practice of conservation and preservation,” Levin said. “Through their philanthropy, Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin have already established themselves among the world’s foremost custodians of cultural resources. I am deeply grateful that their support will allow Yale to combine the resources of its three museums and its library to develop new approaches to conservation and to engage in new international collaborations in research and education…”

The work of the Institute will be supported by two core facilities in conservation and digitization: The conservation core will provide specialized research tools and focus on new technologies and methods to reduce threats common to many objects. The digitization core will apply new technological tools to capture, store, curate, and share material in digital form. As it works to meet these basic goals, the Institute will pioneer areas of research and analytical techniques that are at present unknown to the world of conservation.

On top of the Mellon funding of library and archive conservation training, this new research institute could offer a very exciting addition to the development of the field.

Via PCAN

The future of book conservation training, or thoughts from the education panel at LCCDG 2011

There has already been great coverage of the proceedings at this year’s Library and Collections Conservation Discussion Group in Philadelphia by Jeff Peachey on the newly revamped AIC Blog, Beth Doyle at PCAN, and Suzy at Digital Cellulose.  So might I ask you to click through for the background and notes on the meeting while I dive right in on my thoughts and concerns.

First the good news:

1. I am not concerned that there will not be enough book conservation graduates from the three pilot programs. Despite the fact that graduate students at the three American art conservation programs are not locked into maintaining their interest in book conservation, I suspect that there are substantial financial and enough prestige incentives to “encourage” the programs to find ways to graduate book specialists.
2. I am not worried about the quality of the conservators that will be trained: they will be excellent. The programs have long proven that they can produce students of outstanding quality. No training regime is perfect. And the curriculum will evolve as the programs see how their students are progressing.
3. I am not bothered that they will not receive MLS degrees as part of their formal training. Some jobs will require MLS degrees, but I suspect that number will shrink with time and the new graduates will have the opportunity (and yes added time and financial burden) to earn additional qualifications if they find that they need them.
4. I strongly suspect that the students will have superior technical and analytical research training than many of my fellow Kilgarlin graduates.  It was a strategic short-coming of our program, but I have high hopes for the papers that the new graduates will be presenting at AIC in 5-7 years times.

Now for the…concerns. (Worries might be too critical a word.) My hope is that perhaps there is just a linguistic obstacle that perhaps the programs haven’t been able to hurdle yet in explaining their curriculum in the various forums in which I have heard them, but if not then:

1. First and foremost, I question whether the curricula will focus too much on preparing the students for the “super” special collections’ work of illuminated manuscripts and incunables.  The Morgan and the Huntington may find themselves flush with qualified applicants (for entry level positions?), but far more collections are more…modest in scope and even more modest in the range of materials that will be treated.  It is not just that we need conservators with the ability to tackle these projects, but we need to graduate conservators who want to go and work at these more modest institutions.
2. Judy Walsh said that the graduate coursework was like getting a “learner’s permit.” Now I am not always one for metaphors, but to follow this one, I would say that new graduates need to be closer to their trucker’s licenses than learner’s permits. There simply aren’t enough post-graduate fellowships to build up skills that should be learned while in school. Graduates need to be ready to be the only conservation (and maybe preservation presence) at a small institution with big problems.
3. Will admissions criteria be broadened to include more coursework and pre-program experiences that would be relevant to library conservators?
4. How will the programs integrate the essential emphasis on treatment speed and efficiency necessary for most library work without compromising the training approaches of the other specialties?

All this said, I am very excited to see these pilot programs in action.  Or in graduates.  I don’t doubt that there will be weakness in the curricula (as there are everywhere), and they will evolve to better provide the skills that the programs and the field believe are needed.

A year without posts is like a year without thoughts.

Or not. My apologies, but I will need one more day to pull together some initial thoughts on this year’s AIC and the important LCCDG education panel.