Restoring the Past: A Deep Dive into Conservation of Fine Art

Paint this mental picture: you enter the glorious glass doors of your favorite art museum, teeming with curiosity, your glasses securely placed on the bridge of your nose to see Claude Monet's The Water Lily Pond up close. You weave delicately through a maze of galleries-- American Art, Art of Asia; and finally, you land at Art of Europe. You wander about the echoing room, a time capsule, others around you encapsulated with the colors and textures before them. You catch the Monet in the corner of your eye, and are finally able to bask in it's glory and ageless beauty. As you observe quietly, you ask yourself: how did it even get here in the first place? And yet, after over a decade, how does it still look the same?

The answer? Art conservators.

What many fail to understand upon exploring a gallery is just this: Each work is carefully and thoughtfully positioned throughout each gallery with intention, and sometimes pieces need a little -- sometimes, a lot-- of R&R after years of wear and tear from intense exposure to light, dust, cameras, and people.

This hidden art form behind the art you see on display is known formally as restoration, and has been around for centuries-- dating back to when Renaissance-era sculptors pieced together fragments of ancient statues.

During the 19th century, collaboration grew in the fields of art and science, and art conservation expanded. A scientific department was established at the Staatliche Museen in Berlin in 1888, kicking off the key period. Between 1925 and 1975, the United States made exceptional progress in the field, opening the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University to reexamine how paintings are retouched. Over multiple decades, the methods by which art is analyzed have become increasingly more advanced and minimalist, reducing the contact between a person and a work. Now, ultraviolet light is used to highlight the cleaning process, and allows for the identification of pigments in paint. Science is at the core of the work conservators do.

The Museum of Fine Arts is home to thousands of works on display in a multitude of galleries, and is currently building a brand new conservation center set to open this year. Photo by Molli DeRosa.

At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, conservation is held to a high standard. The existing conservation center preserves art throughout six different disciplines: including an analytical facility, a collections management division, and a storage and transport division. The museum plans to unveil an updated, state-of-the-art conservation center this year, which will feature advanced technology and opportunities for collaboration in a 22,000 square foot space with six different laboratories, for paintings, objects, frame and furniture conservation, mount-making, exhibitions preparation, and scientific research.

"It's bringing in a lot of the distinct, different specialties together into a more united floor plan and architectural space," said Joy Bloser, Assistant Conservator for Public Outreach at the MFA.

The architect, Sam Anderson, has previously designed conservation labs in art hubs like the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

"It's great because it elevates these other specialties that a lot of other people don't know about," Bloser mentioned. "It's great to give the limelight to other areas ... they require an incredible amount of skill to make sure that they're looking their best and are preserved in a responsible and ethical way."

The MFA's new conservation center, currently under construction. The walls of glass are designed for visitors to experience conservation up close. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts.

The MFA prioritizes upholding this. The Museum assumes "conservation as a primary responsibility which requires constant attention to providing a proper environment for works of art and artifacts," according to its mission statement.

As visitors explore the 150 year-old Boston museum, each gallery evokes a different feeling of wonderment and whimsy. Perhaps the grandest room in the MFA is the Koch Gallery, filled with marble and lined with red damask wall coverings, and featuring a wall with Hanoverian polished silver.

Two visitors enter the Koch Gallery, described as the most "dramatic" gallery in the MFA. The gallery reopened in September 2012 after undergoing serious renovations in an effort to preserve its timelessness. It holds European works ranging from the years 1550 to 1700, and Hanoverian silvers. Photo by Molli DeRosa.

Believe it or not, every painting holds a carefully selected space on the wall. Rhona MacBeth, Head Conservator of paintings at the MFA, believes that each work is placed with the artist's original intention in mind.

"You're dealing with the decisions that people made before you," she noted.

Each work in the Koch Gallery is placed carefully by curatorial fellows, who arrange the installations, set up dates to take paintings on and off walls, and make crucial decisions on if and how paintings can leave the museum. Curatorial content meetings are held monthly to make arrangement decisions. Photo by Molli DeRosa.

Curators are most commonly the ones tasked with setting up galleries and ensuring that they live in a spot complimented by surrounding pieces. Antien Knapp is one of these people-- she's a curatorial research fellow for the pre-1800s Art of Europe at the MFA, where she arranges installations and organizes dates for when works will be put up and taken down.

Some pieces can live on walls of museums for years after their original placement, but others can only sustain a couple of years exposed to light sources in a gallery. Light can be extremely damaging to certain textiles, paintings, and drawing, and can cause bleaching of the material used-- hence why when you walk through a museum, flash pictures are highly discouraged.

So what exactly happens when a painting becomes damaged by light, touch, or just years of aging?

This is when a conservator steps in.

By definition, a conservator is a professional responsible for the preservation and restoration of cultural and historical artifacts. They're tasked with keeping work up in galleries and on walls once placed there.

Conservation is no simple task. The job pool for conservators is small, the job itself requires an in-depth understanding of art history and chemistry, and the work is extremely tedious.

"With any conservator you talk to, I think you'll hear the sort of theme, which is that it's a vocation. And so once you get that bug, you can't imagine doing anything else. Even though it's really hard to get into the field. It's a tiny field, it's hard to get a job. It's hard to make enough money. Like it's all these obstacles, but somehow, once you know, it's what you want to do, there's just like, no other choice," said Kate Smith, Conservator of Paintings and Head of the Paintings Lab at Harvard Art Museums.

Kate Smith, Conservator of Paintings and Head of the Paintings Lab at Harvard University. Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums.

The Harvard University Art Museums are home to a small university collection open to visitors and students alike, with the goal of focusing their energies on teaching conservation science. Conservators in her lab are classified by material; there's labs for decorative arts, 3D works, and an analytical lab that focuses on the chemistry around identifying materials. Although Smith's current role is mainly to carry out the administrative responsibilities of the museum, she still carves out time to spend with the art in a lab setting. This is where the magic happens.

"It's very quiet. It's you and the painting all the time."

Work done in silence yields deafeningly loud, beautiful results.

Although performing a proper treatment on a work is a complicated task, conservators like Smith use a lot of traditional tools, one being hand rolled q-tips to clean varnishes (layers of old resins or oils), which utilizes large rolls of medical cotton on a bamboo skewer. The cotton serves as a sponge when dipped in solvent, and the varnish can be absorbed into it. Smith says dental tools are not uncommon to see in a lab either-- just as a dentist would scrape away plaque on your teeth, conservators scrape away dirt-- under surgical microscopes. She ranges from using simple, household items to laser radiation to remove dirt from surfaces. Perhaps one of the most important tools she uses is intangible: light.

Smith specializes in documentation and technical imaging, allowing her to map the locations of different materials on a surface. This process can be slightly complicated, so she broke down the operation of identifying a pigment step-by-step here.

Linsly Boyer although working with a more massive, loan-centric collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, applies many of the same techniques as an objects conservator to pieces in the Japanese Buddhist Sculpture exhibit, a project part of the MFA's 'Conservation in Action' sector.

'Conservation in Action' at the MFA for the Japanese Buddhist sculpture exhibit. Courtesy of Linsly Boyer.

The Japanese Buddhist sculptures have been on display in the Temple Room of the museum, which has been open since the MFA was born in 1909. Many of the sculptures Boyer tends to have been in the exhibit for nearly 30 years, she guesses. In undertaking the massive reparation project, she and other conservators discovered that the pieces were in terrible disrepair: cracking wood, flaking lacquer, insect damage, and dust riddled the centuries-old works. Many of these things were not visible to the naked eye in a dimly lit space.

She takes ultra-violet (UV) images of what she's working with to gain an understanding of the object's condition. Boyer also uses RTI, or reflectance transformation imaging. This is a photographing technique where an interactive model is created from a light source bouncing from a stationary object, and the object can be relit and adjusted in real time. Similar to Smith's use of tools intended for dentistry, Boyer has utilized surgical equipment to dive deeper into the art she works with.

"There's one sculpture we were working on, where we did an X-Ray and we found a shape on the hollow interior of the sculpture that we thought might be a votive plaque which was sometimes a thing artists or donors would write, like, a little votive plaque about who they are and the date and the circumstances of the creation of sculpture, and put it on the interior. So we really wanted to see that and see what it said. So we tried to see if we'd be able to remove the head, which was a separate piece and would have one time been removable, but had since been nailed into place. So the lead conservator on a project contacted a pediatric neurosurgeon, who had been working with endoscope developers and so they had these like tiny two millimeter endoscopes with normally the ones we had for like eight millimeter and were too big. So they brought all these endoscope prototypes over the museum and we did like an endoscopy on the sculpture and put a hole in the neck, and were able to image the interior and found the votive plaque and could read it right away. So that was really cool."

Searching for the votive plaque using endoscopic equipment. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts.

In addition to performing treatments, she educates visitors about her project in the Conservation in Action space. These visitors range anywhere from passerby tourists to museum donors-- and even some unlikely, yet very special, guests. Boyer said they once hosted a tourist in the space who was a 53rd generation blacksmith from Japan.

"[The blacksmith's] family made Samurai armor, like historically, and had a bunch of pieces of these 'tsuba' handles from swords. And his family made -- we had a bunch of them in the MFA's collection. So he came to see some of his family's creations, and so we ended up chatting to him for a long time and he was telling us all about like, the technology of building the swords and using this very particular metal that you have to get like government's permission to use because it's very specific, valuable, and from this one mountain in Japan that's revered. So because people don't really need Samurai armor so much anymore... he started making these really beautiful chimes out of metal which he needed government's permission [to get], so he can only make 10 per year... when he played them, they were really beautiful."

Boyer's work has connected her with people she never imagined meeting-- and brought her to practice her vocation in iconic locations like Central Park, where she worked on cleaning park sculptures (using blow torches, of course.) "It was like summer camp for adults," she noted.

Linsly working on a piece from the sculpture project. Courtesy of Linsly Boyer. 

One of the main goals conservators strive to meet is sticking to the artist's original intention when completing their work. But how do they do this when the artist's work is decades-- even centuries-- old?

For Boyer's project, she focuses mainly on stabilizing the sculptures, consolidating flaking paint, sticking down any moving lacquer, checking for insect activity, and doing light cleaning to remove the museum dust. She says any other aesthetic treatment is unnecessary for this particular project.

"We just sort of feel that we want to exhibit these historical artifacts, and present what's most authentic about them, which is not us imposing our opinion of what they should look like onto them."

To ensure conservators are really sticking to what the artist wanted audiences to view, Boyer and others (including a Brandeis University student) are in the process of developing a 'color recreations' software. This would create a 3D model of the work, allowing conservators to superimpose on the object what the original decoration would look like. She hopes they'd be able to make this model available to the public.

Boyer also mentioned that conservators on this project only utilize materials that are reversible, so if it was later decided that restorative adjustments did not fit the artist's aesthetic decisions, they could be easily removed.

Conservators need to have an eye for assessing damage. With many artists, the intention of the piece is to show damage, adding value -- and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." How do they determine what's considered to be going too far with the restoration process?

"It happens almost object by object," Smith noted. "We get almost a different answer every time. So I think what's most important is not so much that there be a policy (which there almost isn't). But it's about the fact that you have more than one voice always at the table when making those decisions. The curator has a perspective as the intellectual keeper of the of the collection. The conservator has a perspective as the one who best understands the physical nature and the condition."

Conservators undertake the job of taking care of a painting-- just as a healthcare worker would take care of a human being-- so it doesn't slip further into a state of disrepair and can be reveled for future generations.

So what do conservators want you to understand when you approach a piece? When you enter a gallery? When your eyes meet the painting, the sculpture, the furniture, the frame?

Two visitors examine Gerrit van Honthorst's The Triumph of the Winter Queen: Allegory of the Just (1636), a Dutch work. The work was treated in 2011, and used black light technology to deconstruct how the painting changed over time by revealing areas of damage and dirt. Photo by Molli DeRosa.

Here's some of their advice.

Joy Bloser:

"Thinking about our own bias about why we want a piece to look brand new or look kind of old or shiny or dusty, I think it's really interesting to see that the condition and the state of the object really reflects our cultural values... I would love for people-- when they go in-- to look at the content and the story of what the artist is trying to tell you; but also the physical material and kind of what does that mean for both how it lives in a museum-- its museum life-- but also what it reflects about us as a society and you know, what we what we want to see, and what we're choosing to see, in all of these objects.

Linsly Boyer:

"We also want people to be able to see [the art] 100 years from now and 500 years from now, you know, so we can't really think about what's best for us right now. We have to figure out what's best for the artwork to extend its lifespan as long as possible. And although it is unfortunate that it means people then come to the museum and can't see everything they want to and can't come as close to things as they want to, another very important part of it is us to preserve these objects for as long as possible ... it's not just about entertainment for people coming [to the museum], you know, it also has this preservation mission that is equally as important, if not more so."

Kate Smith:

"Nothing you look at is static. Very few objects appear the way they did when they were first made. They've all changed and degraded in some way. You may not notice, but it's almost always true. Very few objects appear the way they did when they were first made. Most work that you look at and view in a gallery has had conservation work done; has had some amount of restoration. If you could flip a switch and all the restorations go away, you wouldn't recognize most things. So I think part of our job is to have what we do not be detectable, right? But as a result, nobody knows that it's there. I think it'd be interesting for people to understand how much goes into making a painting visually legible, so that you're not distracted by damage, so that you can just look at it and see it. And that's a lot of what we do is quiet down things that have gone wrong so that you can continue to have a legible sort of interaction with that thing."

Conservators exist so folks can enjoy works like The Triumph of the Winter Queen: Allegory of the Just, the Japanese Buddhist Temple Room, and The Water Lily Pond for years to come. Next time you find yourself in awe of a 19th century Impressionist painting in an echoing gallery, consider the masters who've given it new life and allowed you to see it.

Silence in The Eijk and Rose-Marie Van Otterloo Gallery, which houses Dutch and Flemish paintings. Photo by Molli DeRosa.