Malibu
Will the works of Picasso, De Kooning or Rauschenberg be as unknown to the public of the twenty-first century as those of Apelles or Zeuxis to us? The question may sound academic, or even trivial, but is in fact addressed with utmost seriousness by concerned museum curators and conservators who, in recent years, have joined forces with scientists to study the auto-destruction of modern art and are attempting to remedy it.
In 1976, “Space Modulator: Red over Black”, a work by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy executed in 1946, and bought by the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1948, was lent to an exhibition in Washington. Retrospectively, conservators agree that the piece, a multi-layered construction, the top part of which is a partially painted piece of plexiglas laminate composed of two thin acrylic sheets with a wire screen embedded between them and set in a wooden frame, should not have been allowed to leave its environment. While on exhibition, the plexiglas popped out of the frame. Returned to Detroit, the piece was re-assembled but a few years later, in 1983, it was brought back from the gallery where it was displayed to the museum’s conservation laboratory; “Space Modulator: Red over Black” had warped slightly. It was then monitored by the conservators who blamed the unstable atmospheric conditions of the gallery for the problem. Yet in 1987, while still in the constant environment of the laboratory, it warped and buckled overnight to a proportion that disfigured the piece and made its exhibition impossible. Thus far, “Space Modulator: Red over Black”, still kept flat in the lab, has eluded the creativity of conservators and scientists. Who should take the blame? The artist whose experimentation with new materials brought unpredictable results? The less than perfect conditions of the galleries where the object was kept? Obviously both, but these are precisely the issues conservators of modern art must address. Art has progressed by experiment. To try to deter artists from such ventures into unknown fields would be tantamount to an attempt at suppressing creativity, while the ideal environmental conditions of galleries and museums are constantly challenged by the global deterioration of the world’s own environment.
Modern and contemporary works more traditionally executed on canvas may, however, be as fragile and difficult to conserve as technically innovative ones. A case in point is the work of the late Mark Rothko. Even the most casual visitor to the large retrospective exhibition held in 1978 at the Guggenheim Museum would recall the disturbingly diverse quality of the paintings’ surfaces. Some appeared to be smooth and flat, others almost pitted. Some paintings had bloomed, others were blotchy. Rothko’s case is a particularly tragic one. At a regional conference on conservation and preservation of the artistic patrimony held at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1989, Richard Koshalek, Director of MOCA, reminded the audience of the catastrophic saga of the panels commissioned from Rothko by Harvard University for the Holly Oak Center in 1961. Rothko considered this to be one of his major statements: a series of paintings that would constitute an entire environment. Both the architecture and the function of the hall were in the artist’s mind when he executed the panels. Within five years, serious problems started to develop: considerable fading occurred, particularly on the panels directly exposed to the south and north lights that stream into the room. Furthermore, individual problems developed on the panels caused by the chemical composition of the paints the artist had used. Whole areas — indeed whole paintings — changed colours: one described by Koshalek as "painted with ... very unstable lythol red pigment ... mixed with ultramarine in a glue binder" turned entirely blue. Today all the panels, which also suffered from accidents and deliberate vandalism, have been removed from view.
Frank Preusser, Head of Research at the Getty Conservation Institute in Marina del Rey, compares the problems inherent to modern art to those afflicting ethnographic art, so much of which has not sustained the test of time. For him, the modern artist, like the artist from Africa or Oceania, uses materials which are readily available: commercial paints, wood from the lumberyard. “The hardware store is the modern artist’s backyard”, says Preusser. As a result, the incompatibility of materials, or the ignorance on the part of the artists of their chemical compositions and future reactions or slow changes are the main problems that lead to the deterioration of modern works of art. This is true even of very recent works. Richard Koshalek at the same conference mentioned several examples: the disfiguring crackles that have appeared on the surface of paintings executed in the 1980s by Sigmar Polke, a painter who uses a combination of lacquer and oil, or again the stress cracks on a recent piece by Robert Longo, literally sagging under its own weight; the problems evidenced in the combine paintings of Rauschenberg, or the destiny of most straw elements in the paintings of Anselm Kiefer to turn to dust. Barbara Heller recalls watching for six years the slow changes in a painting by Larry Rivers. This mixed-media work, which included plywood and xerographic paper, sagged under its own weight, while a mixture of oil and acrylic paint made its cleaning and conservation practically impossible. Traditional solvents were ineffective, but a solution to the problem was eventually reached with the use of non-solvent cleaning solutions based on enzymes developed by Richard Wolbers of the Winterthur Conservation Programme. Such solutions were known to the industrial world, but had never been adapted for use in the cleaning of works of art until Wolbers’ experiments.
The development of new techniques of conservation is a challenge put to all conservators. Carol Muncasi-Ungaro aptly remarks that artists should not be blamed for trying out new techniques, and that it is the conservators’ responsibility to work alongside scientists to develop new approaches to the treatment and conservation of works of art. The experimental nature of modern art finds its counterpart in the innovative nature of modern conservation.
In recent years the exchange of information between artists, scientists and conservators, has largely taken the form of international conferences, in Düsseldorf like those Canada in the mid-Seventies. Another one is planned, in Canada again, in 1991. While the input of artists, and the careful documentation of the materials they use, are of extraordinary importance, artists at the same time are not always the best judges of what constitutes the best treatment of their own works. While some artists, like Frank Stella, whose Purple picture of the early Sixties painted with a metallic paint turned a very light lavender over the years (Robert Rosenblum’s statement that these pictures displayed “a new colour fluorescence which smacked of the growing sensibility in the 1960s to the commercial, acid hues that found their way into much Pop Art of the period” can hardly be verified today), will accept these changes helplessly other artists who are still alive have a tendency to recreate — that is to paint anew — their works. Thus, Ellsworth Kelly, when asked by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art what to do about a damaged work of the 1960s, simply had it returned to his studio where it was repainted. The work now bears two dates on its wall label: that of its “invention” (1969), and that, more recent, of its painting (1985).
Is modern art therefore, to all intents and purposes, impossible to restore and proceeding towards an inevitable decay? To this question, conservators answer with a confidence tempered by fatalistic common sense. All of them, while conceding that theirs is a battle against time and the elements, stress the fact that, in its struggle to preserve its patrimony, humanity can only achieve so much. The issue can even be considered to have a broader ecological or even political aspect. The Getty Conservation Institute, contrary to what is often thought, is not concerned with the conservation of the objects purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum. Its concern is larger, and the Institute deals mainly with study and conservation of sites and their environments, such as the tomb of Nefertari in Egypt.
A brief report on environmental research in conservation published in 1988 in the Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter revealed to many museum professionals that as much as “eighty per cent of outdoor concentration levels can infiltrate a building”, and, furthermore, that high levels of indoor-generated pollutants — which can seriously damage works of art — could emanate from materials used in the construction of buildings and cases. It can easily be deduced from this research that modern works of art executed, for the most part, with commercial paints and manufactured materials could generate their own pollutants responsible for their eventual self-destruction. In 1988, a joint research project of the Egyptian Antiquities Organisation and the Getty Conservation Institute, resulted in the designing of a case specially intended for the conservation and display of organic materials (human remains, parchment, leather, wood etc). Put in simple terms, this case is a neutral environment with inert gas. Since its inception, the Getty Conservation Institute has expanded the idea, and has designed, for instance, the prototype of a framing device that allows the display of flat surfaces under inert gas as well.
Preusser’s opinion is that the treatment of individual pieces, however necessary, may not be sufficient to address the whole problem of the conservation of modern art, and that only a manipulation of the environment can — in the present state of our knowledge and technical abilities — preserve it successfully. Will the museum of the twenty-first century resemble a huge display case, where paintings will only be seen behind glass, protected from pollution and from their own auto-destruction? This is one scenario that is currently being considered. In the meantime, conservators and scientists continue their research, artists continue to create, more aware, one hopes, of the possible dangers. A question remains: as they become increasingly enlightened about such problems, will collectors and curators of modern collections continue to purchase “endangered” works?