Displaying items by tag: conservation

This photograph shows staff at the Rijksmuseum holding their breath as Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1642) is unrolled on its return to the Amsterdam museum in June 1945, at the end of the Second World War. The work had been shipped to Kasteel Radboud in Medemblik, north of Amsterdam, for safekeeping. Since its wartime evacuation, the canvas has been subjected to two assaults by members of the public, the most recent in 1990, when a “confused” man sprayed it with sulphuric acid. Fortunately, the substance did not penetrate the varnish.

If Henry and Mary Lily Flagler were to walk into their music room at Whitehall today, they would feel right at home.

That’s saying a lot, considering that Whitehall, finished in 1902, has withstood more than a century of weather and wear. To reverse the inescapable ravages of time, the Flaglers’ Beaux-Arts mansion has undergone an extensive 15-year conservation effort.

The Yale Center for British Art will reopen to the public on May 11, 2016, after completing the third phase of a major building conservation project. Visitors to the renovated building will experience a stimulating new installation of the Center’s unparalleled collection of more than five centuries of British art, largely the gift of the institution’s founder, Paul Mellon (Yale College, Class of 1929).

The Long Gallery, located on the fourth floor, will be wholly reconfigured, returning to the architect Louis I. Kahn’s original conception of a study gallery, with over two hundred works installed from floor to ceiling across seven bays.

Will Orpheus return from the underworld this time? Will Apollo ever glitter again in sunlight? Is it possible that one of the largest works of public art in New York — a five-ton, 190-foot-long, 39-foot-high sculpture — could disappear with few people noticing?

Twenty-one months have passed since Lincoln Center announced that Richard Lippold’s monumental sculpture “Orpheus and Apollo” — a midcentury Modern explosion of polished metal strips that floated, with the help of some 450 steel wires, for more than 50 years over the grand foyer of what was first called Philharmonic Hall and then Avery Fisher Hall — was being “removed temporarily for maintenance and conservation.”

Thirteen museums in seven countries have been named recipients of Bank of America grants for the conservation of artworks ranging from an Edouard Manet painting to a colossal ancient Chinese Buddha.

The 2015 Art Conservation Project grants totaling more than $1 million were announced Friday. The recipients include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the British Museum, the OCA Museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar.

X-ray radiography is a standard technique widely used by art conservators, art historians, and curators to discover information about the manufacturing process and the condition of a painting. However, cradling—wooden slats attached to the back of many old paintings executed on wooden panels—creates lattice patterns that appear as grids or a series of stripes on an X-ray image. These patterns can obscure the image and distract art conservators from reading the image and analyzing paint layers.

“Cradle patterns in X-ray images has been an ages-old problem for conservators studying collections of Old Master paintings, and until Platypus, required many hours of tedious manipulation of the X-ray image in Photoshop or various other techniques, some of which could be damaging to the painting,” says William Brown, chief conservator at the NCMA.

Early in 1903, illustrator Howard Pyle (1853-1911) began work on a set of nine wall-sized panels for the drawing room of his home at 907 Delaware Avenue in Wilmington, Delaware. The Museum announced that all nine panels are now on view in their entirety for the first time in 75 years. They have been semi-permanently installed in the Museum’s second floor Vinton Illustration Galleries.

While two of the panels were on view during the Howard Pyle retrospective exhibition in 2011-2012, which celebrated the Museum’s 100th anniversary, the complete set has recently undergone conservation work.

After years of delays, the Peabody Essex Museum is moving forward with its expansion plan, adding a gallery wing to the existing complex and a massive off-site facility for managing and conserving collections.

The plan, which the museum announced Wednesday, represents a significant departure from its earlier intent to build a 175,000-square-foot addition to the existing museum. The new design, by contrast, calls for 40,000 square feet in new gallery space and an 80,000-square-foot off-site facility known as the Collection Stewardship Center. The museum hopes to break ground next year, with a projected completion date in 2019.

The Getty Foundation has announced a second round of grants for its Keeping It Modern conservation initiative, funding the study of exceptional architecture including Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park, Ill., and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius' residence in Lincoln, Mass.

Grants totaling more than $1.75 million have been awarded to 14 buildings, built in the 20th century in eight countries including India and Brazil....

Frank Gehry is this year’s recipient of the J. Paul Getty Medal, the Getty Trust’s annual award for leadership in visual art.

Gehry becomes the first designer or artist to win the award that the Getty launched in 2013. The prize – a bronze medal with a profile portrait of J. Paul Getty – recognizes lifetime contributions in various art-related fields that are part of the Getty’s mission, including philanthropy, art-history research, archeology and conservation of art and architecture, as well as art-making.