Displaying items by tag: conservators

A rare surviving English medieval panel painting has been given a new lease of life after conservation at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge. Remarkably, new evidence found by conservators shows the painting owes its survival to recycling during the Protestant Reformation of the Church in England.

Now on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, The Kiss of Judas, is one of the rarest artworks of its type.

From October, Tutankhamun’s golden mask will be off display and his tomb closed to tourists. The boy king’s famous mask is being taken off display at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, to enable conservators to remove epoxy resin, applied to the mask in August 2014 as a way of re-securing its loose beard. Although the beard was not broken, as was widely reported at the time, and the epoxy has not discolored or harmed the mask, it is not the most suitable material for the job, and too much was applied, leaving dried traces visible to viewers.

There is a widespread assumption that plastic is among the hardiest of materials, but that is far from true, as conservators in museums and galleries know only too well.

The Victoria & Albert Museum is now collaborating with Imperial College and University College London to find ways of saving 20th-century works of art and design featuring plastics, including polyester and polyurethane.

All known drawings from Francisco Goya’s private “Witches and Old Women” album are being presented in their original sequence, thanks to extensive technical research undertaken by conservators, curators and art historians. An exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London (until May 25) marks the first time that all 22 ink drawings, which include depictions of elderly women fighting, witches carrying babies on their backs and pensioners dancing, have been shown together since their sale and dispersal in Paris in 1877.  

In what the noted Goya scholar Juliet Wilson-Bareau calls a “feat in forensics”, conservators and curators spent months examining the sheets to determine the pictures’ correct order. Although Goya (1746-1828) meticulously numbered each sketch, eight lost their numbers over the years.

Two Cézanne sketches found by conservators at the Barnes Foundation earlier this year went on view at the collection in Philadelphia today. The unfinished works were discovered on the backs of two of Cézanne’s landscapes, “The Chaine de L’Etoile Mountains” (1885–86) and “Trees” (1900), during a routine conservation treatment in 2014. The Barnes Foundation will display the watercolors in double-sided frames, allowing viewers to compare Cézanne’s finished, polished products with his incomplete works-in-progress.

The conservation session that yielded the discovery was headed by Barbara Buckley, senior director of conservation and chief conservator of paintings at the Barnes, with help from conservators from the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts.

The blue and gold braided beard on the burial mask of famed pharaoh Tutankhamen was hastily glued back on with epoxy, damaging the relic after it was knocked during cleaning, conservators at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo said Wednesday.

The museum is one of the city’s main tourist sites, but in some areas, ancient wooden sarcophagi lay unprotected from the public, while Pharaonic burial shrouds, mounted on walls, crumble from behind open panels of glass. Tutankhamen’s mask, over 3,300 years old, and other contents of his tomb are its top exhibits.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s marble sculpture "Adam" by Tullio Lombardo (ca. 1455–1532) will return to public view on November 11, following a tragic accident in 2002 and an unprecedented 12-year conservation project. It is the first life-sized nude marble statue since antiquity and the most important Italian Renaissance sculpture in North America. Tullio carved Adam in the early 1490s for the monumental tomb of doge Andrea Vendramin, now in the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, and it is the only signed sculpture from that iconic monument. The sculpture and its restoration will be the focus of Tullio Lombardo’s "Adam: A Masterpiece Restored," the inaugural installation in the Museum’s new Venetian Sculpture Gallery.

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum, said: “We are proud to return this great Tullio sculpture to public view in a beautiful new gallery. Our extraordinary conservators collaborated with a team of experts over 12 years to pursue this extremely challenging work. The results of their care and innovation are stunning.”

Cornell University and its conservators faced a lot of challenges rescuing three rare 7-by-50-foot murals from the Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island.

The first challenge was finding two of them.

“We didn’t even know what colors they were, because no one had seen them since they were painted over,” said Andrew C. Winters, the director of capital projects and planning for Cornell Tech, the home of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute.

Throughout the autumn season visitors to the National Gallery of Denmark can see the museum’s conservators at work, restoring Albrecht Dürer’s 500 year-old masterpiece "The Arch of Honour of Maximilian I."

For many years, this artwork by Albrecht Dürer – the largest Renaissance woodcut ever made – was on display at the Royal Collection of Graphic Art’s premises in Prinsens Palæ, now the home the National Museum of Denmark. Here, the 3.5 x 3m artwork was exposed to light and changing climate conditions, and eventually it yellowed and deteriorated to such an extent that it was no longer fit for display. Since then it has been rolled up and tucked away in the SMK storage facilities.

In the spring of 2015 Dürer’s large-scale work will see the light of day again – and be the main feature of an exhibition arranged by the Royal Collection of Graphic Art.

The Getty Foundation in Los Angeles is awarding a grant of €300,000 (roughly $416,000 US) to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (KHM) for the conservation of two great masterpieces by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens. The KHM grant will be one of the last training grants of the Foundation’s successful Panel Paintings Initiative, through which the next generation of paintings conservators is being trained in the complexities of conserving works of art painted on wood panels.

“The conservation of these two spectacular paintings in Vienna provides a fascinating learning opportunity for all of the conservators involved in the project. When the last major training grants are completed in late 2016, the Panel Paintings Initiative will have succeeded in reaching its goals, ensuring that the next generation of conservators is in place to provide quality care for panel paintings in major European and North American collections,” said Deborah Marrow, Director of the Getty Foundation. “The Initiative’s success is the result of a joint effort by all of the expert conservators involved, who have been extremely generous in sharing their time and knowledge.”