by Jon Lackman | 21 July 2010 | Conservation
The L.A. Times recently did a piece on the ongoing diagnosis of the Ghent Altarpiece:
Anne van Grevenstein, an art conservator who teaches at the University of Amsterdam, along with Ronald Spronk, an art historian from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, head a team of art experts and trainees conducting a detailed technical analysis of the work, a project funded by a $230,000 grant from the Panel Paintings Initiative of the Getty Foundation … Eventually, the material collected will be put online for other scholars to study. “It seems logical to do,” says Spronk, “but I don’t think it’s ever been done” … At the end of 2008, the foundation launched the Panel Paintings Initiative and set about identifying projects in need of funding — both to help the conservation of noted work but also to help train a new generation of conservators. Conservation of paintings on wooden panels is a highly specialized field, restricted to perhaps a dozen people in the world. “We realized that most of those current experts will retire within the next decade,” says [Getty Foundation director Deborah] Marrow.
Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer tells a story of conservator training paying off:
“An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing ‘The Gross Clinic’ Anew,” an exhibition featuring the just-restored painting, opens at the [Philadelphia] Art Museum’s Perelman Building Saturday … The Gross Clinic, now owned jointly by the Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, has received the most extensive and informed restoration in its history, an astonishing effort led by [Mark S.] Tucker, now 55, the museum’s vice chair of conservation and its senior painting conservator. The restoration was made possible by a massive public effort in 2006, led by the academy and the Art Museum, to raise $68 million and buy the work when Jefferson [Medical College] announced its intent to sell it to a pair of out-of-town museums … Julie Berkowitz, former university art historian at Thomas Jefferson University, said she was “dazzled by the conservation” work done by Tucker and his team … It has taken decades to accumulate the experience and information to bring off the feat, and no one has had more experience with Eakins than Tucker.
