Contemporary Art Conservation Raises Thorny Issues Around Responsibility

Some artists are eager to be part of any restoration of their works, while others want nothing to do with it.

Art is long, and life is short, according to an old Roman saying, but sometimes art doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain: the canvas warps, the metal bends, and the paper turns brown. New artworks may look like old works too soon, leaving their buyers feeling as though they’ve been had. In fiction, we have the works of Vonnegut’s Rabo Karabekian, whose paintings made with Sateen Dura-Lux (which promised to “outlive the smile on the Mona Lisa”) self-destruct. In real life, similar tales abound. One collector brought back to New York City gallery owner Martina Hamilton a painting she had purchased there by the Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum that looked as though the “painting was falling off the canvas,” the gallerist told Observer.

Art doesn’t come with warranties, and state consumer protection statutes only cover utilitarian objects. Art is sold “as is” by galleries and artists. (Can you imagine Consumer Reports reviewing art?) Still, dealers hope to maintain the goodwill of their customers, and artists don’t want to develop a reputation for shoddy work. It is not fully clear, however, what responsibility artists bear their when it comes to conservation, especially after a piece has been sold one or more times. It is particularly the case for artists who purposefully use ephemeral materials in their art (bee pollen, banana peels, lard, elephant dung, leaves, mud, moss and newspaper clippings, to name just a few examples).

Nerdrum, who is known for formulating his own paints (and constructing his own frames), was contacted by Hamilton about the deteriorating painting, and he directed the dealer to offer the buyer her choice of other works by him at the gallery in the same price range. The collector, however, didn’t want any other Nerdrum painting in the gallery, so the artist rehired the same model he had used originally and painted the entire image anew. The entire incident took a year to resolve.

Nerdrum isn’t the only artist who will try to make amends for work he or she created that doesn’t hold up. Manhattan painter David Novros was asked in 2006 what to do about a 1965 acrylic lacquer painting in the Menil Collection in Houston that had extensive “cracks, canyons and fissures” all over the surface, and he decided “to remake the work with the same materials as before.” The work, 6:30, is now dated ‘1965/2006.’ It’s not the first time this kind of thing has happened to Novros. In 1990, the Museum of Modern Art came to him about a 1966 painting in its collection whose canvas had discolored and was affecting the handmade plywood stretcher, and his solution was to scrape off the old paint and put on new. The museum dates the work, titled VI.XXXII, as ‘1966 (repainted in 1990).’

If alive and physically able, should artists be counted on to repair damage—caused by their own workmanship, shoddy materials or a collector’s mishandling—or are art’s creation and conservation so disparate that no one should attempt both? Experimentation with materials is both an element of artistic freedom and a headache for future conservators. When Pablo Picasso glued a piece of newsprint onto a canvas, producing what was first called “synthetic cubism” and then just “collage,” a monumental event in modern art history took place. On the other hand, Margaret Ellis, professor of conservation at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and director of conservation at the Thaw Conservation Center at the Morgan Library, told Observer that if “Picasso had called up a conservator and said, ‘What do you think of sticking some cut-out newsprint on?’ the conservator would have died.”

There are several reasons why contemporary art may not hold up, even in the short run. Experimenting with materials is one; another is the fact that the training of artists nowadays rarely includes educating them about the properties of the materials they use. Then, there is a lack of funds. At early points in their careers, the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siquieros and French cubist Fernand Leger both painted on burlap sacks, while Marc Chagall made designs on bed sheets and Franz Kline worked on cardboard. Beyond that is sometimes simply a lackadaisical approach to how things are made.

A more recent instance of redoing the past occurred in 2006 when Damien Hirst’s 1991 shark-in-a-tank work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which had been deteriorating badly because the artist originally hadn’t used a sufficient amount of formaldehyde, was replaced. Owned by hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen (he bought it in 2004 for $12 million) and currently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the work “was restored following the advice of conservators. There is only the one work under that title,” according to a spokesperson for London’s White Cube, which represented the artist. In fact, Hirst cleaned out the tank, sawed in half another shark and made sure that this one was more properly pickled. This brings up an important point: maintaining the monetary and historical value of a work of art may requires a range of counter-measures, some of which are intentionally kept vague.

Who’s in charge—the collector, the conservator or the artist?

When repairing ancient objects, Old Masters works or almost anything produced by a creator long dead, the watchword for conservators is generally don’t do anything that can’t be undone by another conservator in the future. For instance, inpainting—filling in areas on a canvas where the original oil paint has chipped off—is often done with a water-based medium that can be easily removed. With contemporary artworks, especially those by living artists, conservators may work in the same way, but they may try contacting the artist to learn what materials they used and if they want to be part of the restoration.

Tom Learner, a conservator at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, leans toward contacting the original artist. “I believe in using the artist as a conservator, and paying the artist as an expert,” he told Observer. “The artist has a better grasp on what should be done.” He added that collectors need to know that if they “are buying works that have untested materials, these kinds of problems are part of the deal.” Maybe. Understanding the artist’s intentions and processes, as well as eliciting the artist’s opinion about a conservator’s plans for repairing the artist’s work, is all well and good, but conservators may not choose to replicate a problem that caused the work to deteriorate in the first place.

Artworks with what conservators call “inherent vices”—defects that eventually make them fall apart—may just be too far gone for restoration. Greg Kucera, a gallery owner in Seattle, Washington, exhibited a sculptural work by Jeffry Mitchell in the 1980s: “a brilliant body of sculptural work made of thin latex, formed in muffin tins, bundt cake pans, gelatin molds and other kitchen and cookery forms.” According to Kucera, “they were incredibly smart looking, but also delicate. In the exhibition, he hung them on the wall with thumbtacks.  By the end of the show, most of them had torn at their corners and the latex had started to disintegrate. He just didn’t know then the risks of working with latex and how to protect against its failings.” The gallery had sold every work in the show and had to renegotiate each of those sales to substitute non-latex works. “It was a painful process but we believed in the artist so we did what we had to do to rescue these sales.” Luckily, the buyers were forgiving.

But “conservators are not obligated to contact a living artist or that person’s estate,” Mary Gridley, a conservator and founder of Art Conservation Solutions in Long Island City, New York, told Observer. Since her clients are usually private and institutional collectors, she lets them make the call. However, she recommends that the artists be contacted, as it “is nearly always in the collector’s best interest to understand how an artist intends their work to look, how they feel about aging and changes in their work over time and their tolerance and approach to conservation and restoration.” An artist unhappy with the conservation of their work may create problems for a collector, as art collector Scott Mueller, the owner of Cady Noland’s 1990 Log Cabin Blank With Screw Eyes and Cafe Door, discovered when she disavowed the piece after it was “restored” with new wood without her permission or any notice of the change. That disavowal made Log Cabin largely unsellable. Conservation not only preserves a work of art but also its current and future value. Sique Spence, director of New York’s Nancy Hoffman Gallery, also recommended that living artists at least should “be consulted in how to proceed. I feel like studio repairs impact the value less than outside restoration.”

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The law itself doesn’t give collectors clear direction. “One does not need to get an artist’s permission to restore or conserve their work,” Joshua J. Kaufman, a lawyer in Washington, D.C. who frequently is involved in art issues, told Observer. A poor job of restoration, or just one of which the artist disapproves, can back up the claim that the artwork’s owner has so damaged the piece that the creator’s esteem is adversely affected. “The collector runs the risk of damaging reputation,” since the 1990 federal statute, the Visual Artists Rights Act, “specifically gives that reputation right to the artist.”

Kaufman said that “it would be prudent” for dealers to tell prospective buyers of artworks that may have inherent vices, although Spence didn’t think “a discussion of future problems would be such a good selling point.” Lemon laws don’t exist in the art trade, so dealers make their own decisions.

Some artists are eager to be part of any restoration, others less so. Marc Mellon, a Redding, Connecticut-based sculptor of small and large-scale bronze works, told Observer that he is “periodically contacted by both homeowners and institutional clients with questions about care and restoration of my bronze sculptures,” and he is happy to offer some advice. However, he’d “much rather recommend a foundry or individual specializing in the restoration of bronze works, particularly if the sculpture would benefit from a more thorough cleaning and re-patination.”

An artist’s sense of obligation to his or her work may sometimes be time-limited, contractually at times—public art commissions usually contain a clause in the agreement stipulating the artist’s responsibility for “patent or latent defects in workmanship” for between one and three years—or based on evolutionary changes in the artist’s life and work. Artist Frank Stella once said that he may be willing to help repair one of his works if “it’s not more than two or three years old.” He uses different materials for specific works, and “after two or three years, I don’t have any of the materials left over. I don’t have the expertise to deal with it; if I were to attempt a repair, I’d make a mess of it.”

Back in the 1990s, Stella refused to take part in the restoration of a quarter-century-old sculptural painting that had been brought in for repairs to Brooklyn conservator Len Potoff, who contacted the artist as a matter of practice. “He said that he couldn’t do it,” the conservator told Observer. “He’s not where he was twenty-five years ago, and he couldn’t put himself in that zone. At the time, I was really pissed, but now I find that point of view commendable.”