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Lost and Found
In the 1950s and 1960s, Yale conservators scubbed away at the Art Gallery’s early Italian paintings, striving to remove anything that was not original. But now, art experts believe that this quest for authenticity did more harm than good, and a new generation is working with the Getty Museum to repair the damage.
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
May 2000
If you walk through the basement of the Art Gallery, you will find some early Italian paintings that are hard to look at.There are large areas of missing paint and raw wood on some, while on others only a heavily abraded, ghostly image remains. You might come to the conclusion that these paintings are badly in need of conservation, and most conservators and art historians today would agree with you. But you might also be surprised to learn that the paintings got that way as the result of a previous conservation campaign at Yale, one that has achieved a certain notoriety in the art world.
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Yale’s collection of early Italian paintings has long been known among scholars for its quality. |
For the past two years, the conservation departments at the Art Gallery and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles have been collaborating on a project to rehabilitate paintings in Yale’s early Italian collection, an outstanding set of some 200 pictures. The goal of the project, which is being supported in part by a grant from the Kress Foundation, is to make the paintings viewable again in the wake of a well-intentioned but misguided effort in the 1950s and 1960s that scrubbed off all previous restoration work in an attempt to return the paintings to an “honest” condition.
Yale’s collection has long been known among scholars for its quality. The 119-painting Jarves Collection, which the Gallery purchased at auction from art historian James Jackson Jarves in 1871, forms the nucleus of Yale’s early Italian holdings, but the smaller Griggs, Rabinowitz, and Lehman collections also contain important works. Jarves is credited with helping to awaken America’s interest in early Italian art. He collected fragments of altarpieces and other paintings to begin what he hoped would be a lifetime of collecting, but soon ran out of money.
When the paintings came to Yale, they were by no means in their original condition. Many were more than 500 years old, and since most were originally displayed in churches and had a devotional function, they had received regular attention—of varying quality—to keep the images visible. “Every painting of that period has been subjected to some kind of conservation,” says Carl Strehlke, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art who has consulted with Yale. “They’ve been cleaned, repainted, filled in, and cut apart since the time they were made.”
Jarves, it was thought by historians and conservators in the 1950s and 1960s, had had too much done to some of the paintings, and the restoration work he had commissioned was in question. “The Jarveses were running out of money toward the end,” says Andrea Rothe, senior conservator for special projects at the Getty Museum. “They were having the paintings restored very cheaply, and having things repainted.”
By the 1950s, some conservators in Europe and in the United States began to believe that the layers of work done by previous restorers and conservators were detrimental to an honest appraisal of paintings, particularly early Italian ones. The most zealous thought not only that previous conservation work should be removed, but also that little effort should be made to disguise the resulting gaps (conservationists call them “losses”) in the images. At Yale, under the direction of Charles Seymour Jr. '35, a respected art historian and son of the Yale President, conservator Andrew Petryn '43 and his staff went to work on about three-quarters of the early Italian paintings, removing all traces of any hand but the original artist's. The losses were regarded as regrettable, but it was felt that anything but the most minimal intervention would mislead viewers about what was original and what was not. Seymour believed that a teaching institution had a special obligation not to present “fakery” in its galleries.
As a result, the paintings were displayed with large areas of gesso or bare wood showing in the midst of an image, causing a major distraction and in some cases making the painting impossible to appreciate at all. “Your eye goes straight to the hole,” says Aronson. “How can you teach students to know how a painting should look if all they see is one full of holes?”
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The cleanings reduced the paintings to archeological artifacts.
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Today many believe that the attitude of art historians like Seymour was overly scientific. The cleanings, they say, reduced the paintings to archeological artifacts, ignoring both their quality as art and as objects of veneration. Cathleen Hoeniger, an art history professor at Queen’s University in Canada, believes that conservators embarked selectively on this quest for “honesty” based on an aesthetic bias against “primitive” early Italian art. She argues that even at Yale, Petryn and Seymour treated a High Renaissance painting (she uses Titian’s 16th-century Circumcision as an example) with greater sensitivity than the earlier pieces, filling in some damaged areas to reunify the painting.
But in recent years, early Italian paintings have come to be appreciated more as artistic expressions in their own right, rather than as simply the rude precursors to masters such as Raphael or Titian. “When they’re in good condition,” says Andrea Rothe of the earlier works, “They’re so immensely refined, beautiful, and well balanced. They’re not artifacts, They’re real works of art.”
Leaving areas of loss unfilled was at least a reversible decision. What troubles many experts who have seen the paintings is that some of them seem to have damage to their original paint, the result of overzealous cleaning with solvents. Petryn, who still lives in New Haven, declined to be interviewed for this article, but many who were close to the Gallery at the time believe that Seymour directed Petryn to clean the paintings with a heavier hand than he might have used otherwise—a view that some say is backed up by looking at Petryn’s more sensitive earlier efforts.
In 1971, when Alan Shestack became director of the Gallery, he ordered a halt to the work that was being done on the early Italian paintings. As the pendulum in conservation circles swung away from Petryn and Seymour’s stripped-down approach, the state of Yale’s collection came to be viewed as something of a scandal. Andrea Rothe, a conservator trained in Italy, remembers his first trip to New Haven to see the paintings in 1981, when he was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I was appalled by how terrible the paintings looked,” he says. “It just stunned me. In Europe, I’d heard about the collection, but I wasn’t prepared for their condition.”
While Shestack sent one of the Italian pictures out for restoration in the mid-1980s (Petryn had retired in 1985), it wasn’t until 1996, when the Getty Museum’s conservators offered their services, that a more comprehensive reevaluation of the paintings was launched.
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In exchange for working on Yale’s paintings, the Getty can display them in its galleries.
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Headed by John Walsh '61, the Museum’s parent, the Getty Center, is one of the world’s richest arts institutions, with a $1.2-billion endowment from the estate of oil magnate J. Paul Getty. The Getty Museum’s conservation department has four paintings conservators and a conservation-science laboratory, as compared to Yale’s two-person operation, consisting of Aronson and conservator Patricia Garland. The collaboration, says Garland “effectively triples the size of our department.”
For the Getty’s part, taking on Yale’s paintings is a way to keep its world-class staff busy. “We have a relatively large staff and a small collection,” says Andrea Rothe of the Getty. “From the beginning we had the idea that we'd work on other collections.” The collaboration with Yale is only one of several ventures with museums in the U.S. and Europe. In exchange for working on Yale’s paintings, the Gallery offers the Getty the opportunity to display them in its galleries for a time before returning them to the Gallery.
But the relationship between Yale and the Getty is not simply one of farming out work. Aronson and Garland have each gone to the Getty for three-month stints to work with its conservators on Yale paintings, and Getty conservator Elisabeth Mention has come to New Haven for a similar stay. “This way, we make sure we don’t have paintings looking like they’ve come out of two different shops,” says Garland. “And it’s a chance to cross-pollinate and have this incredible dialogue.”
The attitude that has emerged from this collaboration is a less doctrinaire, more flexible approach than the one of the Petryn-Seymour era. The conservators now look at each painting individually to determine what is best for it, rather than applying a systematic solution. “We’re working with the idea that restoration and reintegration of loss to some extent is a good thing,” says Aronson, “but we let each picture tell us how much.”
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“We’re trying to reunify the painting and quiet down the damage.”
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When areas of loss occur in an area that can easily be retouched—in a blue sky or a gilded area—the conservators paint in an imitative way, hoping to make the retouching invisible. But where it is felt that area of loss cannot responsibly be reconstructed, they simply add a field of neutral tone to disguise the loss. “We are not trying to put back the restorations of the 19th century that were removed,” says Garland. “We’re not trying to re-restore. We’re trying to reunify the painting and quiet down the damage.”
Occasionally, one of the conservators will actually paint in a missing piece of the picture when there is sufficient historic evidence to support it. One example of this is Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s 1470 Hercules and Deianira, a Jarves Collection painting that depicts Hercules’s love being held by the centaur Nessus as Hercules prepares to rescue her. The painting was originally a wood panel but was transferred to canvas in the 19th century. Aronson did extensive research on the painting, looking at historic photographs, written descriptions, engravings, and the layers of the painting itself to sort out the many treatments and restorations it had received over the years. There was an area of loss just where Nessus held Deianira’s waist, and Aronson felt the centaur’s arm needed to be seen. He was able to determine how the arm might have looked by examining arms in other Pollaiuolo works, and painted it in the style of the original painting.
“Without the act of grabbing, that story is gone,” says Aronson. “We will do restoration in cases like this, where there is a loss of known narrative.”
Given the deep regrets about Yale’s earlier conservation efforts, one must ask what makes today’s conservators confident that they’re not going too far. Aronson believes that by making all of their changes reversible, with easily recognizable modern materials that can be removed, they are less likely to make what future generations will regard as grave errors. Also, he says, the conservators are leaving behind thick notebooks full of documentation—both written and photographic—of their research and their work on the paintings. These documents can be consulted not only by future conservators, but also by curators and art historians who are studying the paintings and need to know what is original and what isn’t.
Art Gallery director Jock Reynolds suggests another way the Gallery can avoid conservation mishaps. “I think Yale might have been a little too single-minded and insular [during the Seymour-Petryn era],” says Reynolds. “They would have benefited from having more eyes from outside on the process.” So while European and contemporary art curator Joanna Weber and her predecessor, Joachim Pissarro, have been actively involved in the discussion, the Gallery has also retained Carl Strehlke, of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as an adviser on its early Italian collection. Strehlke has consulted with the conservators both on which paintings should receive priority and on the treatment itself. A team of early Italian specialists from the Metropolitan Museum has also consulted with the gallery on the collection.
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“Conservators are part of the life of a work of art.”
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So far, the reaction to the program has been positive. Nineteen of the rehabilitated paintings are now back on display in the Gallery, which was remodeled last summer. Another five paintings are currently at the Getty. While some art historians still profess reservations against inpainting and efforts to mitigate the effect of loss, most are comfortable with the approach. Cathleen Hoeniger of Queen’s University is all in favor of Yale’s campaign. “I think it’s wonderful,” says Hoeniger. “It’s also very brave. Conservators shouldn’t be so self-effacing. They should acknowledge that they are part of the life of a work of art.”
Regardless of what future generations might think, Hoeniger believes Yale is pleasing one important but silent constituency: the artists who first painted the pictures hundreds of years ago. “The pictures in those days were regularly conserved and repainted when they needed it,” she says, explaining that their caretakers believed that paintings of the Madonna or of revered saints needed such repainting “to ensure the continuing efficacy of the image.”
For the Yale and Getty conservators, the motives may be artistic rather than religious, but the goal is the same. “When we start in on a picture, we’re not looking for a new painting,” says Garland. “We’re looking for a painting that’s well cared for.”  |
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