Morton Bradley; renowned sculptor, art restorer
Hyfler/Rosner
By Gloria Negri, Globe Staff | September 30, 2004
In the dead of winter, art restorer Morton C. Bradley Jr.
could be found hunched over an art masterpiece in the
backyard of his Arlington home, in a parka and fingerless
gloves, perhaps with a neighborhood cat perched on his
shoulder, working meticulously to bring back the painting's
original luster.
A man also known for his dazzling geometric metal sculptures
that were widely exhibited, Mr. Bradley was restoring art at
his table until several months ago when he fell and was
hospitalized for a broken hip.
Mr. Bradley, 92, who was considered the dean of American art
restorers in the 1940s and 1950s, died Sunday at his home of
cancer discovered when he was being treated for his hip.
While hospitalized, friends said, Mr. Bradley, once head
conservator at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, was making
sketches for new sculptures and planning to move into
another home.
On the outdoor table, summer and winter, Mr. Bradley did
restoration work for many museums, including the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, galleries, and private collectors. He
used the outdoors not only to capture the natural light but
to dispel the strong odor of the solvents and varnishes he
used.
Often with classical music playing in the background,
neighborhood children and cats wandered by to watch. A
lifelong bachelor, Mr. Bradley loved them all.
When she was a child, his neighbor, Elizabeth Regan
Dellanno, recalled Mr. Bradley giving her water and a blob
of cotton on a dowel so she could mimic him by painting on
the flagstone walk.
Mr. Bradley was also a passionate collector of 19th-century
American paintings, many of which he donated to various
museums, including the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard. He
willed the remainder of his large collection and his
sculptures to Indiana University Art Museum.
Mr. Bradley was a generous man, said Kahlil Gibran, the
Boston painter and sculptor and his friend of 60 years. When
Gibran, godson of the famous poet, left his job as restorer
at the Fogg Art Museum to spend a summer painting in
Provincetown, he said it was Mr. Bradley, his replacement at
the Fogg, who asked him if he needed some money.
"I had $45 in the bank," Gibran said. "Before I left, a $200
check arrived from Bob. He was the linchpin in my career."
A cum laude graduate of the Harvard College class of 1933,
and a very private man, Mr. Bradley never bragged about his
achievements. But friends remembered him for his brilliant
mind, his generous spirit, and his classical piano playing.
"Bob was a genius," said Carroll Wales of Arlington, whom
Mr. Bradley mentored in restoration. "It was almost
impossible to ask him a question about restoration that he
couldn't answer."
Wales was studying art at Harvard in the 1940s when he first
met Mr. Bradley at the Fogg.
"It was a time when there were not too many restoration
studios and the Fogg was one of the earliest and one of the
busiest," said Wales, who took lessons there. In 1966, after
floods in Florence, Italy, damaged many priceless art works,
Mr. Bradley and Wales were among a group of international
restorers who went there to help save them.
Wales said Mr. Bradley taught him that a restorer must have
"a tremendous amount of patience, has to love the work he is
doing, and make sure he is not harming but achieving his
goal."
In his restoration work, Mr. Bradley made several innovative
discoveries, Wales said. One was that meat tenderizer could
remove glue from the back of a painting. "To scrape it off
would do damage to the painting," Wales said.
Another of his discoveries, Wales said, was that the paper
used to make tea bags served just as well as the
harder-to-get Japanese rice paper used to cover a painting
when work is being done on its back side.
In the late 1940s, Mr. Bradley began creating his mostly
metal geometric sculptures, hung like mobiles and exhibited
mostly at museums and colleges including the Museum of
Science and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He
loved them so much, his friends said, he declined to sell
even one.
The largest of Mr. Bradley's sculptures, named "The Tree,"
was 7 feet in diameter and had 5,005 pieces of brass tubing
in 32 colors, said Hal Robinson, an Arlington machinist and
engineer. He conceived of the idea for the work, and
Robinson and other members of Mr. Bradley's "loosely knit
renaissance workshop" of friends helped in its creation.
"The sculptures turned very slowly," Robinson said. "With
'The Tree,' the movement showed it changing with the
seasons. I never saw it but Mr. B could see in his mind how
these geometric things could fit together and work."
Mr. Bradley was also a published author. His "The Treatment
of Paintings" appeared in 1950.
"It represented a turning point in the field of art
technology and remains a historic reference for art
restorers," Priest said.
Mr. Bradley even restructured the Gospels into cadenced form
in "The New Testament in Cadenced Form" in which he changed
the structure of the wording to make the lines shorter and
easier to read. Gibran painted the cover for his friend's
book.
Mr. Bradley was born in Arlington, one of two children of
Morton Clark Bradley and Marie Louise (Boison), both Indiana
natives. His maternal grandfather taught modern languages at
Indiana University and his grandmother taught drawing in the
Bloomington, Ind., schools. Mr. Bradley considered himself a
Hoosier, friends said, and still kept the 100-year-old
Christmas cactus his parents brought when they moved from
Indiana, Gibran said.
On graduating from Harvard, Mr. Bradley won a Bacon
Scholarship that allowed him to travel to Italy and then to
Belgium, where he studied piano. He still played classical
music on his piano until arthritis set in several years ago,
and attended the opera with friends. "Bob didn't want to
retire," Wales said.
While Mr. Bradley has no immediate family, there were,
Gibran said, "countless people who adored him because he was
simple and honest and pure. He quipped a lot. He would
always say, 'Well, I'll brood about that.' "
A funeral service will be held at 10 a.m. tomorrow in the
DeVito-O'Donnell Funeral Home in Arlington Heights. Burial
will be in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in Arlington