Paints’ Mysteries Challenge Protectors of Modern Art
Roger Bagula
Paints’ Mysteries Challenge Protectors of Modern Art
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: February 14, 2007
LOS ANGELES — In a sprawling, white-on-white lab here that looks like a
set from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a British scientist
named Thomas Learner recently lifted the top from a small box of slides,
the kind that usually contain microscopic samples of
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
A rack of paint samples used for testing at a laboratory at the Getty
Conservation Institute.
Tubes of paint from Jacob Lawrence’s studio. At right, Mr. Lawrence’s
“Games — Pocket Pool” (1999).
But this was a different kind of lab, and the slides were coated with
dozens of shades of dried acrylic paint, at once as ordinary as house
paint and as precious as rare isotopes. This is because the acrylics had
been taken from the Santa Monica studio of Sam Francis, the abstract
painter, who died in 1994 and who, like many artists of his generation,
had largely abandoned the oils that had been the medium of painting for
at least five centuries. Instead, he turned to their modern successors:
acrylics, enamels, alkyds and many other substances that are more
synthetic than organic.
The new paints, which began to emerge in the 1930s and made their way
into many studios by the 1950s, allowed artists to do things they
couldn’t do with oil. Morris Louis used thinned acrylic to stain, rather
than coat, canvases, creating an ethereal effect. Jackson Pollock used
gloss enamel because it poured and dripped the way he wanted. Bridget
Riley and Frank Stella both used ordinary house paints, Mr. Stella
because they “had the nice dead kind of color” that he wanted, right out
of the can.
But while conservators have inherited generations’ worth of knowledge
about oil paints, they know comparatively little about synthetics and
how to protect the masterpieces created by using them, many of which are
rapidly approaching the half-century mark.
Acrylics, for example, can leave surfaces softer than oil paints do, and
so dust and dirt stick to them more easily. The surfaces can also be
breeding grounds for mold. How should they be cleaned? Or transported?
What should the temperature and humidity be in the museums where they
are displayed? And what can institutions do — besides panic or weep — if
real problems arise, if a deep red on a Mark Rothko painting slowly
becomes a pale blue, for example, or if cracks appear in a Pollock
easily worth tens of millions of dollars? (These two crises have arisen
in recent years.)
In 2002 the Getty Conservation Institute here, working with the Tate in
London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, began an ambitious
project called Modern Paints to answer such questions. It is only one
part of a much larger undertaking for conservators of modern art, who
now must deal with painting, sculpture and installation materials as
strange and fragile as latex, old cathode ray tubes, whale-bone dust,
fluorescent tubes, preserved sheep and at least one shaggy, taxidermied
angora goat.
Dr. Learner, a conservation scientist who recently moved from the Tate
to the Getty, said he began focusing on paints many years ago, partly
because he believed that progress could be made relatively quickly and
that the results would benefit so many museums, where paintings make up
the majority of modern collections.
When he began his research in the early 1990s, he said, “It was quite a
lonely time in this field.” But now many conservators and scientists are
involved. The Getty is in the forefront, not only because it is one of
the wealthiest arts institutions in the world, with a mandate to help
the entire field of conservation, but also because it does not have its
own collection of modern paintings, and so does not need to focus more
narrowly on its own problems.
Over the last few years, in its labs perched high in the hills of
Brentwood, the Getty has brought complex technology costing millions of
dollars to bear on modern paints, building up a database of thousands of
kinds of pigments, solvents, chemical binders and other substances. In
the process it has helped cast light not only on better ways to clean,
care for and transport modern paintings, but also on the ways that
artists — some, like Morris Louis, highly reclusive — worked.
On a recent tour of the lab, Dr. Learner and Michael Schilling, another
Getty conservation scientist, showed off some of its machinery. This
includes an infrared spectroscope that has been used to figure out the
chemical fingerprints of things as varied as asteroids and illegal
drugs; a device called a microfadeometer, which trains an intense beam
of light — 8 million lumens per square meter, compared with about
120,000 for a cloudless day with the sun at high noon — on a tiny area
of a painting to see how it fades; a hulking Atlas Ci4000 Xenon
Weather-Ometer, which simulates the effects of decades of sunlight and
heat in just months; and a scanning electron microscope costing more
than a million dollars.
As just one reminder of the kind of lab this was, a cardboard storage
box sitting on one table was emblazoned with the hand-lettered warning:
“Beware!! Works of Art Below.”
That morning, one Getty scientist was at work on a project that
demonstrated the residual benefits of the research. A conservator trying
to salvage a defaced urban mural by an artist named Peter Quezada in the
Highland Park area of the city had asked the Getty to help her identify
the paints used in the graffiti, so she could remove them more
carefully. A chip of the graffiti no bigger than a bread crumb was
examined with a spectrometer, which found that it was, in fact, two
kinds of paint, each needing to be treated differently.
Joy Mazurek, a research lab assistant, prepares a paint sample for
analysis at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.
Nearby, almost as if by design, sat vintage paints taken from the studio
of another artist famous for his murals, Jacob Lawrence. The colors —
Chinese orange, olive green, golden yellow — rested on a lab table in
half-squeezed tubes, waiting to be examined. And in a corner of the room
behind them, another scientist subjected another kind of artist paint, a
titanium white made by Golden Artist Colors in upstate New York, to a
thermal analysis, in which a sample is heated in a small furnace to
1,100 degrees Celsius to “unzip the polymer chain,” as the scientist,
Eric Hagan, said.
Dr. Learner and Dr. Schilling, friendly, forthright scientists who throw
around terms that would strike fear into the hearts of most painters and
conservators — “fugitive pigments,” “embrittlement,” “tackiness,”
“yellowing” — say that their initial findings show that many modern
paints, especially acrylics, are more stable in some ways than oils. But
many questions remain. And paint companies, which should know more about
their products than anyone else, are often not much help because they
tend to guard their industrial secrets.
“The worst people to try to get information out of are the industrial
manufacturers,” Dr. Learner said. But even companies that specialize in
paints for artists, he said, often require scientists to sign secrecy
agreements if information is provided about how their paints are made.
“This is a bit of an issue,” he said, breaking into a laugh, “because as
a scientist you just might want to be able to tell people what you’ve
discovered in your research.”
“As far as this project goes, we’ve just had to accept that and keep
plugging away,” he added. Gesturing at the busy lab, which looked as if
it might be preparing research for a mission to Mars or the cure for
cancer, he said, “As you can see, we are.”