From the archives: The Aotearoa Art Show is on this weekend in Auckland. In 2021, Andrew Paul Wood reviewed a book which points out why it sometimes pays to look at the back of the painting. We revisit his review, from the Listener’s April 3 - 9, 2021 edition here.
Taking care of art has become something of a spectator performance of late. Perhaps you’ve seen the YouTube videos in which a private conservator slathers chemicals on a canvas with anxiety-inducing abandon, or pictures of dodgy amateur restorations of church art in Spain. What you probably haven’t seen is the world-class surgical precision and alchemical mastery that go on in conservation labs in our galleries and museums. The work is varied. Scholarly research on materials and techniques is done in parallel with the more regular tasks of preparing paintings for loan and assessing the condition of proposed acquisitions.
Linda Waters is one of two paintings conservators at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Along with Auckland Art Gallery’s Sarah Hillary and Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s Jenny Sherman, Waters has written a book about art in our museums and art galleries, The Back of the Painting: Secrets and stories from art conservation. Lavishly illustrated, it explores the detail and construction of 33 works dating from the 14th century to the present day, including paintings by Monet, McCahon, Hotere and Fomison.
New Zealand-born Waters spent most of her life in Australia and worked at the National Gallery of Victoria before moving to Te Papa. Her specialty is looking after paintings from the mid-20th century onward, putting cross-sections of paint from the canvas under the microscope and researching the pigments to help tell the story of an artwork’s creation and the artist’s choices behind it. The difference between restoration and conservation is that the first is geared around appearances, making something look appealing and near-new, Waters explains.
Conservation is concerned with preserving cultural artefacts for the future, the priorities being to ensure objects are physically stable and to minimise their physical and chemical deterioration.
Conservators also undertake restoration - that is, attend to the aesthetic aspects of an artefact - though they do so within strict ethical guidelines of minimal intervention and the use of reversible materials and techniques. Typically, all this activity is out of sight, but to share the information that only conservators are privileged to see, Waters created the conservation content for the interpretative display for the portrait gallery in Tūrangawaewae: Te Toi o Aotearoa, a long term exhibition at Te Papa.
The difficulty in entering conservation in New Zealand, she says, is that you have to study overseas. Art conservation is a highly specialised field, especially paintings. The nearest study course - the only one in Australasia - is at the University of Melbourne, and Waters was drawn to it by its unique challenges. She has always loved science and art, and says she is curious by nature. Often in education, the two fields seem diametrically opposed, but the Melbourne course - a degree in materials science - melded the two. Louise Henderson’s Les Deux Amies is one example of conservation she notes from the book. “When it was first bought by Te Papa it had a gold-painted frame, distorted canvas and many tiny losses in the paint layer,” she says.
“Conservation involved structural and cosmetic work: providing a new stretcher so the painting could be adequately tensioned to remove the distortions in the canvas, and filling and toning the tiny paint losses so they were no longer distracting.
“Examining the back of the frame revealed that it was originally an off-white colour - confirmed by a photograph of the artist with her work in the 1950s - so treatment also included replicating this finish on the frame.”
Waters is working on some of the Rita Angus paintings in Te Papa’s collection. “We are examining her paintings in various ways - under the microscope at 10 to 40 times magnification, and with UV and infrared light - which enable us to unpack the layers of paint and really see how her paintings were constructed.” They will also be using in-situ X-ray fluorescence, a nondestructive micro technique, to try to pinpoint specific pigments in her palette.
The most challenging painting she has worked on was a large Lois White mural on canvas, preparing it for exhibition. There were inherent preservation problems in White’s technique and the paint she had used. “Basically, it suffered small losses in places where the matte upper layers are poorly adhered to the paint below, and it needs constant work. The catch is that it is very difficult to re-adhere matte paint without the adhesive being visible, and it is also quite taxing and physically intense to do this on a large scale.”
Preservation of the mural was a painstaking process of sticking back down and stabilising the paint with a conservation-grade glue, one that will last without chemically affecting the pigment. “It’s derived from seaweed and can be used in very dilute form without creating any gloss,” says Waters. “We introduced this under the flaking paint, using a tiny brush and working with the painting flat. With the painting upright, we toned down areas of previous loss using watercolours.”
This is a process called “inpainting”, which preserves the material history of wear and the age of the artwork while retaining a sense of what it looked like. “It’s a balancing act where we are not obscuring the nature of the art - they will see that part of paintings that is never seen - the back. There’s a lot to be seen there. It’s paint but at the same time ensuring that the composition can be read without too much distraction. We discussed that aspect of the work back and forth with the curator as it progressed.”
Waters hopes the book will bring awareness to this complex and exacting work that makes it possible to put historical paintings on gallery walls. “They will see that part of paintings that is never seen - the back. There’s a lot to be seen there, looking with an expert eye. Materials tell how paintings were made and tell the history of their lives. That close examination of materials can inform a response to an artwork. Conservation is a really close community of professionals who undertake the valuable and yet largely invisible work of protecting and conserving our taonga.”
The Back Of The Painting: Secrets and stories from art conservation. by Linda Waters, Sarah Hillary and Jenny Sherman (Te Papa Press, $45). This story was originally published in the April 3-9, 2021 issue of the New Zealand Listener.
