Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Joyce Hill Stoner

Joyce Hill Stoner: My Life in Art Conservation and Intersections with the Getty

Getty Trust Oral History Project

Interviews conducted by Amanda Tewes in 2019

Interviews sponsored by the J. Paul Getty Trust

Copyright © 2020 by J. Paul Getty Trust Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley ii

Since 1954 the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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Copyright in the manuscript and recording is owned by the J. Paul Getty Trust, which has made the materials available under Creative Commons licenses as follows: Manuscript is licensed under CC-BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and recording is licensed under CC-BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Joyce Hill Stoner, “Joyce Hill Stoner: My Life in Art Conservation and Intersections with the Getty, ” conducted by Amanda Tewes in 2019, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, under the auspices of the J. Paul Getty Trust 2020.

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Joyce Hill Stoner, photograph by Lifetouch, 2018

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Abstract

Joyce Hill Stoner is a professor of material culture at the University of Delaware, Director of the University of Delaware Preservation Studies Doctoral Program, and painting conservator for the Winterthur/UD Program in Art Conservation. Stoner was born in 1946 and grew up in the Washington, D.C., area. She graduated from College of William & Mary in 1968 and attended New York University, where she earned a masters in art history in 1970 and a diploma in art conservation from the Conservation Center in 1973. She earned her doctorate in art history from the University of Delaware in 1995. Stoner briefly taught at Virginia Commonwealth University before moving to Winterthur/University of Delaware in 1976. She has a long history with the J. Paul Getty Trust, including as a visiting scholar to and traveling with the Paintings Conservation Department in the 1980s, working as the managing editor of Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts, and serving on committees with the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI). She has also been an interviewer and project director with the Oral History Archive Project for the Foundation for the Advancement of Conservation since 1975, as well as written and performed in many theatrical shows. This interview includes discussion about: growing up in the Washington, D.C., area; attending College of William & Mary, New York University, and the University of Delaware, as well as doctoral work on the treatment of James MacNeill Whistler's The Peacock Room; major developments in the field of art conservation, including training, literature, and technology; contributions of art conservators like David Bull, John Brealey, John Gettens, and George Stout; meeting husband Patrick Stoner and his career and studies in theater; teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University and then at Winterthur/University of Delaware since 1976; interviewing and conserving art for the Wyeth family; longtime association with the Getty Trust, including as an applicant, visiting scholar with the Paintings Conservation Department, as the managing editor of Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts (AATA), serving on committees with the GCI, and receiving funding from the Getty Grant Program; history of AATA and FAIC's Oral History Archive Project; challenges in the field of art conservation, including sexism, diversification, and treatment controversies; ongoing theatrical work, which sometimes intersects with art conservation; the Getty's contributions to art conservation, including the UCLA/Getty doctoral program, supportive leaders and staff, and funding projects like the Panel Paintings Initiative. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley v

Table of Contents

Interview 1: November 8, 2019

Hour 1 1

Birth in Washington, D.C., October 9, 1946 — Childhood in Chevy Case, Maryland — Father's work as an editor for the Evening Star — Family connections in politics and entertainment — Mother's work as a French and piano teacher — Paternal family history in Alabama — Conservation of family portraits — Tuskegee project — Decision to attend public school — Early interest in art and theater — Parents' appreciation of art — Experimentation with art styles in college — Introduction to art conservation by Thomas Thorne — Family values of good manners and public appearance — Parents' racial attitudes — Rebellious behavior against parental expectations — Mount Holyoke College and posture pictures — Gloria Steinem on Stoner's father — Experiences as a woman in art conservation — Work ethic — Application to the College of William & Mary — Coursework in fine arts — Graduate program in conversation at New York University (NYU) — Overemphasis on Western art — Increase in art conservation programs and scholarship — 1966 Florence flood and Mud Angels — Choosing art conservation as a career — Intersection of art history, science, and studio art — Art history programs, 1970s versus 1990s — Research at NYU

Hour 2 20

Emphasis on technical skills in modern art conservation programs — Apprenticeship system and application process — Apprenticeship with Charles Olin — Public interest in art conservation — Specialization and diversification of the art conservation field — Charles Olin's techniques — 1976 Ottawa conference — Interest in painting conservation — Continued involvement in theater — Marriage to Patrick Stoner — Patrick's theater education in Virginia — Working in Virginia as an NYU student — 1973 graduation from NYU — Employment at Virginia Commonwealth University and Winterthur — Experiences as a teacher — Interview with the Getty — David Bull and Norton Simon — J. Paul Getty — Work with the Getty Trust in the 1980s — History of Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts (AATA) — Experience as managing editor of AATA, 1969– 1983 — Digitization of AATA — Transfer of AATA from the British Museum to the Rome Centre — Transfer of AATA to the Getty in 1983 — Continued work with AATA — Structure of AATA, editorial board and volunteer work — Conservation and Art Materials Encyclopedia Online (CAMEO)

Hour 3 38

Importance of AATA in research — John Gettens and George Stout as leaders in conservation and personal mentors

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Interview 2: November 8, 2019

Hour 1 40

Influence of Gettens and Stout — Oral History Archive Project for the Foundation for the Advancement of Conservation (FAIC) — Teaching career from Virginia Commonwealth University to Winterthur — Decision to settle in the East Coast — Patrick's connections in Los Angeles — Travels as a visiting scholar — Caroline and Sheldon Keck — Charles Hummel and the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation — Johannes Hell's and Helmut Ruhmann's conservation methods — Structure of the Winterthur program — Changes in teaching style — 2019 Yale conference — Technical and mental skills of a conservator — Advantages of having a joint program with University of Delaware — Comparison to other programs — Recent projects by University of Delaware's PhD students — Implementing the doctoral program — Caroline Keck's financial support — Intersection between the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs — Completion of her PhD in the 1990s — Dissertation research on James McNeill Whistler — Emphasis on art history over conservation in doctorate program — Management of work as both student and administrator

Hour 2 58

Conservation work at the Freer Gallery of Art — Whistler's The Peacock Room — Return to the Freer as a researcher — Restoration of The Peacock Room — Dinner with the Getty Board of Trustees — Timeline of The Peacock Room project — Getty Grant Program — Work as a painting conservator at Winterthur — Conservation and artistic integrity — Interview with Jamie Wyeth — Critical reception of Andrew Wyeth's art — 1997 interview with Andrew Wyeth — Andrew Wyeth's painting techniques — American Institute of Conservation (AIC) and Foundation for Advancement in Conservation (FAIC) — History of AIC and FAIC — Becoming the FAIC executive director — Creation of FAIC's Oral History Project — History and memory in oral histories — Oral history of the Wyeths — Experiences with oral history — Differences in interviewing conservators versus artists — Changes in conservation, apprenticeship versus classrooms — Effect of World War II on conservation — Debates between Norman Bromelle and Gaël de Guichen — Notable interviews — Intersection of conservation and theater background

Hour 3 76

Early challenges with FAIC — Oral History Project transferring to Winterthur — Sexism in early conservation communities

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Interview 3: November 9, 2019

Hour 1 80

Experiences as a visiting scholar to the Getty — Work with Andrea Rothe — Paolo and Laura Mora — Getty Panel Painting Initiative — Trip to Italy with the Getty Paintings Conservation Department in 1986 — Cesare Brandi and chromatic abstraction — Challenges to chromatic abstraction theory — Process of planning and ordering restoration projects — Mentorship of John Walsh — Walsh and William Suhr at the Frick Collection — Walsh as a teaching assistant at NYU — NYU student training exercises — Walsh's influence as director of the Getty — Husband Patrick's career in radio — Composition of a 1986 article on the Getty — Disinterest in conservation from curators and art historians — Public perception of conservators — Importance of viewing paintings in-person — Observation of the Sistine Chapel with Rothe — Controversy over Sistine Chapel conservation — Birute Vileisis of the Getty Grant Program — James Beck and ArtWatch International — Beck igniting the Sistine Chapel controversy — Beck's attitude toward conservators — Effect of the ArtWatch movement — John Brealey's response to criticism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hour 2 96

Working with the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) — Importance of language in conservation — Picture LA: Landmarks of a New Generation initiative — Diversity and the future of conservation — Engagement of children of color through the Picture series — Picture Delaware and Mahasti Afshar — Sibelius, the Wyeths, and mythology — Experiences on the GCI Advisory Committee — Changes to the Advisory Committee under Miguel Angel Corzo — Dissolution of the committee — Developing the UCLA/Getty Program in Archaeological and Ethnographic Conservation — Comparison to other universities — Glenn Wharton on conserving Native American art — Importance of honoring the artist's intent — International reach of the Getty — Writing a musical on Whistler and The Peacock Room — Intersection of music and visual art — Performance piece on Howard Pyle — Theater as an educational tool — Jamie Wyeth's attention to detail — Musical on N.C. Wyeth — 1974 Greenwich conference — Integration of different conservation styles — Adherence to tradition — Transition from apprenticeship to educational programs

Hour 3 113

Angelica Rudenstine's impact on conservation — Improvements in book and photograph conservation — Private practice and connoisseurship in conservation — Discovery of lead soap effect — Consequences of rapidly expanding information — Ethics and sustainability — Work culture at the Getty — Importance of the UCLA/Getty doctoral program — Current leaders at the Getty — Reflections on AATA — Personal contributions to conservation — Efforts Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley viii toward greater diversity — Classism and labeling at museums — Low salaries at museums — Achievements and setbacks in diversity — Women in conservation Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 1

Interview 1: November 8, 2019

01-00:00:00 Tewes: This is an interview with Joyce Hill Stoner for the Getty Trust Oral History Project, in association with the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley. The interview is being conducted by Amanda Tewes in Winterthur, Delaware, on November 8, 2019. So thank you so much for meeting with me today, Joyce.

01-00:00:22 Stoner: Delighted! Thank you for asking me.

01-00:00:25 Tewes: Well, we'll start with the easy stuff here. When and where were you born?

01-00:00:29 Stoner: Well, I was born in [the] Washington, [D.C.], area, Chevy Chase, [Maryland], grew up in Chevy Chase. My father was a newspaper editor. I never knew which way he voted, but we were constantly having my friends move in and out, as different administrations would come in.

I grew up in Chevy Chase with—never deciding whether I wanted to do art or theater, and put on Shakespeare in the sixth grade, directed it, and played Lady Macbeth and Katherine in the Taming of the Shrew myself, and shrank it to twelve pages of blank verse. So I was a strange child, I think. But I hated recess, so this was one way to get out of kickball and such.

01-00:01:19 Tewes: [laughs] Well, you gave me a lot to unpack there. So you were born in the D.C. area and grew up in Chevy Chase.

01-00:01:26 Stoner: Yes.

01-00:01:28 Tewes: Which newspaper did your father work for?

01-00:01:30 Stoner: At the time, it was very well known, it's gone now. It was the Evening Star, and the two newspapers were the Washington Post and the Evening Star. We were sort of not to say "Post" in our house. It wasn't until Watergate that it shifted dramatically, and no one remembered the Star. But it was the evening paper, and the Post was the morning paper, and we always got both and were very aware of what was going on in the world and would discuss it at dinner.

My father, at one point, was head of the Cartoonists Association [Association of American Editorial Cartoonists], so we had cartoonists come, like the fellow who drew Mutt and Jeff and Beetle Bailey and Mary Worth would come to our house for dinner. Dear Abby came, because [my father] was Feature Editor [at one point], and all of my friends in about the eighth grade had to come in and discuss their adolescent issues with Dear Abby. So sort of odd things going on.

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01-00:02:29 My father interviewed a lot of movie stars, so we had—I grew up in a living room filled with [photographs of] my father and Gina Lollobrigida, my father and Jayne Mansfield, my father and Lena Horne. And then oddly, skipping forward, I married someone who interviews movie stars—never meant to. And in our house, we have my husband interviewing Sophia Loren, my husband interviewing Gregory Peck. So it's odd, but there it is.

01-00:02:53 Tewes: Well, what was that childhood like, growing up in that kind of a household?

01-00:02:58 Stoner: Well, it was a wonderful place to grow up, because there were so many diplomatic kids. People were from all countries, and we were always hearing about—one fellow, for instance, who sat next to me in science class entered Haverford [College] as a junior, because he was so smart and had already done all the experiments with fruit flies that were apparently very important. I was just surrounded by people like that, so I thought that's the way the world was.

01-00:03:33 Tewes: And did your mother work?

01-00:03:34 Stoner: My mother taught French and piano, and wasn't working by the time I was born. I learned French and piano from her and continued on doing that. But she had to be a newspaper editor's wife and go to all of the Washington society parties, and she knew some little phrase about every senator. She smoked a cigarette with a long cigarette holder and was always saying things like, "Oh, Senator Jackson, I love what you said about forest fires." And then two years later she'd see him again, and she'd say the same thing, and he wouldn't remember and she wouldn't remember, and everyone was happy.

So I grew up being told, "Now, when you eat at the White House, you must so- and-so and this and that." We did have a big conference at the White House with Barbara Bush for opening a new care of collections conservation book. That was good training, that came in useful, and no one thought it would, but it did.

01-00:04:33 Tewes: [laughs] Very unique. And just for the record, what are your parents' names?

01-00:04:39 Stoner: My father, I. William Hill, [Jr.] was the son of Isaac William Hill, who founded the 4-H Club, was superintendent of [public] schools in Alabama. My father left Alabama at six months old and came [with his parents] to Washington for the 4-H Club and grew up there. My mother came from mostly Virginia. And a connection to art conservation was we had a whole group of family portraits done by a German itinerant artist, and the Yankees came and burned where they lived, but they—the Yankees—politely carried out the portraits and the grandfather who

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was in a wheelchair. I later restored the paintings, the portraits, for other members of the family, because they went around to cousins, of course.

01-00:05:29 Tewes: Wow, that is full circle for you!

01-00:05:31 Stoner: Because we're bringing on a lot of diversity projects in conservation and trying to get more African American undergrads excited about art conservation, we are especially working with Tuskegee University. It turns out my grandfather was on the board of Tuskegee, because he was the superintendent of schools [of Alabama]. And also, I just realized my grandfather was born during the Civil War. My family waits a long time to have children, so we can span—I'm still getting over that. That's new news. Oh well, probably totally unrelated, but also connected—the lovely curator, Dr. Jontyle Robinson of Tuskegee, the reason we are working with them and treating a bunch of dioramas, which we can show you upstairs, about the history of African Americans, is due to the Legacy Museum funding. I don't know if you know about the Tuskegee project, where the government was wrongly using [African American] men [who had] syphilis and studying that, and [the subjects] didn’t know it. It was a terrible thing, and under Bill Clinton reparation was made, which went to the Legacy Museum, which has the dioramas, which we’re treating upstairs. And the Evening Star, my father’s paper, in something like 1972, broke the story. So it’s all wrapped around.

01-00:06:58 Tewes: Oh wow, wow. And your mother’s name?

01-00:07:03 Stoner: I. William Hill; Isaac William Hill is his father. And then my mother is Catherine Humbird Dawson Hill. Her mother got a telegram when she was born from this very dictatorial aunt, who named her by telegram and said, "Welcome, to Catherine Humbird Dawson." So that’s what my grandmother named her, but she went by Kay Hill, and so Catherine Dawson Hill, Kay Hill. Kay and Bill Hill had a lot of exciting adventures. They took the boat to London with [Bette Davis], and introduced Noël Coward and Bette Davis, and all kinds of exciting things that I only know part of, because I wasn't all that interested when I was little, and now I'm sorry.

01-00:07:52 Tewes: Do you know how your parents met?

01-00:07:55 Stoner: What a good question. I'm not sure I know. I'd better say no, I don't know. I'll ask my sister. Not that you need to know, but I should know that. They were married in 1932, I believe, in the Washington area. [My sister thinks they met when my father was at George Washington University and my mother was at University of Maryland, before going on to Mount Holyoke, and they were introduced by a cousin.]

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01-00:08:13 Tewes: And your sister is older?

01-00:08:15 Stoner: My sister is [seven years] older than I am, and she is retired and lives in Reston, Virginia. Went to Mount Holyoke, majored in philosophy. But in those days, women didn't work, so she did obituaries for the Star and then got married, and has always been active with choirs and the Junior League and all kinds of things. She also did art and theater, but not professionally.

01-00:08:42 Tewes: I think we mentioned your date of birth was October 9, 1946.

01-00:08:46 Stoner: Nineteen forty-six.

01-00:08:49 Tewes: So that's right after World War II ended.

01-00:08:51 Stoner: Yes.

01-00:08:51 Tewes: Do you know how that impacted your family?

01-00:08:54 Stoner: It did not impact my family [very much]. The funny thing is in our junior high school, Leland Junior High School, we were learning bar graphs, so they had a big display of everybody's birth year. I [was born in] a key baby-boomer year, but my father did not go to war, so [my birth] was unrelated. But it went along—doot, doot, doot, doot—[very large] bar [on the] graph [nine months after] the end of whatever, V-J Day or when everybody came home. I'm very aware that people born in 1946 are often the war babies when the parent—the father, the dads came home.

01-00:09:37 Tewes: You mentioned you grew up with a lot of diplomatic children. What schools did you go to?

01-00:09:44 Stoner: I was stern. My parents wanted me to go to private schools. I was very, "No, I will not do that." I'm awfully glad I didn't, now that I've met many of the people who seemed to get into alcohol by the time they were in eleventh grade or were taking safaris to Africa. Pooh. I wanted to make sure I went to a place that had good art and theater, and the public schools were very good.

I went to Rollingwood Elementary, and that's where I put on Macbeth and The Taming of the Shrew. Oddly enough, I'm so sad now that—now everything parents video—nobody took even a picture, even though we did it for the PTA.

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Except when Macduff died after a wooden pole sword fight, his little skirt flew up, and that was a big to-do for the PTA.

Then Leland Junior High School, and then Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, which used to have a great rep. I remember when I applied to William & Mary, they go, "Oh yes, BCC." I've actually had some students—we had a great art teacher, Mr. [Esau] Motovich, and so a number of my later graduate students had been through Mr. Motovich. He was very, very inspiring. We had a fabulous theater teacher named Mr. [Dalla Santa, known as "Mr. D"]. So the art and theater—I was so amazed when I got to college that you could actually major in art or theater, because it was obviously an add-on in high school. But we were in shows, we put on shows every summer. We were painting, and I was—what I did starting in sixth grade was if I needed to give you a present, I would go by your house and take a little photograph, color photograph, with some kind of Brownie camera, and then make it into a watercolor and present you with your house as a portrait. People said, "I didn't see you sitting out there in front of my house." And I would go, "Ha, ha, ha." But in any case, starting in the sixth grade, art and theater.

01-00:11:43 Tewes: Do you know what inspired that for you originally?

01-00:11:45 Stoner: My father, who was a newspaper editor, went to Washington [and Lee]—no, first he started at George Washington University, and he played the banjo and he did the Charleston and was in vaudeville on [Keith’s stage in DC.] His father did not think much of this, and transferred him to Washington and Lee. And then he was split between being, he said, a great cartoonist or a great newspaper editor. He stayed up all night and decided to be a newspaper editor, and then he was.

Okay, and then my mother took me to museums starting from whatever, age ten, [especially the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection.] I can remember. I also was taken to theater starting at [least by] age ten because of my father working on the newspaper. We knew the then-critic Jay Carmody, who would come to our house for dinner. He decided to have me write the review of The King and I, starring not Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner, but the touring cast of—Leonard Graves, I remember, played the King of Siam, and Patricia Morrison was Anna. And so I know, through that, and the little review by Joyce Hill, who liked the show, that I was going to theater and going to art museums very early.

And that's true of our students, too, which is—and that's one of the big fights of trying to diversify the field, because if you are not brought up going to Europe and going to musicals and opera and ballet, it's not a comfortable zone for you. So we have that battle to make it a welcoming place. But I was just sort of slam dunked into art and theater.

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01-00:13:37 Tewes: When you were saying you were painting these houses for your friends, what medium were you using?

01-00:13:42 Stoner: In that case, it was watercolor. I know by the eighth grade I was doing both oil and acrylic. And then my senior thesis for William & Mary was—my art teacher, wonderful Mr. Thomas Thorne—we were in Williamsburg, of course—he did the Williamsburg Mill as if by van Gogh, as if by Gauguin, as if by Cézanne. And I thought, Ooh, I want to do that! At that point I wasn't interested in landscapes; I wanted to do portraits. So I did twenty-two portraits in the style of the Old Masters, from cave painting to pop art—and still have some of them. We use them for putting dirt on for trying different aqueous solutions for removing dirt, because I would write on the back what I had used, which is—we always want artists to do, and most artists have to be arm-twisted to do that.

01-00:14:34 So I was using all kinds of media, and was aware of that. I don't quite know why, because there weren't that many books about different media. Whenever I was sick, my father would bring me home a book on how to paint portraits or something like that, and I would sit in my bed and do that. Which later, working with the Wyeths, I found out that's what N.C. [Wyeth] did to Andrew [Wyeth] when he was sick. He would bring him home a book on Dürer, which is why Andrew Wyeth paints these beautiful drybrush [paintings], like the Dürer rabbit, [Young Hare]. So in any case, strong parental influence, and using any media I could find in the art store.

01-00:15:14 Tewes: But you weren't taking lessons, were you?

01-00:15:17 Stoner: No, no. Just what was taught in school, because I remember Mr. Motovich was very good about cropping. I remember for some reason I got fascinated with painting cats walking away from you, which meant their sort of private areas were drawn, and he said, "No, let's not do that anymore." Nowadays I'm jealous, because I didn't ever get to do firing pottery and all kinds of other things that are done in [most] schools. I was just painting and drawing and making clay models on my own with no instruction. At William & Mary—as many things in the sixties, there wasn't a different major for fine art and studio art, so that I did—just ran both tracks at once. And as a result, didn't get that deep into either one, which again, I would like to go back and change.

But oddly enough, when I did the twenty-two self-portraits, Tom Thorne said, "It sounds like you're training for art conservation." I said, "What is that?" Again, my parents dumped art and theater on me, and Tom Thorne dumped conservation on me. NYU [New York University] begins training people in 1960, takes four people a year—two boys, two girls. And already, little William & Mary has sent two people. So by 1968, when I graduated, Ben Johnson and Jim Greaves had

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already [graduated from William and Mary and gone to NYU.] [Both Ben Johnson and Jim Greaves worked at] LA County [Museum of Art], and that's what brings me to California. But in any case, Ben Johnson's class [was the first]—and so William & Mary oddly knew all about what is art conservation, which still—many universities and many strong art departments do not have any idea about.

01-00:17:11 Tewes: That is interesting. Well, you know, before we jump into William & Mary, I did just want to wrap up some things in your earlier life. You grew up in this very cosmopolitan, interesting household. I'm wondering what values you acquired from your family.

01-00:17:33 Stoner: Values, family values. Well, proper behavior was very important. My sister once crawled out the window and went to some party in the middle of the night. I don't think I did anything that wicked, shall we say. We'd get fussed at if we didn't use the butter knife or if we weren't—I remember one time when my boyfriend, my high school boyfriend broke up with me and I cried, and [my father] came and put a washcloth on my face and said, "Don't you come down to breakfast until you can smile and be cheery." That's like early theater training, if you think—[sings Irving Berlin, from "No Business Like Show Business"] "You get word before the show has started that your favorite uncle died at dawn. Top of that your ma and pa have parted, you're broken-hearted, but you go on." So that was my training, is you are polite to people, you are nice, you do not [publicly grieve]—that's not really a value.

My sister and I have both rebelled. My parents both grew up in the South. They were not what you would call diversity oriented. My father actually told me he would disown me if I roomed with Shelley Fletcher, who's a lovely African American who was the only other girl in my class at NYU, because my mother would be so upset that maybe strange people would come into our apartment. [It wasn’t Shelley herself they worried about, but "her friends."] So my sister and I both sing in fully integrated choirs, and we've always both been rebelling from that [bias], but the era of the times and so forth. So that was an anti-value, shall I say, that we both rebelled from. At our various high school reunions we've always been—we had a number of African Americans. We did not realize how they couldn't go to the Hot Shoppes, which is the early, the first restaurant by the Marriott brothers was in Chevy Chase and Bethesda. Most of the people in my high school are now trying to make reparations everywhere they can, realizing what life was like [for them] in the sixties. But we didn't know. We were at our own parties and doing things like that.

So values. Like what? What do you mean by values?

01-00:19:59 Tewes: Well, it sounds like both you and your sister were very arts oriented.

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01-00:20:00 Stoner: Yes.

01-00:20:01 Tewes: I don't know if that was a value—your appreciation for the arts—that your parents wanted to impart.

01-00:20:09 Stoner: Yeah, art and theater and—hmm, I'm trying to think. So when my mother would try to make me go to the—we belonged to the Chevy Chase Club, which was swanky, and I hated it. When somebody fancy would come over, I'd dress like a beatnik and kind of pretend I'm not into that sort of thing. Oh, they really wanted me to marry someone who was a [Vietnam] veteran and was a powerful sort of manly person. Of course I married somebody in the theater. They didn't like that.

01-00:20:45 Tewes: Did they have someone particular in mind?

01-00:20:48 Stoner: Well, at one point—this is funny. My father wanted me to marry Winston Groom; my mother wanted me to marry [J.] Carter Brown. Winston Groom wrote—oh dear, Tom Hanks played it, the guy on the park bench.

01-00:21:02 Tewes: Forrest Gump.

01-00:21:03 Stoner: Forrest Gump. Winston Groom wrote Forrest Gump many years later. He was tall and handsome, and I saw him at my father's funeral, but I thought he just was too interested in drinking. We had one date, and he was so tall, and it was too hard to talk to him. I thought, Oh, that wouldn't have been so bad, marrying Winston Groom. But he was one of my father's reporters, and he fought in Vietnam, so this made him good in my father's eyes, and I resisted that. He [seemed to be] a very nice person. My mother wanted me to marry Carter Brown, who was the director of the National Gallery, and I don't think that would have been a good idea either, for various reasons. So that's who they had in mind. I don't think of myself as somebody who rebelled all the time, but I rebelled in key areas, to do what I wanted.

01-00:21:56 Tewes: Considering they had a very particular view, perhaps, of what your future should be, did you always know you wanted to attend college?

01-00:22:04 Stoner: Oh, for sure! My mother was Mount Holyoke; my father was George Washington/Washington and Lee; my sister was Mount Holyoke. They were a little disappointed I didn't go to Mount Holyoke, but I wanted to do theater, and I didn't want girls playing boys’ parts. It was that simple.

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Oh, also, I heard about posture pictures. Do you know about posture pictures? Finally, something came out about it in feminist writing. I went to college in 1964. Oh, I was class of '68, my sister was class of '61. Everyone had to do posture pictures. Vassar, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Goucher in Baltimore, I would learn later. It meant that young women had to be naked and stand and get posture pictures. And of course, something would happen, like the guys from Amherst [College] would steal the Mount Holyoke posture pictures. I mean, fill in the blanks. This is not a good idea. You also had faculty insisting that this should happen, and everything. I remember my mother and father telling my sister, "Now, just stand up straight." And I thought, I'm not going to a place that takes posture pictures. That was another reason I was not going to go to Mount Holyoke. I thought that was a terrible idea.

01-00:23:18 Tewes: What is the idea behind that?

01-00:23:22 Stoner: I think sexual harassment by faculty, but nobody said that then. But it was a long- time tradition. And finally, something came out about it, that it is a horrible situation, and they stopped it. But that was the way women were treated, and women were polite. [I believe the practice was begun to look for curvature of the spine or some such thing.]

The way I described it to somebody, my father wanted me to be a feminist geisha. He thought I would perhaps go in the newspaper business, and I should always know how many sugars that my boss wanted in his coffee, and I would never make him mad, and I would—this and that. It's really interesting, when you look at it. But I would achieve, and I would be the first female city editor—kind of a disjunction here. I do try to figure out what people want, and do that. But his whole idea was—oh, and Gloria Steinem said my father was the second worst male chauvinist pig she [had] ever met. Somehow she trained with him a little bit as a reporter or something like that. And he had written something, "The Ten Commandments for the Female Reporter," which is what I think set her off. But it was very much pleasing men to get what you want.

When I grew up and moved into the professional world of art conservation, a lot of that was still around. I realized—I was on six different boards at one point, and I realized that the ones in New England—as my sister used to say about Mount Holyoke, she liked being at Mount Holyoke because the professors acted like women were people. I said that I wished women, during the time that—several Getty things were in my boards at that point. But I would go to meetings for the National Institute for Conservation or the American Institute for Conservation, and all the guys would be there and they'd say, "Oh, well everyone important is here." You'd hear that, and so you—my reaction to that was just to [claps] tell more about what the FAIC [Foundation for Advancement in Conservation] was doing, or something like that. Or I was left to the end, when the important people had already had to take their train to Baltimore, and you'd notice. But the NIC, I

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would say—and I'll be silly here—I would say, "Oh, did you see the sky was blue today?" And there would be silence. Then Ross Merrill would say, "Oh, did you see the sky was blue today?" And everyone would say, "Oh! What a good observation. Thank you, Ross." So anyway, that's, I think, disappearing. But I was set up for: that is the way the world is, and this is what you have to do to get around it.

01-00:26:17 So, I did end up being the first chair, female chair in the College of Arts and Science. And then I would be the first—when we have pictures of the ANAGPIC, Association of North American Graduate Programs in Conservation, the first meeting where we took a picture, I'm the only female chair. So I kind of went through that. I can't say whether my father's training was good or bad, but it did help me navigate the shoals of male dominance, I guess, and still get things done.

01-00:26:56 Tewes: Can I ask an example of how maybe you navigated that?

01-00:27:02 Stoner: I'm a workaholic. One of the reasons is because I'm always doing art and theater, and I don't want somebody in art to think I'm less serious. So I will work twelve- and sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, and not let anyone know, because it won't help me. As you don't want to know your dentist tap dances, you don't want to know your painting conservator writes musicals. So you just live two separate lives.

I remember I came in here as painting conservator in 1976, was head of the Conservation Department by 1980, and director of the program by 1982. By never not answering an email, answering things, getting things done, just—well, my reason wasn't to succeed as a woman. My reason was to keep both lives going invisibly, which resulted in people giving me positions. I guess that describes it. One of the stories I tell is they made me float chairman of the sorority at William & Mary, and I had no real interest in doing that. But what happened was because I had a reputation for getting things done, nobody else helped. And I thought this is not good. I want to be more of a—so the new director knew. I was director for fifteen years, and Debbie [Debra Hess] Norris has now been director for twenty years, and she's one of these people who gets everyone to work together. But I had the unfortunate reputation, "Oh well, if Joyce is float chairman, we don't have to do anything." That is not good, but that is typical of what I was doing at the time.

01-00:29:07 Tewes: So, working extra hard.

01-00:29:09 Stoner: And then [unfortunately] not inspiring other people to shoulder the load equally. [laughs] Bad move.

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01-00:29:23 Tewes: So, we mentioned that your interest in theater led you to look at a co-ed school. What else drew you to William & Mary?

01-00:29:33 Stoner: Again, this doesn't sound very laudable, but my father and mother decided we'd do a college trip. We were on our way to Duke, and I actually thought I'd probably go to Duke. And we had so much fun, [especially in Williamsburg]. They [invited] my friend Debbie Pellington—we're still friends—[to] go with us. Debbie and I had so much fun in Williamsburg. We rented bikes and we went all around. We didn't even want to go on to Duke, so I never ended up interviewing at Duke, and just went to Williamsburg. As my brother-in-law said, "Oh, it's like you're going to college next to Disneyland."

And again, it fed the art conservation, because I could—they had art and art conservation going on next door. If we get into the history of conservation, the two [most prominent US] figures were Sheldon and Caroline Keck, in the fifties and sixties. Their protégés, the Quandts—Eleanor and Russell Quandt—were at Williamsburg and made the first movie about the art of the conservator. We're talking '65 or something. My professor had me sit and look at one of the first screenings of the movie.

01-00:30:49 So, it worked well. A good thing happened for a not very serious reason, which was I loved bicycling in Williamsburg and didn't make it to Duke.

Also, everybody talked about how William & Mary walks both sides of the street, as the University of Delaware does. It's both a public and a private institution, so if you're from Virginia, it's a lot easier to get in and the tuition is way low. People started telling my father, "Oh, getting into William & Mary as an out-of-state student is really hard," so that fired us all up. If we're going to do this—and my father, I don't even remember, like he had the governor write or something. I don't know. Anyway, I did okay, because I graduated Phi Beta Kappa, so I guess they weren't sorry. But again, probably got in for not the best reasons. But my father would probably have [worked to help] influence, because we just heard it was really, really hard. I remember in my interview, they did acknowledge that because—I guess of the diplomatic kids, BCC was a good place to have come from, even though it wasn't a chichi private school.

01-00:31:59 Tewes: So you start there in 1964, and you mentioned you majored in fine arts.

01-00:32:04 Stoner: Yes, because you couldn't [major in either] art history or studio, [you had to do both at once].

01-00:32:07 Tewes: Right. So I'm interested in the kinds of coursework that you were exposed to there, in both those areas.

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01-00:32:14 Stoner: The teachers, looking back, were all half art history and half studio art, which is good and bad; I can argue either side. But I did, early on, an oral history with this great Russian conservator named Rostislav Hlopoff, who taught objects conservation—later at Cooperstown. But he had made the finials for many dealers, [Joseph] Duveen and such, and was very, very skilled with his hands. He said, "You must take a flowerpot and smash it across the room, and then get a sandbox and use Duco cement and put the little pieces together and build it up in a sandbox, and you will develop fingerspitzengefühl," which is your feeling when you've got two puzzle pieces exactly matched, and feeling [the edges of the mend]—

So, my sculpture professor, who lectured on the history of sculpture and Brancusi and such—and then also was a wonderful sculptor himself, did a lot of—I remember he did turkey [sculptures] for Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown. He said, "You know, nobody has a photo of the back of a turkey," and so to do a 3-D sculpture, he obviously had had to research backs of turkeys.

01-00:33:32 So anyway, I explained to him what I was doing and brought in a flowerpot. I was sculpting. People alongside of me were carving marble. I was mostly just making clay, but we didn't even fire it. But I brought in my little flowerpot, as Rostislav Hlopoff had told me [to do], and had it in a little paper bag and I was going to go, choonk. And he said, "No, no." He took my flowerpot and, wham, [threw] across the room. So it's in all these little pieces, and I got it together and was putting it together. They were very indulgent on letting me be planning for conservation. But I remember a football player coming over and looking at me with my little flowerpot, and he said, "Wouldn't it just be easier to get a new one?" Anyway, so Rostislav Hlopoff had said, "You mend one flowerpot, you mend two flowerpots, and then you're ready for a Meissen vase." Okay. So we did that.

And he allowed me, my teacher of painting, to do what he had done and do the different styles of painting through cave painting and Picasso and Fragonard, as he had done with the Williamsburg Mill. He also would hire me on the side for people who wanted a portrait of their ancestor. And here's the photograph, and so I would paint that. I don't remember that I was paid or anything. I'm just happy to do it. But they were always at me for, "You're not painting like an Abstract Expressionist. You really should throw the paint around." And they gave up on me, because I painted with an eyeliner brush and didn't want to be Jackson Pollock, which is how [most] everyone was trained in the sixties, so that was against the grain.

01-00:35:18 And looking back, they didn't know enough about proper stretching. I would buy everything just already stretched—as now, we're constantly fighting the lack of permanent materials. And most of the people who teach art, with a few exceptions, something like the Pennsylvania Academy or—actually no, we just visited somebody at the Pennsylvania Academy and they're being taught nothing

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about, Don't paint with chicken fat. I mean, what can you say? Conservators still have a long way to go to excite art professors about what would be the best way to teach if the student wants something to last. I mean, they may not, and that's okay.

But anyway, looking back, I did that. I did drawing, a lot of drawing. We didn't draw from the nude. Later on I found out almost everybody else I knew had drawn from nude models. That's why Linda Nochlin said there are no great women artists, because they didn't get to draw the nude. But we did, in front of each other, sit and just in our clothes and model, and so forth. That's what we did in our art classes.

01-00:36:28 And in art history, it was nice. I think that practicing art professors also taught art history, so there was always a strong awareness of materials, which on the other side—I'm fussing because my art teachers, studio art teachers, didn't know enough about long-lasting materials, but my art history people were very good at the materials that they were teaching. So technical art history was not there yet, but it was a good beginning. [coughs]

01-00:37:10 Tewes: You need a break? [break in audio] Okay, we are back from a break, and we were just talking about your coursework at College of William & Mary, and particularly in dealing with art history and studio art. I'm curious about what kinds of art history you were being exposed to, which fields in—

01-00:37:35 Stoner: I graduate from William & Mary in 1968, go off to NYU. And Linda Nochlin's article, ["Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"], which is among the things that absolutely change art history, is a few years off. [At that time], it’s really memorization, iconography, remembering the names of artists and so forth. It was really quite dreadful the first two years of NYU. William & Mary was friendlier, because it was, again, artists playing the roles of art historians. They really loved the techniques and the materials, and that came through, and I loved it. And then you get to memorize this wall. Everything, this evolution, actually in conservation, too, the seventies are the huge change. We suddenly wanted social history, we suddenly had Marxism, feminism, and so forth. So I was part of before, and I was part of after. When I finally go and get my PhD, it’s an entirely different scene. So William & Mary was the friendly version of what was going to be a lot—I mean, there were no handouts. At NYU, you weren’t allowed to [even Xerox] the books at the New York Public Library—[everything had to be copied by hand]. There were no color slides. Everybody was using what was called taurgos; I don't know what that even means, T-A-U-R-G-O-S. So we learned our art history in black and white. In any case, it was a little better at—William & Mary did have color slides. I'm glad I came back to art history when it was a much better discipline in the nineties.

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01-00:39:34 Tewes: Was this mostly Western art you were learning about?

01-00:39:38 Stoner: That's another thing, the lack of diversity. There was nothing but Western art, and our bible was H.W. Janson, and it starts with Greece and Rome, and if you're lucky it gets to Pollock, and that's it.

01-00:40:00 Tewes: You mentioned your final project was doing twenty-two portraits in the styles of many different artists, and you said you were really interested in portraits by that time. What did you see for the future of your art practice?

01-00:40:24 Stoner: Well, as I had once painted all my friends' houses, I painted all my friends' faces during my college years. And that would be my present, would be you sitting in front of a drapery in your house. But by now I'd already found art conservation, so my twenty-two self-portraits were to show that I understood the evolution of art materials, and so forth. So I was on that path. I mean, I love Jackson Pollock now, but at the time that wasn't what I wanted to do. And so painting with an eyeliner brush, and so forth, my professors kind of thought, "Well, nothing we can do about her." And so that's when they had me start painting portraits from photographs, and all of that.

01-00:41:15 And then I went to NYU, and it was a nice segue. Understanding the materials, which was—I now even think about what a nascent stage NYU was in the sixties, how much we didn't know, and how hard it was to find a [science] professor who knew something about material properties. We had scientists and we had restorers who were wonderful. Larry Majewski, who was the director of NYU, worked on mosaics. I didn't want to go into mosaics. I really wanted to go into paintings. I knew it, I knew it. Then we had Norbert Baer, who came in the second year, and he was very good. He said, "Oh, you mustn't focus so hard, I think." Well, this is ridiculous. And now you can't even just do paintings, you have to do whether you're going to do pre-Renaissance paintings, whether you're going to do ModCon paintings, whether you're going to do tempera, whether you're going to do panel paintings. I mean, it's all these different worlds. Yet at NYU it was a matter of you would rarely specialize in just paintings. So now it is so sophisticated. The field has changed so completely.

I'm jealous now of the programs I could have applied to that didn't exist, because when I applied to NYU in 1967 or '68, whatever it was, it was the only [graduate art conservation] program in North America. It took only four people a year, always two boys, two girls [at that time]. Then by 1970 we had Cooperstown, and then by 1974 we have Winterthur—[now Winterthur/UD]. So everything is exploding. The same thing I then later learned working in the history of conservation: England had one program, the Courtauld [Institute]. Then [things] exploded, and we have the Hamilton Kerr [Institute] and then we have [what used

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to be known as] Gateshead, and all these different places. Almost every country went from one single place to an explosion of places, so by the seventies it was very different. And obviously NYU taking only four people a year, from 1960 to 1970, produced a small amount of people to go out and teach, so we all got busy.

01-00:43:36 I mean, I was managing editor—I know you'll want to wait until later for this, but at NYU, one of my student jobs was to do all the card [cataloguing]—our [conservation] library did not have cards, so I typed out cards for the library on manual typewriters, because I could alphabetize, and was doing that. They made me managing editor of the AATA [Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts] in 1969. So it has now been fifty years, and, boy, has everything changed, as I tell people. I could have put in one suitcase the books that I needed to read at NYU. And now I can't put in one suitcase the books that come out in one semester, about so many different things. So the explosion of the field—I came in when it was sort of quiet. What was it they said? [Harold Plenderleith of] the IIC [International Institute for Conservation] said [in 1950], "We never envisioned there would be more than fifty fellows internationally." And so everybody was thinking quite small. So anyway, I guess I got to witness [snaps] the explosion; and then working for AATA, the explosion of literature.

01-00:45:00 Tewes: Well, considering that NYU was your only option for art conservation and that they only took four people a year, two of which could be women, what made you think that this was going to be something that was achievable?

01-00:45:20 Stoner: Hmm. I don't know. I'm not easy to daunt, I guess one would say. And after I heard William & Mary was hard to get into, and then NYU was hard to get into— I mean as a non-Virginia student. But I just thought, Well, this is what I really want to do. William & Mary people were very good about saying, "This is really where you belong." They didn't like it that I painted with tiny brushes, and so art conservation—and they had already had Ben Johnson and Jim Greaves go through, so they knew, they helped. That worked well. So I think I was well guided and very happy, and I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't gotten into N[YU]. I think it didn't even occur to me I wouldn't get in. That's typical to say, because now it's so—I have to keep telling people we have four hundred people write in, and only [twenty-some get interviewed and] ten get in. But it's a much more well-known field now.

Because I went to Florence [in summer of 1966] on a little [college] trip, right before [the flood and before] finding out about art conservation, which is fascinating. Because I go back now and think about it, and there's still things being treated from the 1966 Florence flood. And we've had all kinds of oral history and sessions about the change of—now most people that worked in the Florence flood aren't alive anymore. But the fortieth anniversary, which was 2006, we could do lots and lots of interviewing.

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01-00:46:56 Tewes: Did you go volunteer after the flood?

01-00:46:59 Stoner: I didn't know about art conservation then. I just, just missed it. I'm sorry about that.

01-00:47:05 Tewes: That's so interesting. Yes, I have heard that many people, American students, went to Florence to help catalog and try and conserve things.

01-00:47:15 Stoner: That gets into a whole interesting story, in that Americans flooded over and Italians said, "No, thank you," because they didn’t want a bunch—Americans mostly formed lines and passed books out of the mud and that sort of thing. But the Italians did not—I mean, even some of our great restorers, like Bernie Rabin, they set up in the Limonaia. Musical instruments are such beautiful things [but were not the great paintings], but he was sort of relegated to musical instruments. He was one of our most famous conservators, but the Italians said, "No, thank you. Glad to see you, great. But no, go over there." Books, passing the books out of the mud.

And thank heavens, because—oh dear, I'm forgetting her name, a wonderful woman, she spoke—oh dear, this is terrible. She was head of the IMLS [Institute of Museum and Library Studies], and now she's—then she was head of the American Folk Art [Museum]. Oh dear, let me come back to that after I look it up. But anyway, she started out as a [Mud Angel], whatever they called them, passing the books out of the mud, and so forth, and that experience caused her to be head of federal agencies that did wonderful, wonderful things for conservation. Anne-Imelda [Radice]—it'll come to me, I'm having a head cold, that kind of thing.

01-00:48:37 Tewes: [laughs] That's fine. We can always—

01-00:48:38 Stoner: She's the significant other of Stephanie Stebich, who is head of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I'll come back to that.

01-00:48:51 Tewes: We’ll think of it later. Well, I have to ask before we move on—you had mentioned that in your sister's day, which was not that much before yours, that women didn't have career aspirations. What made you think that you wanted to follow a career path?

01-00:49:09 Stoner: I announced when I was ten that I was going to be the first [female] city editor of the Evening Star, my father's paper. I think it's totally baby boomer. [My sister] was born in 1939 and I was born in 1946. And even women a few years older than me are reluctant to be as ambitious. But our group, hey, we were ready for

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everything, and it just didn't occur to me I wouldn't be something cool. I was going to be the first female city editor of the Evening Star, and then it moved to the—and then I was going to write shows on Broadway.

Oh, I didn't tell my epiphany, which was—okay.

[While I was at William and Mary, I was studying art during the day and doing theater at the Wedgewood dinner theater, in productions like Meet Me in St. Louis and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I also sang requests in the dining room before each show. I went around with a guitar and a little tip bag and took requests—"Lara’s Theme" and "Ode to Billy Joe" were two favorites in 1967. But you could pick a year and I could sing a song from that year, and I got pretty good at singing whatever people wanted. Then one night during Christmas vacation, one of their apprentices from a previous summer came to visit and they booted me from the dining room and had her sing. I then had my epiphany that I would go with art conservation as a career, because experience and knowledge count. In theater, someone may just boot you for a "new face" at any time, and if you’re doing Macbeth, even Julie Andrews is out of a job. Art conservation is all about accumulated experience and skill. So, conservation would be my livelihood and theater would be my avocation.]

01-00:51:06 Tewes: You mentioned the black-and-white slides that you were using at NYU. But I suppose we should also say that this program is simultaneously an MA in art history, but also a diploma in art conservation?

01-00:51:21 Stoner: Yes. NYU is a little bit different now, but it's still a four-year program. Because our program at Winterthur-University of Delaware and [SUNY] Buffalo are both three years; NYU is four years. And because it was new kid on the block, you had to fulfill everything the art history people wanted. So you were getting a master's degree in art history with a major in conservation—kinda/sorta, because you couldn't do your master's thesis, which was then called two qualifying papers, in art conservation, because again, it's sort of the black sheep coming in the back door. As many people said, the German art historians who had fled Hitler, et cetera, did not see art conservation as a thoroughly academic field. It was too much handwork, and all of that. So we were in the basement. Now they're in a beautiful building across the street. The art historians didn't always even want us in their classes, because we'd say, "I'm sorry, I think that area of the sky you just talked about is totally overpainted." They didn't want that. One of them famously said, "Oh, I'll have conservation students in my lecture classes, but not in my seminars." Because they didn't know technical studies, and they did not wish to be embarrassed. It was kind of kitchen stuff or something else, it wasn't high art history. Which is odd, because now that I've gone back and done a lot of historiography, the great art historians, like Adolph Goldschmidt, drew and wanted everyone to have a sense of drawing, but that kind of disappeared. The

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history of art history is a whole 'nother kind of thing that we felt at NYU. So we were the black sheep that came up from the basement and were in their classes.

And so we got through the art history, and so it was two year[s] to get your master's degree, and then two years to get your diploma in conservation. It's way better now and better organized, but we just had to pretend we were getting a PhD—I mean, sorry, an MA in art history. I think there's probably still some people who really don't want conservation students in their classes, because it's embarrassing. "Have you looked at the X-ray?" "Uh, no." Or change the subject or something. So it was an interesting time. It was the changeover.

01-00:54:00 Tewes: Do you think there's a benefit to have conservationists [conservators] steeped in that much art history?

01-00:54:12 Stoner: Well, I went on to get a PhD in art history, so I think you'd get a lot of different answers from different people. But some of my colleagues went on to get PhDs in chemistry. So we all divide up: studio art, art history, and chemistry, what George Stout called the three-legged stool. [coughs] Excuse me. Wait. Say that question again?

01-00:54:43 Tewes: Well, you're just describing the NYU program as being a little bit odd in the way that the art history and art conservation were married together. But I was wondering if there was a benefit to having that much art history going into conservation.

01-00:55:00 Stoner: Some people will argue yes, and some people will argue no. Because it was very old fashioned art history, it was [iconography and traditional memorization then]. And then Linda Nochlin hits the scene, and she later ends up at NYU—she wasn't then—with the whole idea of the social revelation of art history. I've done lectures on this thing, of the different layers of art history, whether you're just doing [iconography] and—you don't realize that John Singleton Copley is actually involved in the [American] Revolution and what that means. You didn't do that. You just looked at the paintings and you did [aesthetic analysis]—and now it is so interknitted with actual history, psychosexual history, all kinds of different things. I have a big diagram I draw about how all these different other academic areas [now] bleed into art history, and it's become so much more interesting.

So it was a lot of memorization, a lot of very arrogant people at NYU in the sixties, and you had to do it their way. They didn't even show color slides and they gave you no handouts. I remember there was a wonderful woman, [maybe Laura Fusco]—actually she married somebody at the Getty—who just came around with a satchel of five-by-eight cards, and the [instructor] would mention— and there were no handouts of course, no reading assignments. The course was called "El Greco to Valdés Leal," and I thought, Who is Valdés Leal? And she

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immediately pulled out of her satchel a whole set of five-by-eight cards on Valdés Leal, and started filling out [additional] things—and no handouts, no anything like that. It was a tricky field at that point, and [conservators] didn't feel welcome. It wasn't about where Valdés Leal lived or what kind of social class he was in [or his media or techniques]. That all happened in the seventies.

01-00:57:08 And so I was so happy to come back to the new art history later and get a PhD. That would have been—so I graduate from NYU in '72; delay a little bit while working in theater, '73; and then go back in the nineties for a PhD. And the world had totally shifted. I think, with our three-legged stool, George Stout—studio art; art history; and science in conservation, science and analysis of materials, and so forth—that nobody's perfect in all three. Science went leaping ahead in the seventies. And so I picked going forward with [two legs of] the three-legged stool, art studio and art history. Art history just improved in leaps and bounds of relevance to the physical properties of a painting. Because you couldn't talk to an art historian about looking through the microscope in the sixties, and they thought you weren't that important if you had to do that. Now, there's much more blending, and it's a much more exciting field. I loved getting my PhD.

01-00:58:32 Tewes: [laughs] We'll dig into that one a little later, I promise. Well, in terms of the classes you're taking at the same time in conservation, I'm wondering what skills and what training you were getting out of that part of your education.

01-00:58:50 Stoner: So we're talking NYU?

01-00:58:51 Tewes: Yes.

01-00:58:53 Stoner: We had a block system, so one year was organic—well, I started with an inorganic year, so we started with pottery. It's so different. I mean, the best thing I can do is to compare it to what we do here. And NYU doesn't even do what NYU used to do. But it was sort of, Here is a Byzantine bowl block, here is New York. Come back and talk about the Byzantine bowl. Whereas here, in an objects block, you might get a Byzantine bowl and, here is a whole list of bibliography about the history a Byzantine bowl. Here are all the analytical techniques you would use to—here's all this. [But for me in the 1960s], it was like, Here's New York. Go find it, come report.

I have a big theory about this, which is rat mazes. So if you have a bunch of rats and you put them in a maze to find food on the other side, and you put them in a little cart and you go di-ti-di-di-di-di-di—food! And then you have other mazes that have rats that have to find the food on their own. Then you take these rat wagon rats and these free-form rats and you put them in a whole new maze, the rat wagon rats are way behind the other ones. NYU gave us no rat wagons. It was

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a matter of, Here's New York, New York Public Library, our library. Find out about this Byzantine bowl. And [at Winterthur] we say, "Okay, here are all the handouts on Byzantium, here are all the handouts on bowls, here is all the handouts on that," so we give extreme rat wagons. Looking it over, I would have liked more rat wagons at NYU. But perhaps we give out too many rat wagons, because you have to think on your own if nobody gives you a bibliography. We [mimics handing out papers]: bibliographies, bibliographies. I think NYU does, too, now.

01-01:00:56 But in those days, you're trying to teach how many different [materials]— ceramics and glass and stone and paintings and mosaics—and all of this in a very short time. They had just started the program, really, when I was there. The faculty was very good in certain things, and there really wasn't a painting conservator teaching when I was there.

So, in any case, it has changed greatly. I think I benefitted to some degree of not having any rat wagons, and I had to go and find everything myself. But, gee, it took longer than it would have with all the handouts we now have and the Internet and all the things that we have. You couldn't even Xerox at the New York Public Library, you had to write everything down.

01-01:01:53 Tewes: [laughs] So you certainly gained a lot of research skills during those years.

01-01:01:56 Stoner: Yes! [laughs]

01-01:01:58 Tewes: What about technical hand skills or anything you learned about actually doing conservation work?

01-01:02:09 Stoner: Well, I came in very strong in studio—in sculpture, painting, and drawing. The way NYU worked was Monday was all day science; and Wednesday was all day actual treatment; and then Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, you were probably working on your art history. So the density of knowledge was not what it is there now, and not what is at Buffalo, which was Cooperstown, and not what is here at Winterthur. When you enter our program it's like entering a nunnery. You really can't walk your dog. You're seven days a week, nine to five, and so you can crowd a lot more into that. So we make sure, in our blocks—NYU's blocks were inorganic for one year and organic for another year, and six weeks in ceramics, which is when I met my Byzantine bowl that I had to go study. I may have lost the train of thought—what am I answering? Sorry.

01-01:03:22 Tewes: [laughs] Hand skills.

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01-01:03:25 Stoner: Hand skills. Okay. So I, through apprenticeship, which the program would set up for you, you would do your hand skills. I think all the programs now are much, much [more] jazzed up on doing this. For instance, it's easier for me now, because we're talking about the 1960s then, what we have [now] is a textile block. And in a textile block you're going to do every kind of weaving or—and in the paintings block you're going to experience tempera painting, you're going to experience fresco. You're going to get all these different things. So all the programs are much, much more intensive now, and you are taught the three-legged stool: the chemistry, the art history, and the hands-on practice all at once, very intensively. That was simply not true at NYU. We didn't have [that], but it is true there now. So I don't really want to go on record saying—it has gotten better. But dear Larry Majewski, who was our teacher, and he wanted the—like Antoinette King, who should have taught our paper block, was busy, and he had to teach the paper block, and his expertise was archeological. That would not happen now, there or at Buffalo or here at the University of Delaware-Winterthur. Now it's so very intensive. And you, in all three programs, you go through blocks and you get extreme hand skills. You're going to be good at some and not so good at others, but you will have experienced it. So everybody has to carve a dovetail, and everybody has to do inlay, and everybody has to do all these different things. That simply wasn't how it was done at NYU in the sixties. But it was the only program in the whole United States, and it only took four people a year.

01-01:05:32 Tewes: You mentioned apprenticeship.

01-01:05:34 Stoner: Yes.

01-01:05:36 Tewes: Was this a model that NYU followed?

01-01:05:43 Stoner: I've done a lot of papers on this. I'll try and shorten it. [Tewes laughs] Seven years is sort of the generalized term, I think, in Japan, for your training. I like to say that in the US what we have is a year or two in intense hand skills to get into the program. You need an apprenticeship with somebody who's going to write how good your hand skills are after you've worked and worked and worked. Then your program is either three years or four years, and then you're going to have an internship, a residency, and so forth. So it ends up being seven years, in any case. It's a combination of extreme hand skills, a lot of, lot of, bibliography and trying to absorb all of that. We try to combine it. [Actually NYU doesn’t require experience, so if their grads want to go into practical conservation and didn’t enter school with much experience, they have to catch up after graduation, I suppose.]

It's still seven years, even if you go to Queen's [University at Kingston, Ontario], which is only a two-year academic program—and think of the competition. We have over 400 people write to see if they can get into the program, and we

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interview—well, about eighty have all the prerequisites we want, and then we interview something like twenty-five, and we take ten. Most people have applied two and three years, bettering their portfolios, bettering their experience. So now you probably have 2,000 or 4,000 hours of experience before you get in. We can count maybe two of those years before you get into any of the programs. And then the time in the program and the time afterwards, to make sure that you have fulfilled both the apprenticeship side and the academic side. There's no way around that, unless you're going to only be a technical art historian, let's say, and never actually put two pieces of pottery together and that sort of thing.

01-01:07:39 Tewes: So when you were at NYU in the seventies, did you have an official apprenticeship model?

01-01:07:48 Stoner: Actually, sixties I'm at NYU.

01-01:07:50 Tewes: '68 to '73.

01-01:07:51 Stoner: Right, but I'm not actually at NYU [in the 1970s.]

01-01:07:54 Tewes: Okay, we'll get there.

01-01:07:56 Stoner: But right, so your question is—

01-01:07:59 Tewes: Did you have a mentor in this apprenticeship model?

01-01:08:02 Stoner: I started out with Charles Olin, who was at the Smithsonian. Now it's the Smithsonian American Art Museum; then it was called the National Collection of Fine Arts. He started me off with a whole lot of very practical things, and then I really—then I came back to the Smithsonian for a fourth year or third-year internship with three different conservators.

I could never get in now in any of the programs with the little bit of experience I had ahead of time. Simply the whole field of conservation wasn't as famous, so people weren't—we now have people who pick it in tenth grade and pick their college accordingly and use every summer to get experience and so forth. So people are much more prepared now. Everyone says when they are graduating, "Boy, I couldn't get in anymore, because it has gotten so [sophisticated and demanding]—there are so many people that are interested in it."

01-01:09:09 And you think about the public relations of the field. The Florence flood happened before I heard about conservation. But it is the first thing that

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everybody goes, "Whoo, [how do we get into that field]?" And oh, they're [enlightened]—what are they—and then the Sistine Chapel is another one. One of my current undergrads right now, she just Googled and found conservation. I couldn't have—I mean, there wasn't any Google. But at the same time, the information about [the profession] has spread, and there's so many excellent things on the Internet. So the whole field is far—and if you think about the one suitcase of books I could have—if I owned every book I needed at NYU—one suitcase. And now, with one suitcase a semester, just in my specialty, not in everything, which my one suitcase at NYU would be.

The explosion of the information, the explosion of the [information in your] specialty that you need, and so forth, to really go forward. And there are a few people who try to be generalists, but they're not very employable. But now we have preventive conservation, and that's new. And we have people who learn a little bit, like with our block system here. For instance, you do six weeks of painting, six weeks of paper, six weeks of—actually because of preventive it's all shorter—four weeks, four weeks, four weeks, of all the different specialties. You may end up simply dealing with humidity and temperature control, and so forth.

01-01:10:42 So the field has changed so completely during that period. Very few people from my 1960 to 1970 time at NYU still practice it, I think, because so many have retired. But I do love this job, and there's nothing I'd rather do. As long as I'm relatively healthy—although I have a terrible cold right now—I hope to stay in it a while longer.

01-01:11:14 Tewes: [laughs] Good. Well, when you were working with Charles Olin, what did you learn from him?

01-01:11:20 Stoner: One of my favorite graduates has just done a history interview with him, and it was one of the longest ones we've ever had on record, he had so much to say. He was a very powerful personality, and so my first day meeting him he had me take varnish off of a [John] Trumbull [painting]. I would never do that. But in any case, a very, very powerful personality. I was up on scaffoldings and I was [filling and] inpainting [18th-century paintings]. He would say, "This is the most delicate instrument in your laboratory—that's your hand." And of course I tried that out on some scientists later, and they—ha ha. But so, he was a very powerful. He went to NYU for only two years and then was offered a job as head [of paintings conservation] at the Smithsonian [Conservation Analytical Lab on the Mall then], which again, tells you how the lay of the land was in the sixties. He said, "If you don't get into NYU, you just come back here and work for me." And many people did, so he has trained a number of people in apprenticeship style. For a long time I still taught the way he did tear mends or the way he did fillings or the way he did inpainting, the way he did cleaning. And then, after working with a lot of other people, I diversified.

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And now the field is—I mean, I talk about when I first started teaching, there's only this much notes—and now it's just explosion of conferences all the time with new information. I just came away from the Yale seminar on—which was sort of the return to Greenwich, the first big change in conservation, with the 1974 Greenwich Conference [on Comparative Lining Techniques]. I'm all out of school by now, and I didn't get to go to Greenwich. There was one follow-up in [Venice], Italy [through ICOM-CC in 1975] and then a follow-up in Canada [in 1976], and I got to that one. I was just switching to come and teach here at that point, where we just learned how many choices there are for lining a painting. I was only taught one way, and that was easy. I taught students, "This is a wax [lining]; this is how you do it." And [in Ottawa]. we [heard about] all the different ways you can [line a painting]: with BEVA, with Mr. [Vishwa] Mehra’s way of using [acrylic] emulsions, and so forth, and then not lining at all. This exploded. Now we've just returned to that at Yale in Conserving Canvas. So from 1974 to—what is this—

01-01:14:05 Tewes: Twenty nineteen.

01-01:14:06 Stoner: Thank you. [laughs] My head cold is getting in there. And everybody felt reborn, and it was a wonderful conference. It was sort of Greenwich 2.0, and how much the field has changed and how hard it is to keep up with so many alternatives. Teaching is hell, because I just taught how to wax line. You can wax it with an iron, you can wax it [on the vacuum hot table]—in 1976, when I first started teaching here—and now the choices—and yet we're also trying to introduce you to paper conservation and preventive conservation and blah, blah, blah. The field has just exploded in possibilities, varieties, literature, bibliography. Thus, the Getty's AATA [Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts] is a huge online device that gives me a little book. The field is extremely sophisticated and complicated, and is going to continue on that kind of explosive Venn diagram, I think.

01-01:15:22 Tewes: Now, did you have a specialty at NYU?

01-01:15:25 Stoner: They tried to stop me from having a specialty. I knew I wanted to do paintings. I had painted paintings since the fifth grade. I worked with Charles Olin on paintings. He had told me I was talented and able, and I took that in very happily. [Norbert Baer] said, "Well, you're trying to specialize too soon," and so had me— I did a big project on mold and had to mend my Byzantine bowl, had to do all kinds of other [unrelated] things. But I felt like time was wasting, because I really needed to learn a lot more about paintings. And so in my heart, the program I wish I'd gone to was the Hamilton Kerr [Institute (HKI)], which started in 1974. You just walk in the door and see paintings: paintings, paintings, paintings. Art history, chemistry, paintings, paintings, paintings. The NYU way was you spent a year just surveying all the organic materials, and then another year surveying all the inorganic materials. And we do that, in a way, here, unlike the Hamilton Kerr.

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But then the Hamilton—what I have to say is the situation here is that inventions—a new way to treat paintings is sometimes discovered while you're taking the photograph conservation block. And so there is a wonderful intermixing.

So my theory, at the end of all this, is the best way to put together—I'll just say paintings—a paintings conservation studio, is to have someone who was trained at the Hamilton Kerr [in] just painting; and then someone else who was trained at NYU, when you have to dabble in every—not dabble, sorry; I take back that word—you had to study intensely all these different materials. Here at Winterthur you study intensely, and then add on to that. As an example, NYU doesn't have photography and wood conservation and furniture conservation and preventive conservation, and so forth. So you have your absolutely specific—and then you must hire somebody from Russia, because they—it's a six-year training program, and they just paint from the cast for the first two years. So in other words, you are trained as a dynamic nineteenth-century artist before you are trained as a conservator, and you want one of those in your lab. The whole idea of all the different ways to approach things, I don't think any one is the best. But if you put somebody from each of those backgrounds together, you have a really good group who can do many different things ably.

01-01:17:56 Tewes: That's an interesting perspective. So you mentioned that you started in 1968 and you finished in 1973. But along the way you got married.

01-01:18:12 Stoner: Yes.

01-01:18:13 Tewes: So we should probably back up and talk a little bit about Patrick [Stoner].

01-01:18:16 Stoner: Okay.

01-01:18:17 Tewes: How did you meet him?

01-01:18:19 Stoner: In theater. I was Ophelia and he was Hamlet in a workshop directed by my boyfriend, who then went off to Vietnam in the Navy. He wasn't harmed. So what I did was just do art cons[ervation]—well, art, art history, some chemistry— during the day, ferociously, and theater at night. We were in a lot of shows together. And then I went off to NYU, and my boyfriend, Bob, came back from Vietnam and had free tickets to Broadway shows every night! So I went to almost everything that was on Broadway in '68 and '70—'68, '69, and '70, but then ended up marrying Patrick when he finished—he did his master's degree in theater at the University of Virginia, and then we got married. He was finishing some more at the University of Virginia, and I came down and was the conservator for the University of Virginia, Rugby Road, Bayly Museum, and during that time did

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treatments. And we ran a dinner theater for three years, and I played all kinds of parts in that.

And so to some degree I lived a split life of art conservation during the day and theater at night. I defend it now, because I teach public speaking for the Art Conservation Program. So every student who comes through this program has been videotaped giving a talk, and critiqued by me about umm-ing and uh-ing. I mean, mostly they solve things themselves watching their own video. So it has managed to blend. I've done a lot of giving talks about conservation to the public and teaching and whatnot, so I feel like the theater background feeds into that.

01-01:20:34 Pat, however—I mentioned that my father interviewed movie stars. Pat started out in theater, [was on the radio for a while] and ended up in public television interviewing movie—[laughs] I didn't know this was going to happen— interviewing movie stars. So when I was on a visiting scholar stint at the Getty, he came with me and made it into the movie studios and started a new career of interviewing movie stars. And so that went nicely. That was around 1985. We have two children, and their names are Catherine—and two grandsons—Catherine and Eliza, and they both love theater and art [and each has a son]. Eliza came to the program here, the curatorial program here at Winterthur and now works at the Guggenheim.

01-01:21:29 Tewes: What a nice connection there!

01-01:21:31 Stoner: Yes.

01-01:21:35 Tewes: But just to clarify, when Patrick was getting his master's—

01-01:21:39 Stoner: In theater, yeah.

01-01:21:39 Tewes: —in theater, you moved down there, and you were still technically a part of the NYU program?

01-01:21:45 Stoner: NYU [was] very loosely organized [at that time], so I worked for a year-and-a- half treating paintings at the Bayly Museum of the University of Virginia. NYU would say—they still wanted me to work on mold, so I worked with a faculty member at the University of Virginia who taught [about] mold. What I was assigned to do was make hundreds of little squares of paint and expose them to mold, to do a project on which pigments are actually fungicides, so they will kill the mold, and which pigments are—the mold conquers [them]. It's always been in the back of my mind. And now people are studying preventive conservation and doing much more about mold. But that was when they were saying, "Don't you

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specialize." I'm thinking, I have so little time, and I want to learn more about that. "No, no, you're going to do mold." At least it was mold on pigment, so it was a little bit related to painting.

01-01:22:39 Tewes: [laughs] So that explains the extended time of finishing that particular work.

01-01:22:47 Stoner: Yeah.

01-01:22:50 Tewes: Well, when you finished this program at NYU officially, what did you think was going to happen next?

01-01:22:59 Stoner: That would have been 1973. I was already working three jobs. I was working for what later became the Getty Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts, but at that point it was NYU. So I had three half-time jobs. I was the managing editor of Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts for NYU—later the Getty. I came up to work on the Freer [Gallery of Art] for the Bicentennial on Whistlers, and so forth, which later became my dissertation. And I taught at the Virginia Commonwealth University, because they had, oddly enough, a wonderful man named Mr. [Maurice] Bonds. He had no master's degree, and he was chair of the Art History Department. He had found one of the early books on painting conservation, and he was restoring paintings in the back room. So he was very excited about having me come down from NYU and lecture about what is painting conservation, and all of that. I taught three semesters at the Virginia Commonwealth University, out of which a lot of [pre-program] people came to NYU, Buffalo—although it would have been Cooperstown then—NYU, Cooperstown, and Delaware out of the—so I was sort of a pre-program teacher for conservation through Virginia Commonwealth University, thanks to Mr. Bonds, because he was in the back room trying to learn—to teach himself to be a painting conservator.

01-01:24:24 And then I got hired at Winterthur while I worked for the Freer, I worked for Mr. Bonds and at VCU, and doing AATA. And AATA stayed with me, it came with me. So I was already a job-and-a-half when I came here, and then moved into—I had a little office with people doing—well, work for AATA in Newark, the other part of our university, while treating paintings here and doing theater at night.

01-01:24:59 Tewes: Just to keep it lively. [laughs]

01-01:25:03 Stoner: Yeah.

01-01:25:04 Tewes: Okay, well, a few questions about that. What made you think that teaching was an area that would be something to pursue?

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01-01:25:13 Stoner: I didn't really. I fell into it. I didn't start out saying I want to be a teacher. But I wanted to be in conservation, and—that's an interesting question. I didn't aim, I fell. But then I liked it. Because at the Freer, treating paintings for the Bicentennial, I was purely a painting conservator doing private work. For AATA, I was an editor and going through the literature. I remember being so mad, because the president of AIC said, "You don't treat paintings, you're just an editor." I thought, No, I treat paintings, I teach.

I should put this in: I interviewed at the Getty before going to NYU. So while working for the Freer and while working on Whistlers and such, and while working for Virginia Commonwealth University, I interviewed before Mr. Getty died, at the Getty.

01-01:26:22 Tewes: Sure, let's talk about that. That's probably in 1975?

01-01:26:27 Stoner: Yes, I think—when does Mr. Getty die?

01-01:26:28 Tewes: 'Seventy-six.

01-01:26:30 Stoner: Okay, yeah, he was still alive. I was interviewed by Burton B. Fredericksen, who—I'll go ahead and tell this. He's still alive. I was brought out to interview at the LA County Museum [of Art], [the Balboa Art Conservation Center in San Diego], and the Getty. Burton B. Fredericksen took me around. He had worked closely with Mr. Getty. Before we went into the [Paintings Conservation] Studio [at the Villa], he said, "We have not told the painting conservator that she is going to be fired, so you will be introduced as a curator." So, that was very odd. I did not get a good impression of the Getty from that. I do remember coming in there, and the five-gallon [canisters of] solvents were stored under the hot table. It was just like, Whoo!! And this was in what I think is called the Ranch House, at that time. In any case, it was strange in every way, and so I did not take that job. Burton B. Fredericksen is still alive and well and doing some consulting work, and so forth. In any case, he gave me a very strange impression of the Getty. I remember coming back and telling my friends at the Freer, "They have the solvents stored under the hot table." [gasps] So anyway, it has changed, of course, mightily.

01-01:28:08 I think the person who took the job—I try to always keep track of my parallel lives, like you were offered this or this, and you take that—so who [took the jobs you didn’t take]? It was Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, who then went off and became the supreme interviewer of living artists at the Menil [Artists Documentation] Program in Texas, and she's worked—I can't do her history in order. She also went to NYU, but went only in the art history, but she was obviously interested in conservation. So she ends up in the Menil, but she also was—oh no, wait. She

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goes to the Menil, she ends up at the Whitney [Museum], but for a time she had two jobs—the Fogg [Museum] and the Whitney, because we're the same vintage out of NYU. That would happen to people like me, working three jobs, because there just weren't that many people out there trained in conservation. She was running the modern art for the Fogg, the modern art for the Whitney, and also the Menil Project in Texas, but I can't give you her bio. In any case, she's the one who took the job, and then she was replaced by David Bull, who ended up at the Getty.

01-01:29:19 I've never let any of my students do what I did when I interviewed at the Getty, which was I didn't do homework. I stupidly said, "Will I get to meet Mr. Getty?" who at that point lived in England [and didn’t leave. He] had had a bad channel crossing, so he no longer took the boat, he only took the train. Later on one of my mentors, John Brealey at the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art], talked about how he would go and see Mr. Getty and so forth and talk about [his paintings. And when Brealey was packing up to leave for the US and removed his easel from Mr. Getty’s home, Mr. Getty patted the easel and said, "I’ll miss this." And that was about as effusive as Mr. Getty got.] I didn't do my homework, so I never let anyone not do their homework that way, because how stupid was that?

Anyway, so I interviewed at the LA County Museum, then I interviewed at the Getty, and I interviewed in San Diego. It was two trips to California. I can't keep this quite straight. I ended up taking the job at Winterthur, and that would be here in 1976. But that was my first Getty encounter. I'm not proud of it, but nonetheless I looked around and saw things—or learned things. Burton B. Fredericksen was very nice. I do remember telling them at the Freer, "The solvents in the great, big cans are all stored under the hot table!" And they went, "Ack!"

01-01:30:42 Tewes: What is the problem with that?

01-01:30:46 Stoner: You need to keep them in a special solvent cabinet away from anything hot, or you [could] have a huge explosion. So the fact that you're running hot—I don't remember how the Getty hot table was built. But essentially, you're running resistance in a heat blanket in a table that could spark. Actually, after I came here, my first six months here, the guy who had sort of put together the hot table—I rebuilt it afterwards—had a foam [rubber pad] in order to [cushion] the wires for the [heat blanket] on the table [under the metal sheet.] And it sparked and the whole thing [of foam rubber] went whoosh, and went and fried. So you have acetone—just completely a bunch of flammable things under the hot table, which could spark, and you [could] have blown up the Painting Conservation Studio at the Getty, as it was then. It was in the Ranch House, it was called. So anyway, I entertained a lot of people at lunch telling them about how that was.

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01-01:31:52 And so the young woman who I did—no, they said, Burton B. Fredericksen said, "We will introduce you as a curator." So, "Hello, come in," and met her. And then she was [later] fired. I believe, if I have the order right, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro took the job, and then David Bull took the job. He later became a great person for—John Brealey was my fabulous curatorial-oriented art historically connoisseurship painting conservator[-mentor]. I would take my students [to visit him at the Met each year] for eleven years or something like that, until he had a terrible stroke. Then we would go to see David Bull, who by that time had left the Getty. He only stayed at the Getty like eleven months, and then went to the— became the director at the Norton Simon Museum, then he had to deal with Norton Simon.

One of my mentors, Bernie Rabin, also had to deal with Norton Simon. And at that point I learned: don't work for a rich person. In the middle of the night Norton Simon would say, "I have this painting. I want to see whether I want to buy it in Texas. You're going to be on the plane tomorrow morning." So yeah, it was a private plane, and yeah, it was really lovely, but your life is in the hands of some very autocratic million/billionaire who wants you to do what he wants. I didn't ever have a talk with David Bull about why he left, but I think it was possibly something like that. He ended up with the National Gallery, where I would always bring my students for a wonderful field trip with him. I did a two-part oral history with him, and I don't remember him talking [about the Getty]—I guess it was such a short time at the Getty—eleven months—but he should be interviewed. He lives in New York now.

01-01:33:51 Tewes: You know, mentioning the wealth aspect of these particular museums, did you have a sense of, even though Mr. Getty was living in Surrey at the time, how much he would be involved or how interested he was in the paintings conservation?

01-01:34:07 Stoner: Okay. Mr. Getty at that time, all I heard was little gossipy stories. I heard that Gillian something, [Gillian Wilson] whose name I can't remember, who was the curator of Furniture [Decorative Arts], got a bigger—these are all gossip—budget for buying furniture because when she went to see Mr. Getty she'd unbutton a button. Okay. And then I heard that Mr. Getty really watched—Burton B. Fredericksen, who had interviewed me, was close to him, and he managed the Museum with an iron hand from afar by quizzing different people. At one point, he got the electrical bill and was furious at how much the air-conditioning cost, and he said, "We're cutting it on the weekends." And one panel painting obligingly popped from not having enough moisture—because particularly in California with Santa Ana winds and so forth, you can get humidity doing this. So [demonstrates graph of up and down with hands] a panel painting went, [demonstrates breaking in half] and that stopped that. He had a network of talking to different people, so that even though he wasn't there, he knew exactly what was

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going on, [if hangings had been changed, if something was removed from a gallery and so forth.]

01-01:35:29 And of course nobody knew the Getty, as the Getty is now, was anywhere in the offing. So it just sounded like a little bit of a scary snake's nest for me to join up with the person who is being fired not knowing she was being fired, me being introduced as a curator, the solvents under the hot table—[sings] woo. It was interesting to see the collection, and soon I was coming out to the Getty a lot to work for Nancy [Englander] and Harold [Williams]. I can remember this piece. Before I came here in '76, I was at the Getty—do you know when Mr. Getty died?

01-01:36:13 Tewes: 'Seventy-six.

01-01:36:16 Stoner: Right, okay. So soon thereafter—oh, I can date this. I'm asked to come and see Nancy and Harold, Nancy Englander and Harold Williams, and so I do it by the age of my children. By '82 I'm coming out to the Getty to consult with them. Is that right? Yeah, that should be—on their plans for the huge Getty city on the hill, [Getty Center]. And AATA, which I'd been managing editor of since NYU in 1969, was moving out to the Getty, so I was brought out. Which, I was thinking would be the reason you were interviewing me, these very different tendrils of life of the Getty. So the first one is the interview by Burton B. Fredericksen; and the AATA is taken into the Getty; and that becomes when I'm on the Visiting Committee for the GCI [Getty Conservation Institute]; and then I'm on another project for the GRI [Getty Research Institute] for the AAT, Art and Architecture Thesaurus, and so forth. I probably should have brought my résumé. When we have a break, I'll get that.

01-01:37:32 Tewes: Well, we'll get to all that. Don't worry.

01-01:37:33 Stoner: That'll help me date things as to when I started doing stuff. But I've been on various Getty committees. And then at the same time so happy to work with wonderful Andrea Rothe, who was in Paintings Conservation. I was a visiting scholar on various committees, and went through Luis Monreal and Miguel Angel Corzo and now Tim Whalen, who are the various people who have run the GCI. So I've been a Getty watcher for a while.

01-01:38:14 Tewes: I like that! A Getty watcher. [laughs] Well, you know, I was thinking that you would say this, but since we've been alluding to it quite a bit, I think it's probably a good idea to talk about the AATA.

01-01:38:27 Stoner: Okay.

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01-01:38:30 Tewes: I believe the official name for this was Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts?

01-01:38:36 Stoner: Yes. I'll do a brief history.

01-01:38:40 Tewes: Please do.

01-01:38:39 Stoner: It started out with Mr. [Rutherford John] Gettens—I just gave a talk about George Stout in Worcester, and all these beginnings that are part of the Freer and the Courtauld and IIC. But AATA was first an appendage of Technical Studies [in] the Field of the Fine Arts, which came out of the Fogg from 1932 to 1942. Then the war happens. Then we have the Monuments Men and a whole bunch of involvement with that. As the war ends, they realize, Oh, we just had a whole bunch of years where nobody did abstracts of conservation literature.

There are key places—the Fogg and the Freer and the Courtauld—and the bouncing around of who's going to run this [on a volunteer basis] in those places. The Freer puts out a—I don't remember what it was called—Abstracts in Archaeology and—da, da, da, da—essentially the title was everything we missed during the war years [Abstracts of Technical Studies in Art and Archaeology]. That was put out by Mr. Gettens and Bertha Usilton, bless her, his secretary at the Freer. Then IIC Abstracts [Abstracts of the Technical Literature on Archaeology and the Fine Arts] starts up in 1955. It's so funny, if you look at the inner pages, it bounces from the Courtauld to the Freer and the Fogg. Who has time? Nobody is paid, and everybody is trying so hard to keep up with international literature, such as it was. So that's 1955 to 1965 or so.

01-01:40:18 And then in 1966 it is taken over by NYU, and there's two managing editors in very short order, 1966, '67, and '68: Meredith Sykes, who goes to Europe and never comes back or something. Her name is on it and she is running it, and she has a special interest in Eastern Europe, so a lot of abstracts were gathered from Eastern Europe. She was replaced by Ann Davidson, who essentially, as far as I can tell, assembled two issues, put them all in a file drawer, and went to Europe— and there it sat. So '66 to '68 was Meredith and then Ann Davidson. I arrive as a student in '68, and by '69 they made me managing editor. I opened these two file drawers and tried to put together issues from these piles of abstracts, and then got a lot better at it. So when is it moved to the Getty? That might be in my CV.

01-01:41:31 Tewes: I think it's '83.

01-01:41:32 Stoner: 'Eighty-three. So from '69 to '83, I'm running it with my pals in theater, who were out-of-work actors typing everything, writing everything by hand, making all the indexes with three-by-five cards. I remember one of my actors left the whole

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shopping bag with [the letter] P on the bus. We had to redo all the handwritten entries to make the index for P. That gives you a sense of how [informal] it was.

It couldn't have been more wonderful. I was at AATA, I think I made $2,000 a year doing it, but they sent me to every conference. So I met all the senior people. My husband would go along. I would be sitting down with George Stout and John Gettens, and then he would be off on a fieldtrip with Mrs. Stout and Mrs. Gettens, and all of that. It was all very lovely. I got a lot of worldwide travel and getting to go to every meeting because of AATA. It was quite wonderful. And it went from being—I didn't really understand what Ann Davidson hadn't done, so there was duplications between Volume VII, No. 3 and Volume VII, No. 4. And after that I made sure that didn't happen again.

I'd better stop for a minute. [coughs]

01-01:43:03 Tewes: Oh sure, we'll pause. [break in audio] Okay, we are back from a break, and we were talking about some duplications in the early issues.

01-01:43:11 Stoner: Oh indeed, yes.

01-01:43:12 Tewes: At the AATA.

01-01:43:13 Stoner: I met the great Hubert von Sonnenburg over at the Met, who, it turned out, was cutting out every AATA and putting them on little three-by-five cards, so he caught the duplications. He said, [imitating accent] "There are duplications." Ooh! I finally ended up hiring students to glue every abstract onto a three-by-five card and making a complete index, because there wasn't one, and there weren't computers. So we finally had an index to check duplication, and I was able to do that starting with Vol. VIII. I was Vol. VII, [Nos.] 3 and 4, and then Vol. VIII.

Meanwhile, the computer is coming into the world, and the British Museum is going to start producing the indexes. You should see the huge—they were these punch-hole things on the edges where stuff went through computer printers. And so I would get these things with these little holes all over the edge to check, that were the indexes that first started coming from the British Museum. So AATA went through this extreme electronic reformatting between Vol. VIII—and let's see, whenever I—I'd have to look at the books. But the British Museum starts doing an index, because before that, it was actors with three-by-five cards on their kitchen tables. I think they made $4 an hour to make these indexes. And Curt Beck, wonderful Curt Beck, who had been on the AATA Board of Advisors for Vol. VII, [No.] 1 and VII, [No.] 2, before I come on the scene, had made the indexes by taking three-by-five cards, going through and writing on them. Well, first he would take the AATA issues and [highlight in] yellow important key

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words, and then copy them onto three-by-five cards, and alphabetize those three- by-five cards. This is life before computers.

01-01:45:13 And then it goes to the British Museum, and we get this huge roll with the rough edges and the little holes, and we added all that. And unfortunately, it was done by British Museum people who were archaeology and ancient classicists, and they didn't think artists' names were a good thing to alphabetize, and I had to fight to say, "No! People are going to look up Picasso and John Sloan, and they want to know the techniques." That was a battle.

Then it was taken away from the British Museum by Giorgio Torraca, and it went to the Rome Centre. He actually had some money, and I got to hire a bunch of assistants for $5 an hour to help with indexes. And then Giorgio, who was so lovely, made a whole Venn diagram about someday there will be regional editors and centers all over the world, and so forth.

01-01:46:09 So it was quite an adventure. And then I was going to all these conferences, meeting all these people. Here is Little Miss Abstracts coming along, and I remember the Swedish regional editor, who had not been doing anything, saw me coming—and actually started backing away and then hiding and things. It was a very funny period of time when—here I come and getting the AATA more and more organized. The board of editors, pre-Getty, all had to live near New York, because we'd just meet at an NYU classroom and so forth. I would bring up shopping bags full of abstracts, and I'd give them each a pile. I knew very well some of them were just talking and not—I won't say their names—and others were very wonderful. It was a very informal operation. I remember having my first child in 1978, and making the deadline, getting all the shopping bags, and getting them up there and getting the editors to look through them.

Where did computers hit? First we have the British Museum, so I think we're already there. But then we get the Rome Centre doing the index, and then we finally get good abstractors at the Rome Centre. When did we move to the Getty? In 1983, okay. That's when I got to know Harold Williamson and—is that right? Nancy Englander and Harold—I'm blanking, is he Williams or Williamson?

01-01:47:48 Tewes: Williams.

01-01:47:49 Stoner: Williams, okay. And being invited to their—by now I have two little children, and I go to see Nancy and Harold in their downtown office in LA. Everything is white and glass, and I have two little children coming in [maybe about to get] jelly on everything. In any case, met them, talked with them a lot about the future of the AATA and how it will work.

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01-01:48:22 And at that point the Getty—GCI, the Getty Conservation Institute, is at Marina Del Rey. I'm still doing [AATA] for the Getty for some years, so I've always had sort of three jobs. And eventually it is chosen that Jessica Brown and I will overlap to do a brain transfer for six months or something like that. The Getty wants to have regional editors who come from all over the world. Okay. Nobody got any money, and they met at NYU, and we got the issues out. And then they said, "Oh, we're going to have people come from Rome and England." Then it got too expensive, and then they stopped meeting in person. But it was lovely when we would all come out there and meet in person, when the Getty could afford it. So Jessica and I did sort of—we partnered at every meeting. I introduced her to all the abstractors. I remember going to see her in the empty building before the Getty occupied it in Marina del Rey, that became the Getty Conservation Institute for a time. And just her. There's Jessica standing there in a totally empty top floor that became the busy offices of everybody typing, and so forth, of AATA. So it became much more professional.

First there were no employees through IIC Abstracts and Abstracts of Technical Studies in the Fogg. None. [Except, I suppose, Meredith Sykes and Ann Davidson.] Then I made about $2,000 a year from 1969 to Jessica Brown, who comes over—what's the date again of GCI? Did you just tell me? Okay, '83 or something, when the Getty is taking over the AATA.

01-01:50:30 Tewes: Yes.

01-01:50:31 Stoner: And it's Jessica. And then suddenly there are secretaries, there are typists and everything. That was very exciting. The heads of the Getty Conservation Institute, under which—first I was [working] directly with Harold and Nancy, and going to see them in this amazing building in LA that was all white and glass, and my children and their jelly fingerprints. I just worried they might—because you have to bring a little food for little people. [They didn’t actually end up getting jelly on anything, but I worried about it]. And then it moves to Marina del Rey and the Getty Conservation Institute, and then it's under Luis Monreal. I have, by this time, a double life with the Getty. I am the AATA person. I have been with AATA now for fifty years, because I was the managing editor starting in 1969, and now I'm the paintings editor—I was for a time paintings and education, and now I'm just paintings, and I'm very happy about that because it makes me keep up with the painting literature all the time. Oh dear, I was on a track that I just jumped. Something with the progress of the AATA.

01-01:51:45 Tewes: Well, I would be interested in hearing about what the mission is of the AATA when you first started, and how that may have changed over the years.

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01-01:51:54 Stoner: I think the mission is exactly the same, which is abstract the world literature related to conservation. It's just being done a lot more efficiently and with computers. But essentially, we're back again—this is down in the Fogg in the 19—when they do Abstracts of Technical Studies, which is 1932 to 1942, halted by the war. Then 1949, then 1955 to '66, then AATA forward.

The idea is there are regional editors. So you're the regional editor of Japan, and you want to make sure everything about conservation in Japan gets abstracted and sent in. Some regional editors were better than others. Josef Riederer was the regional editor in Germany, and he just sent in about fifty abstracts of his own articles every six months. So that was one kind of regional editor. I remember wonderful Yasuo Kamasaki. I would see him at meetings, and he was just so good. We would talk about what was going on in Japan. I mean, it was a lovely [situation]. I felt like I could be dropped out of an airplane anywhere in the world, and there'd be an abstractor or a regional editor who would look after me, and it would be lovely, because I met all these people internationally.

01-01:53:12 So it's the same mission. There are now paid abstractors at the Getty, but there are still regional editors and still an editorial board who tries to make sure what's— AATA is so valuable, irreplaceable, but some of the various GCI heads didn't think it was very sexy. Now, I understand that. It isn't very sexy. It's a dictionary of important international abstracts about world literature about conservation. I don't think Tim Whalen wants to think of it as voluntary, but a lot of it is still voluntary, because you can assign somebody to write, to collect all the author abstracts, in something [like] Studies in Conservation—it's a periodical that comes out four times a year. But somebody writes this wonderful book about Picasso with a whole technical appendix—one shot. Who's going to cover that? Somebody who happens to notice it, who's maybe a volunteer abstractor who sends it in, or they send the book to the Getty. They keep getting cut, as far as I can tell, as far as how many people work for AATA, because it's not sexy. It's the dictionary of all the international literature. If you look at Chemical Abstracts or you look at the—I'm dropping the name of the art history abstracts—they're all these paid people and computers just doing it. And this is still largely a lot of people doing volunteer work.

01-01:54:51 The Getty is doing its very, very best to get original copies and assign paid abstractors to do it in—up on the hill in Brentwood; it was Marina del Rey. It has been so many different places. But in any case, the upsy-downsy of AATA has often depended on the Luis Monreal, Miguel Angel Corzo, and now Tim Whalen. And Tim Whalen is a very good person to be in charge of it. But Luis Monreal, world traveler that he was, and Miguel Angel Corzo, did not think it was sexy. So it didn't get, perhaps, the attention it could have done. The editorial board, which used to meet in person—I wonder if it was every six months or every year. And then it was too expensive, because they were so good about bringing somebody

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from Rome and somebody from Brussels, and then it was too expensive to get them all together.

01-01:55:59 There's nothing else like it for—I teach, and getting—now it's online, which is, of course, lovely. That's another big change that happened while it was at the Getty. It couldn't have happened without the Getty. The Getty did think, in the early years, about charging for it. And everyone went, Oh. When it went online, because—as training programs, we totally rely on that publication. I can't give you the list—I'm sure it's findable from Jessica—on how long she stayed as managing editor. We crossed over, then she went on her own. I have a few pictures when I do a history lecture of regional editors. So I became training and painting [editor] and something else, and then I'm now just painting. And David Grattan was waterlogged wood, and—well, when we had the tiny, little books, I could look right in the front and see who did what. And now it's all online, and I don't know where—it's embarrassing, but—where the table of contents and list of all the other editors even is. It's all online, and I just do my part and send it in, and so forth.

I think it was Tim Whalen, who said, "It's very important, but it's not sexy." It is the dictionary of conservation literature internationally, with beautiful little abstracts, which are vetted by—either they're author abstracts taken out of the books or they are a loyal abstractor—some of the people I dealt with in 1969 are still abstracting. It's so wonderful when I see their names. Oh! They're sending it in voluntarily to make sure it gets worldwide distribution, because if it's a one-off appendix on technical analysis of Picasso. Unless somebody sends it in, the Getty can't know about it. You can assign all the periodicals, but you can't assign the one-off things that are being written everywhere all the time right now. But it's an amazing important service, and I hope the Getty—they went through a big moment of, "Should we charge for this," and then they didn't. Thank heavens. It is our bread and butter for teaching.

01-01:58:18 Tewes: Well, besides the potential for charging for this, what else changed when the AATA went digital?

01-01:58:29 Stoner: Well, what did they do? They hired convicts to type. Because it first had to be loaded into a computer, because it was all these hard copy books, back to 1932. So what do you do? And I'm not really quite sure I know what was done. But that had to be done. And first they started with, I think, IIC Abstracts, which is 1955, and then later tried it again. They had convicts in Canada typing things in somehow. Anyway, it all got eventually on—and then the other problem was there are—oh, we love the supplements. So there'd be a supplement on [Tyrian] purple or there'd be a supplement on musical instruments conservation. The general rule was, when you put together a supplement, only about half of all the important articles on that topic were in AATA, and you'd find another half. And so

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the supplements were—it took a while, and they finally all got onto the computerized database.

01-01:59:44 Every now and then there's a wonderful moment at AIC, American Institute for Conservation, when people come from the Getty and demonstrate the new AATA. We were all held back in the last year because a new something is about to come, a new indexing or something like that. So it's been held back a little in its publicity. But it's lifeblood for a researcher in any of the fields related to conservation, of any of the specialties, preventive conservation, and so forth. And we, in this room, we hold our admissions interviews once a year, and we always ask, "Do you use AATA?" Which is very interesting. The other thing is CAMEO [Conservation and Art Materials Encyclopedia Online], which is—I can't expand the abbreviation, but it's the materials used in conservation that's put together by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. More than half of the applicants know AATA, and maybe only a third of them know CAMEO. But they're the two lifeblood online researchable databases if you're doing a treatment for either who has already written about the problems you encounter with Alex Katz, or what exactly is Acryloid B-72, which would be CAMEO.

01-02:01:18 Tewes: Would it be fair to say that having AATA online has expanded the audience?

01-02:01:27 Stoner: I mean, I would guess, but I don't know, because I'm now in my own little corridor, which is I look at the articles about painting conservation. And I don't know—hi, people at the Getty! [Tewes laughs] I just don't know how much money you're putting into publicity and marketing for AATA. It isn't, I think, as well known as it could be. As Luis Monreal, Miguel Angel—Tim has, in fact, said, "It's just not sexy to spend a whole lot of money to make sure people in every corner of the world are using AATA." I think all training programs rely on it tremendously. Private conservators don't have time to carry out a lot of research, so they're kind of a not-daily audience. But it is so important for training and knowledge of researchers, the scientists all rely on it. And we are inventing new things constantly, and they better the heck be checking AATA to find out what problems they had the last time they tried using whatever that was.

01-02:02:42 Tewes: That makes a lot of sense! Finally, you've mentioned that you've worked with AATA for fifty years now, which is quite impressive. What has kept you onboard for so long?

01-02:02:58 Stoner: Well, again this is Stout. I just did this talk about Mr. Stout at [the] Worcester [Art Museum], where he was director for a time. For both the AATA and the [American Institute for Conservation] Oral History Project, I was cornered because—well, because I did AATA, I obviously was somebody who alphabetized and kind of kept things in an organized way. [John] Gettens and [George] Stout,

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our wonderful lead founder of people in the field, kind of cornered me and knighted me, shall we say, to do both. I'm a teacher, so looking at all the new articles about painting conservation. I don't know what they do. It was every six months; I think it's every four months now. It keeps me informed in a really lifeblood way. So certainly, I'm going to keep doing it. In sort of honor of Gettens and Stout, I would never not do it. I told them that "You'll have to shoot me if you want to get me off the board." I think it's a completely worthwhile endeavor, and I'm happy to be part of it. It happens to be a win-win, because it keeps me abreast of the literature for teaching. Does that answer what you were thinking?

01-02:04:30 Tewes: That's great. Is there anything else you'd like to wrap up as we end our session for this morning, in terms of things we've discussed or you wanted to discuss?

01-02:04:44 Stoner: If I think of it, I'll bring it up as we come back.

01-02:04:47 Tewes: Excellent, okay.

01-02:04:48 Stoner: Because I'm—

01-02:04:50 Tewes: Well, thank you, Joyce.

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Interview 2: November 8, 2019

02-00:00:00 Tewes: This is the second interview with Joyce Hill Stoner for the Getty Trust Oral History Project, in association with the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley. The interview is being conducted by Amanda Tewes in Winterthur, Delaware, on November 8, 2019. So thanks for sitting for a second session today, Joyce.

I think we wanted to start off our second conversation here by wrapping up some thoughts about AATA. Would you like to add anything there?

02-00:00:29 Stoner: I wanted to make a point about John Gettens, because really another reason I'm still doing this is Mr. Gettens, because he was there my first stint at the Freer [Gallery of Art]. One of his little sayings was, "We all must do our part." And AATA, he followed through all along and covered the war years with the Abstracts of Art and Archaeology, he and Bertha Usilton. He had everyone who worked for him just do that, right? It was just bread and butter; you just did that, you contributed. He instilled that in his people, and so I—they'll have to shoot me to get rid of me. And then, with George Stout, who helped found IIC [International Institute for Conservation] and was, in being the director of two different museums, going to all these meetings, doing the Weaver Report [on the Cleaning of Pictures in the National Gallery], writing books, still contributed to AATA. And then Mr. Gettens made the talk in Cooperstown AIC [American Institute for Conservation] of 1973: "We should have a history project." And then Mr. Gettens, Mr. Stout, [Tom Chase], and others sort of framed me to do that.

So these two things that I do on the side, the History Project—which is a lot of oral history, which I'm eagerly learning how you're doing your project—and AATA, are both Gettens and Stout sitting on my shoulders and saying, "You just do this. Whether you're paid or not, you just do this." And so I wanted to put in a thank you, because you don't find people behaving that way so much anymore, although there are some.

02-00:02:15 Tewes: I think as a testament to how the field has grown, by dedicated individuals working on it.

02-00:02:21 Stoner: Indeed, yes.

02-00:02:26 Tewes: Well, as we move forward, I wanted to talk more about your teaching. We mentioned that you started teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1975, and you taught—was it three classes there?

02-00:02:41 Stoner: Three semesters. One semester I had two classes, I think. So that was an introduction to what we call curatorial conservation, which means not doing it,

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but what it means: what [is] preventive conservation, humidity control, how to pick a good conservator, how to recognize a good conservator. And then I had internships to actually prepare people to apply to the programs. There was a lecture segment and then a very practical lab segment. So people who worked with me at VCU went into book conservation at the Library of Congress, the then- Cooperstown Program, the Winterthur Program here, and NYU [New York University]. So it was a little lovely kind of melting pot to send people off in the future.

02-00:03:32 It's interesting, I was in the middle of producing and writing an off-Broadway show when this Mr. Bonds called me from Virginia and said he had a person leaving on sabbatical, and would I please come teach? I mean, I didn't say, "Oh, I want to teach!" He asked me to teach and I said, "Oh, that sounds fun." And so I went. It was supposed to be just one semester as a sabbatical replacement, then he kept me on for a whole year additionally, so it was a year-and-a-half. And then I got the job at Winterthur, but was also working at the Freer [Gallery of Art], so I had three things going.

When I started at Winterthur, I was still working part-time at the Freer, which is, of course, imbued with Mr. [John] Gettens. So everything was beautiful, long hand, taking notes of everything. Until he died, he would send me little three-by- five cards with little lists of things he thought were worthy to be abstracted, and I needed to find someone to do that. I've always tried to have my students also abstract. I'm not nearly as good as Mr. Gettens in infecting people with service to the field. And then others on the faculty, such as Vicki Cassman, have tried hard to make sure all of her undergrads did abstracts. So the abstracting and the teaching wind together. Also, I have no business teaching if I don't keep up. And editing AATA—I don't edit the whole thing anymore, I just get the little sections on paintings. That's what I teach, so that works very nicely and keeps going.

02-00:05:09 So I taught for a year-and-a-half—involuntarily, shall we say. They kind of just asked [me] to come and teach. When the Winterthur position was advertised, I remember a woman at the National Gallery said, "Well, you'll be the only one with teaching experience." I thought, Oh, I guess I do have teaching experience now. So it just kind of flowed that way, and I couldn't be happier. If I'm healthy and I make sense, I haven't an immediate reason to retire, because I really love it. I think of the students as that I'm a vampire and that I get their blood, and I stay young, kinda sorta, dealing with them, and a new group every year. I would miss it terribly. I don't know, if I retired, what I'd do instead that would be as fun as meeting my new group of painting majors each year. It goes from one to five, and then I help with the new group. And now I'm head of the PhD Program, which means I'm helping people make their connections to write a dissertation. People writing a dissertation and just topic sentences and structure, and all that kind of thing, seems less and less taught in undergraduate [education]. So that becomes an

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important—and because I got one and had very good people hammer into me, I can pass that hammering along.

02-00:06:35 Tewes: Well, it occurs to me, before you took the Winterthur position, that you mentioned that you were interviewing at several museums on the West Coast and Winterthur around the same time. What were those conversations you and your family were having about where you would end up?

02-00:06:55 Stoner: My husband, at that point, was trying to decide whether he wanted to go to CUNY [City University of New York] to get a PhD in theater or UCLA. He got a much better offer at UCLA, and I got a much better offer on the East Coast, but I was the breadwinner. But while I was out as a visiting scholar at the Getty in about 1985 with Andrea Rothe in the Getty Museum, he was able to kind of sort of crash as a radio and TV interviewer the—I don't remember which studio he started with, but he got a position. So he [has] been flown [by the studios] to Los Angeles for a time—doing the taxes, it was forty-two times a year, almost every weekend—to do interviews with the movie—they've cut back a lot, so it's not as often as it once was. So he ended up benefiting from my interviews, because I interviewed at the LA County Museum [of Art], the Getty Museum, and the Balboa Art Conservation Center in San Diego. Did I talk about—[coughs] excuse me.

02-00:08:08 Tewes: You did mention your interview with Burton Fredericksen.

02-00:08:18 Stoner: [coughs] Sorry.

02-00:08:19 Tewes: That's okay. Let's pause for a sec. [break in audio] Okay, we are back from a break. We were just talking about your decision to end up at Winterthur to teach.

02-00:08:33 Stoner: Well, I interviewed at LA County Museum with Jim Greaves—oh no, sorry. Jim Greaves had just left, and Ben Johnson was the head, and I interviewed there. To be perfectly frank, Ben Johnson and his wife had a dog named Chauncey that was nothing that they wanted. They'd had a previous dog that they loved very much, and they were complaining all the time about Chauncey. And then Jim Greaves had just left; I think he went to the Huntington. I realized if I go there, I'm going to be Chauncey, I'm not going to be what [Ben] wanted, [which was] Jim Greaves. It may be some male/female thing, I don't know. But anyway, that didn't seem right. And I interviewed at the Balboa Art Conservation Center, and that wasn't a match. And so I turned down the Getty before they offered it, because the whole idea of working for someone who hadn't told the person they weren't going to work there anymore, well, it didn't look good. My heart was sad, because I really loved California. But I thought Winterthur would be better and went there.

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And I bought my husband a pool table as a consolation prize, but he seemed—he went to CUNY—CCNY?

02-00:09:59 Tewes: CUNY?

02-00:09:59 Stoner: I have forgotten which it was for the PhD level. He commuted and ended up, because of my later trip to be a visiting scholar at the Getty, making the connections with the movie studios, which was really great. It happened entirely because Andrea invited me to be a visiting scholar. I had such a wonderful time, because he had such fabulous international connections. While I was there the Moras, Paolo and Laura Mora, came from Italy. I mean, everything that happened to me, I can turn around and teach at Winterthur. And in those days, I had a great big video camera and was aiming it at whatever was happening, and that was quite wonderful. And—

02-00:10:45 Tewes: Yes, I know we want to talk more about that in a little bit.

02-00:10:48 Stoner: Okay.

02-00:10:51 Tewes: But when you moved to the Winterthur site, what was the program like here?

02-00:10:59 Stoner: I came at the third year; it started in 1974, and I arrived in 1976. So I know every single student, because the first year [class] was in its third year. And oh dear, how much to get into all the politics of that, but the ruling couple—I've mentioned them briefly—Caroline and Sheldon Keck did not want Winterthur to teach paintings conservation. They wanted it to be the little decorative arts program. And I came to teach painting conservation, because nobody told me it wasn't to be taught. My first group of majors, we [had to call] them paint majors—paint on canvas, paint on wood, paint on copper. Then some people turned down Caroline Keck's Cooperstown Program to come here, and then the guns came out. She was after me and it was—she tried to hit down the Oral History Program, and all sorts of things. It was an interesting battle.

In the end, she gave us all her archives and funded our PhD Program. So in the end of the loop, it ended happily. It did not increase the people at Buffalo liking me any, that it ended up that Caroline Keck gave her archives—and we were one- quarter of her will. Her son Albert, her son Larry, her granddaughter Laura, and the University of Delaware PhD Program divided her will. So that came around, but in a lovely way.

02-00:12:37 When I first started teaching here it—what had happened was the people who designed the program—Charles Hummel, George Reilly, and Peter Sparks—went

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around and looked at all the other programs and said, "Okay, we'll take the block system from NYU, we'll take the three years from Cooperstown." So they looked into everything and [said, "Okay,] this is the best thing we can figure out designing it," and I think they did a good job.

02-00:13:07 Charles Hummel hired me, and he's still here, emeritus. When I had my shoulder operation in May and couldn't drive for six weeks, he drove me [a few of the days]. And we're still laughing and chatting about those [early] days. He was active on the National Institute for Conservation in all the early days. One of the things I love to track is curators who have cared very much about conservation. There aren't many—or less than ten probably through most of the history, and he was an early one. He worked very hard to put together a good program, a good faculty, and suggested that—I was hired in 1976 to teach paintings. By 1980 I was Associate Director and head of the Conservation Department [at Winterthur], and by 1982 Director of the Program. That was all with his support and encouragement, so I'm very grateful to him. And he's still around, which is lovely.

02-00:14:01 Tewes: Would you call him a mentor to you in these early years?

02-00:14:04 Stoner: An administrative mentor, not—as far as painting conservation, I have a complicated ancestry. We talk about six degrees from Kevin Bacon or whatever that is. Well, in my world of painting conservation, it's a battle between Johannes Hell of Germany; and Helmut Ruhemann from Germany, but at the National Gallery in London. And how you clean a painting—whether it's aesthetically and with the idea of unity and harmony, or whether it's just take off the varnish and go down to whatever's left, and struggling between the two of them. Andrea Rothe was more on the John Brealey/Johannes Hell side. My mentors all divide up, and the Oral History Program allowed me to go talk to all the pupils of Hell and the pupils of Ruhemann, which again, I constantly pass on to the students. So my mentors are always [standing behind me, offering advice]. They start with Charles Olin, who was an unusual mentor, very much of a male chauvinist, but in any case taught me some very useful things.

One of the things I do with the students is start off with a diagram. Here you are with your talent and ingenuity, and then here is this semi-permeable membrane around you. You're going to be exposed to all these different people, and they all have strengths and they all have weaknesses. It's your job to figure out the strengths and take [those] in and jettison the—[door opens]

02-00:15:37 Tewes: Oh! Let's pause—no.

02-00:15:39 Stoner: —things they don't teach well. For instance, John Brealey, a great mentor and influence on me, was wonderful on treating a painting and terrible at writing

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reports. So I say to the students, "Don't learn reports from John Brealey, learn how to clean a painting," and so forth. And Bernie Rabin, who was a protégé of the Kecks and flew around all the time, he established the first painting conservation at the Norton Simon [Museum], and so I was very aware of that.

02-00:16:08 And so yes, I have a number of mentors: John Brealey, Andrea Rothe, Bernie Rabin, and so forth. But I didn't meet them while I was at NYU. They really came into place a little bit later, as training—I hate to say it, but as we imported more people from Europe, we got a little bit more sophisticated. If I could go back and redesign things—I started graduate school in 1968, and the Hamilton Kerr Institute in London didn't start—or outside of London—until 1974, I think it was. I'd have gone there if I could have, but it wasn't to be. But I've sent a lot of students there and they report back. It's now called reverse mentoring, when you learn things from students, so I'm very happy to do that whenever I can.

02-00:16:57 Tewes: Oh, that's a lovely concept

02-00:16:59 Stoner: Yes. Also for computers. You call your eleven-year-old, "How do I do this?"

02-00:17:07 Tewes: But that's just good common sense, Joyce! [laughs] Oh, you were talking about Charles Hummel and the state of the program when you arrived in '76. So you were teaching paint majors. What kind of classes were you able to teach them?

02-00:17:27 Stoner: Well, it's pretty much the same, actually. Our design, where we—

As the Getty, the dear Getty, has with Marta de la Torre, who for a long time ran the branch of teaching of the Getty Conservation Institute, would bring people from all the different programs—Hamilton Kerr, Italy, and so forth—to Arrowhead up above the Getty—that was their lovely conference center—and talk about what you can teach and what you can't teach, and had these experts from San Diego, who didn't know a thing about conservation, but are teaching experts. They said, "Well, there are these things you jettison, you just don't teach anymore." We all said, "There's nothing we can jettison, because everything that was ever done to a painting, we're going to have to know about it to remove it or whatever." So all these things were taught, and they're not used anymore, but we have to know them to get them off. As was pointed out in Arrowhead—that might have been the mid-eighties—we don't subtract anything, we only add.

So our program is extremely—we had to add preventive conservation. We had to add time-based media. We suddenly have people doing computer art as their— and so we just cram all of this stuff in. We're still doing essentially the same thing: a complete introduction to everything in the first year, a total banquet buffet. You probably already know, but you choose if it's going to be painting, going to be paper, or going to be objects. And then the second year is completely

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in that field, but you're cross-fertilized. The Hamilton Kerr, where I always wanted to go, would have been just paintings—and the cross-fertilization is very important. Richard Wolbers, who had brought enzymes into the treatment of paintings, said it happened to him in the photo block that he thought, Oh, this would work, and then moved it to paintings. So we star in cross-fertilization with our blocks. It's just we have many more moving parts now.

02-00:19:34 When I first started teaching painting conservation, I taught wax lining with an iron or the hot table. No! Then we had the Greenwich conference, and that got to the US about two or three years later. And no, no, you must also teach Plextol linings, you must teach BEVA linings, you must teach not lining—that was not a concept when I started teaching—and loose linings, [or] unattached linings, [and edge linings] and all these different things. So we just keep adding. Now, we've just had another [conference], it's the step two of Greenwich. Greenwich was 1974. Yale, October 2019, [Conserving Canvas Symposium] was the answer to Greenwich, and we just got a whole 'nother load of things we need to teach from Yale—mist linings. Okay. Already about [fifteen] years ago we got Heiber thread-by-thread mending, which was different from what I had learned originally [from] Charles Olin, and so forth. We still have to teach everything we always taught, in addition to what we now have to add. So I'm still teaching things I taught in 1976, but I have to teach many, many, many, many alternatives.

02-00:20:47 The bibliography has exploded. I could have, when I was working for AATA in 1969, and I actually—the reason they hired me at the AATA, I had been the library assistant and there was no card catalog, so I made the card catalog, typed it out for the NYU Conservation Center Library. I could have put in one suitcase all the books that you had in 1968. Now I can't put in one suitcase the books that have come out about painting conservation in the last semester. I mean, the explosion of information, techniques. As we all say, we're not teaching recipes, we're teaching critical thinking, so that as a new thing pops over the transom you say, "Okay, I would use that with this painting, but not that painting." We have to teach you why and how to make the choice. So it's hard to fit in enough practical [work] in that time with all of the—we have to teach about all the different people who invented all these new things. Here are all their bibliographies, and then here—we're all going to try it. So we do these surveys of, okay, we're going to have a lining day, where we have donation paintings that we chop up into little squares; and, okay, we're going to wax line this, and glue line this, Plextol line this, and so forth. And I'm just paintings. My colleagues in the other specialties have something similar. So that's how the training programs have changed. It's a matter of trying to put your arms around an extreme explosion of information, techniques, and approaches, but keep your head about you.

02-00:22:32 Tewes: Has that changed how you conceive of training programs like this, in that you're going to learn the basics here for three years, but it's a lifetime of learning? Or—

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02-00:22:47 Stoner: Well, yes, that's absolutely true. And again, back to Marta and the Getty and Arrowhead, the idea was, What can be taught, and what must you come with? I would have thought you had to come with inpainting, but I've been disabused of that notion, because one of the people who—I don't know if you interviewed him, somebody interviewed Mark Leonard.

02-00:23:12 Tewes: I did.

02-00:23:13 Stoner: And Mark Leonard—I don't know if he told this story—could not inpaint. He was superb at art history and really a good brain and a smart guy. But Dianne Dwyer tells a story of him at the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art]. He could not inpaint, and she finally made the leap for him. He was working on a little Gerard David with his—let's say a fifty-cent size, fifty-cent piece loss, and he couldn't do it. He could not match Gerard David. I think maybe he told me part of this, so it— I don't know if he told it, but it must be true. She inpainted half of the fifty cents, then he inpainted to match her, not Gerard David, and jumped the fence, and then he could do it. So something, I suppose—it's all very intellectual. It's not just dabby, dabby, dabby. And now he is a superb [inpainter]. He's also a painter on the side, or now not on the side because he's retired. So I now believe that inpainting can be taught. I wouldn't have thought so. But as many of the Arrowhead wise other professors said, "You can't teach patience." And conservation is such extreme patience, observation.

I mentioned David Bull, who was hired at the Getty, director at Norton Simon, and then painting conservator at the National Gallery, has become the subject of a series of something like ten now exciting adventure books by Daniel Silva, who— and his character, based on David Bull, is named Gabriel Allon, and he's a hired assassin for the Israeli secret service and a painting conservator. There's a wonderful long story of how they met and how he conceived the night he met him this whole series of books, which are very popular, that you need the same things to be a great painting conservator and a hired assassin: extreme observation and extreme memory. The first one is called The Kill Artist. And anyway, they're very exciting books.

So what do you really need to be a painting conservator? A very good memory, excellent observational skills, critical thinking, and of course extreme hand skills. That's not the end of the story.

02-00:25:40 Tewes: Well actually, could you explain what hand skills you were looking for when people were entering the program?

02-00:25:47 Stoner: I still, every year, take in new undergrads. I teach undergrad, master, and PhD. And we have a skill test, which is based on the Instituto Centrale del Restauro

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[now Instituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro] in Rome, which is their skill test. But because one of the things you have to do if you're treating polychrome sculpture is—let's say the Virgin's robe was yellow in 1420, and then painted red in 1470, and then blue in 1520, blah, blah, blah. They're usually the same medium paint, so you can't use a solvent. So you use a scalpel, and you carefully scrape to 1520, [makes scraping sounds] and then you scrape to 1470 or whatever. And you make a little—like a photo color chart of each of the layers and scalpel skill. So for nearly every specialty, the ability to do that with a scalpel—extreme patience, extreme [dexterity]—and so I have upstairs such a spectrum of people who were really good and went on in conservation, and people who made a monkey's breakfast out of it, just scraping, scraping, scraping. It's all streaky, and they couldn't somehow focus and do it. That's a basic one.

02-00:27:11 Color matching is another you need for most everything. People thought it was a crazy paper, but some people liked it later. I called it—it was during the time of inner tennis [The Inner Game of Tennis book] and inpainting is on the right side of the brain. I'm sorry, it was called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain—but I did a sort of "inpainting on the right side of the brain," and did a whole study of split-brain patients. So at the time with epilepsy, the doctors would split your brain, the connection from your right brain to your left brain. And then they said, "No, that was a bad idea." But it left a number of people who had been disconnected, and they were [apparently] very useful for [research].

So what they did—and this is the part that carries right into painting conservation—is they would put people in little helmet things. Your left side of your brain is connected to your right eye—if I've got this right. In any case, so certain things that you do in painting conservation—matching color and figuring out a missing profile—are totally right brain. So they would cover one eye or the other and show them—try to have them match color. If you did not allow access to the right brain through the left eye, you couldn't do it. Somebody would give you a little picture of half of a bicycle. The split-brain people, if they saw it with their left brain, had no idea what it was. If they saw it with their right brain, they knew that it was a bicycle. So clearly, to inpaint, both the color matching and the figuring out the missing form, is a right-brain activity. Colorblind people cannot come into conservation, but access, good right-brain/left-brain access is clearly very, very important. And so those are some of the basic skills.

02-00:29:12 Mark Leonard is this wonderful example. You can be taught to inpaint, but you can't be taught patience, you can't be taught focus. And it's interesting, we've had a few—not many—students that have had to be jettisoned. One went off to be a dental assistant, and that was just right, because he really wanted everything [turned] into a formula. And of course [different people’s] teeth are probably different, too. But painting, and artists who are suddenly putting in clove oil into their paint or whatever, it's too much variety compared to teeth. Again, this goes back to the Getty in Arrowhead: if you have 200 people in the audience, you can

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teach them [about the structures of] teeth. But it's really hard to have 200 people in the audience and teach them all the varieties of paintings, and what to do when you're trying to clean a painting—and suddenly the artist had put wax in it, and everything you're using is going to [gasps] take off [the paint]! Anyway so, we're glad he went into being a dental assistant. He just didn't get the sophistication or the variety. Those are some of the things, and this could go on and on.

02-00:30:28 Tewes: I'm curious why you think Winterthur became the center for such a robust conservation program.

02-00:30:37 Stoner: Marta de la Torre—depends on who listens to this—[told me that in her mind at that time we were the best] program. Just saying. Why? She said we were the best in teaching critical thinking. We were the very first to be jointly sponsored by a museum and a university. UCLA and Getty now have a program in archaeology and ethnographic [UCLA/Getty Program on the Conservation of Archeological and Ethnographic Materials]—but they don't do paintings. So we're still—if you're talking about paintings—and I have to explain a lot on our teaching evaluation things to people who are doing nursing, let's say. So we are like nursing, in that we have a teaching hospital here with real art. And we have leaks in the wallpaper that—we leave the classroom and run over there and see about it. NYU/Buffalo don't have that. We have that great advantage.

We have a larger faculty. Because if we just talk about [the] people [in the position I’m in] or Debbie Norris, we're paid by the University of Delaware. Then we have like fourteen people who are paid by Winterthur, and we get to rent them. It's like taking horses out of a stable. We don't have a textile major this year, so [the textile conservator teaches the textile block, but is then] left alone to do Winterthur things. But we have two textile majors suddenly, and we take them out of their stable and trot them around, and they—and we pay extra. University of Delaware pays Winterthur for the time of these people. So if we have no painting majors—but of course I work for the university, so that doesn't save any money. But if we have no wood majors, no furniture people, we don't have to pay Winterthur as much. In other words, it's this complicated thing of having a lovely stable, because no other program can afford to have that many specialists. And with this unique arrangement of renting [various] Winterthur conservators who are very well trained and smart, because they wouldn't be hired if they—to teach if they weren't—as needed. So it gives us a faculty of somewhere between fourteen to twenty, compared to NYU and Buffalo—they are in painting conservation our rivals, our sisters—because they only have a total staff of [about] five or six.

02-00:32:55 Now, of course, NYU is connected with the Met. They weren't such friends when I was there, but now they are. [The Met conservators] have to teach on their own time. If I'm a painting conservator at the Met, I have to use vacation time, evenings, or weekends or something to teach. And my supervisor doesn't

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necessarily like it that I do it, [and teaching abilities are not part of my evaluation].

02-00:33:20 Here, you are hired by Winterthur because you not only were a good textile conservator, but you also could teach. And Winterthur gets your salary back, for the time you spent teaching, from the University of Delaware. I do not know if UCLA is set up similarly. We've had people from Rome and people from Brussels come over and study us to say, "Hmm, do we want to do it this way?" But we are jointly sponsored, except—the way I put it is Winterthur is the stay-at-home mom and the University of Delaware is the working dad, because he pays Mom for renting her time, her space, and everything else. It's not like the cost is split. But this beautiful facility, two floors of labs and studios up there; a stable of conservators who are kept [plenty busy] and happy until we need them, by Winterthur and their exhibitions. That's the setup, which is very nice. That all predates me. It was all in place when I arrived in 1976, but happy to look it over, join, and then head it for a time.

02-00:34:36 Tewes: So you mentioned that it was almost alone in American conservation programs in teaching undergrads.

02-00:34:46 Stoner: Yeah. Over the years, for a time—it goes up and down. We were, for quite some time, the only undergraduate program. And then one would pop up somewhere— MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] or something. And then the person who wanted to run it left, and it went away again. So it's hard to keep track of how many there are. There's one at Scripps [College], near you all—you're more San Francisco—but near the Getty. They don't have a single conservator on board. And I've taken in some of the Scripps [undergrad] people, and they don't get any credit for working with a conservator at Watts Towers or anything like that. I think there's very few that are well designed. But on occasion, there are universities that make deals with nearby conservation facilities—a regional center, a museum, or something—and they go. Marist College sends people to Italy as part of their [experience]—but again, it's uncertain how expert or up to date the people they study with are. Depending on the year and how you count them, there are probably about five undergraduate programs.

And we run a "spy ring." Because in this room, we bring in people to be interviewed who come from all these places, and we ask them, "Well, what did you do?" And, "How did you do that?" And then we go, "Oh, okay." Sometimes it's wonderful, and sometimes we think, Hmm, they should have a conservator there advising.

02-00:36:12 Our undergraduate program started first. It started in 1971, and then we added the master's program in '74, and then the first iteration of the PhD program in 1990. So we're now full service, three levels. [laughs] The other [two] PhD programs in

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North America, [I believe, are UCLA, which is more archaeo-ethnographic, and University of Arizona], which is a little bit more science, and we're a little bit more—we've had two iterations. We started in 1990, and then we restarted after some—because of a kerfuffle with the Dean's Office and all that. They say you don't have enough people, because there are not that many people who want to get a PhD [in this field]. [We] had to stop taking students, then we re-emerged. Now we have permanent status as [roughly] half art conservation and half historic preservation. So we have people who do buildings. I'm head of it, which is odd, because I don't know much about buildings. But I have a group of wonderful advisors who help with that.

02-00:37:19 [The] Getty has taken two of our PhD students' dissertations and turned them into the GCI [Getty Conservation Institute's] book series. So Hans Hofmann: [The Artist’s Materials] by, most recently, Dawn Rogala. And previously, Willem de Kooning: [The Artist's Materials] by Susan Lake, came out of our PhD program. Waiting in the wings is Tatiana Bareis, who is—Ausema; she was Bareis, she's married to Ausema—is working on Morris Louis. And Tom Learner knows that will be a wonderful Getty book at some point. She got hired as an NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] Program officer and gives out money to all the training programs. So we don't want to stop her from doing that. We know some day—I don't know, [the NEH might fold] or her children will get old enough, she has time on her hands, she'll do her Morris Louis dissertation and finish. We have wonderful stories of our own graduates saying, [gasps] "The NEH officer is coming. Are we ready? Are we ready?" And Tatiana saying, [gasps] "This is my first visit to the Isabella—to any museum. I'm going to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum." They walk in and there are classmates, and they go, Ha! But in any case—

02-00:38:32 Tewes: That's too funny.

02-00:38:34 Stoner: So Tatiana is on leave from the PhD program.

02-00:38:37 Tewes: Okay.

02-00:38:39 Stoner: Another student, [Marina Dobronovskaya], did the historic preservation of the Soviet Union following World War II, ["The Material Culture of Stalinism: The City of Novgorod, Urban Reconstruction, and Historic Preservation in the Soviet Union after World War II, 1943-1955"], and won two prizes—one from the mayor of Moscow and so forth, and I don't remember the other one—but for the best book on historic preservation coming out of Russia. So we have a nice spread, and other people doing historic preservation topics, so it seems to be going along well.

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It's somehow harder to raise money for the PhD stipends than it is for the master's stipends. People understand: here's a broken vase, a fixed vase. Got it. And then, this is this person who is studying historic[al] graffiti, and how sailors in the nineteenth century stood in the window and carved ships into the wall by the window, and that should be saved and preserved—doesn't have quite the same oomph.

02-00:39:44 Tewes: Well, that leads me to a question about this program starting in 1990. What conversations were you having about why it was important to add a PhD element?

02-00:39:55 Stoner: Well, my old enemy, Caroline Keck—actually, we were already thinking about it, so let me not hang too much on her shoulders. We got a new president of the University of Delaware who said, "Dream big! Think of what's really needed in [your] field." We said, "We need a PhD for lots of reasons." It's hard to get a job teaching in a university if you don't have a PhD—harder every year. And we think of the master's-level students as the engineers or the surgeons, whereas the PhD people would be the cancer researchers. So they're not going to carry it out, but they're going to research it. We were determined it was needed in the field of conservation. And there was one, I think, before us in [both] Australia and in Sweden, but nothing in North America. We were really determined it was necessary.

I remember Peggy Ellis of NYU said, "Good. You put this through, and we'll finally get conservators who know how to write." I can say personally, when I was director of the program, I was writing my dissertation and getting every, whatever, four years a grant from the NEH. I did my big grant request and so forth. I finished my dissertation, and it was four years later and time to write my new [grant request]. And Laura Word, the program officer of the NEH said, "Joyce, your writing has gotten so much better in the last four years. What happened?" "Oh! I wrote a dissertation." As they say, getting your dissertation past a group of academics is like trying to have a group of people who cannot agree on the time of day agree on your dissertation. I mean, they all bled all over it and put red ink and everything else. You go through that, you write better.

02-00:41:38 So we had many reasons thinking the field of conservation—then, so what was it called, the president had some "path to prominence" kind of logo he was doing, and we're going to start a PhD in art conservation research. Okay.

Then Caroline Keck puts in the AIC newsletter, "Conservation needs a doctoral degree. We can never be on an equal footing with curators, blah, blah, blah, unless we have a—" I thought, Oh! So I contacted her, after many years of her disliking me intensely, and said, "We're starting one in Delaware." She said, "You'll never be able to do it, darling." Because apparently, the whole system of boards of regents in different states—NYU would have to go through some kind of state board of regents. They had tried apparently, and it was declared—it was a

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"vocational pursuit" not worthy of a doctoral degree. She said, "You'll never get it through the board of regents." I thought, Well actually, we don't do that in Delaware. And in fact, when [one of the recent] governors of Delaware was inaugurated, in his—the president of the University of Delaware attended, and the governor said, "The [President of the University of Delaware] is the second-most important job in the state." I thought, I don't think the governor of New York says that about the president of NYU. So anyway, everybody was so excited about it, and then it went right through.

02-00:43:13 That's when [Caroline Keck] decided a quarter of her will would come to that. She had collected many paintings over the years, and she put some number of— all the ones she had left, really, up for auction to raise money for our PhD program, at Christie's, so we had a benefit auction. So it was an odd combination of me and Caroline Keck working together. She had all her friends in different places put in money and put in art and everything, so she called in all the chips she could from the past.

This, of course, made the people at Buffalo furious, because what had happened was there had been a bit of a messy divorce between the Kecks and the group that went on and kept the Cooperstown Program going in Buffalo. It was not unexpected, but they're still angry that their founder had switched allegiance to Delaware. The real reason was she had put out a clarion call, "We need a PhD," and we were already in progress. So it was a lovely karmic happenstance.

02-00:44:22 Tewes: And as you were designing what this PhD program could be, did you imagine that there would be overlap with the MA, or that there would be some definitively different things?

02-00:44:35 Stoner: In its current incarnation, the administration wanted to make it perfectly clear they should be interwoven, that we should not be like Antioch, which is a famous college you don't have to go to to get your degree. You can do it all by—this was before online courses—you could do it all correspondence and stuff. They said, "This will be no Antioch." Our master's-level people regularly lecture to the undergrads, the undergrads come out to Winterthur, the PhD students run classes for the undergrads, so we're trying to get it all mixed around. If they have a topic, like historic preservation, which we don't really teach on the master's level, it's kind of separate. But if it's something like the techniques of Hans Hofmann or the techniques of Morris Louis or Willem de Kooning, it's very important that they know each other. The master's program people will invite the PhD program people as their visiting guest speakers, and things like that, for the student-choice [lectures], and things like that.

So it's not always [connected] swimmingly, because the topics—we've had somebody just recently, just defended in May, was doing Chinese export lacquerware. Nobody in the master's level program is currently interested in that.

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So you have a disconnect, and then sometimes you have a connect, but at least they become aware. Because we have it all built in that each PhD student must lecture to the whole combined group of master's level students in their second year, so that they know what's going on. It was wonderful for the guy doing graffiti, because he gave his talk on historic[al] graffiti in American buildings, eighteenth and nineteenth century, and then all of the students became spies, and they would go somewhere and, [gasps] "There's graffiti," and then take a picture and they'd send it to Michael Emmons. That was nice, in that they weren't personally interested in it, but they became seekers and could find it and inform the PhD students. Yes, master's level or undergrads could find it and inform the PhD.

02-00:46:57 Tewes: I think an important thing to note during this time, though, is that as the PhD program was developing here at Winterthur, you were also considering your own work in a doctoral program.

02-00:47:13 Stoner: Okay, first I must correct you in—

02-00:47:14 Tewes: Oh, okay.

02-00:47:15 Stoner: The PhD is not at Winterthur; it's at the University of Delaware.

02-00:47:17 Tewes: Okay.

02-00:47:18 Stoner: The master's program is jointly sponsored [with Winterthur], but the PhD program is a separate entity, and it has gone up and down. Sometimes it has you pay a fee to use the analytical lab here [at Winterthur], sometimes it doesn't. It's a given with the master's level that it's combined; with the PhD, it's a little bit more located at the university now.

02-00:47:42 Tewes: That's a good distinction, thank you. Oh—

02-00:47:44 Stoner: But when you asked that—

02-00:47:45 Tewes: I wanted to ask about your own doctoral work.

02-00:47:48 Stoner: Oh, okay. All right, when is this? The fundraising auction with Caroline Keck helping happens around 1990. If we go back to me, somewhere around 1987, the Getty is going to collect AATA and take it out to California, and I will just be editor of one section. Okay. I was very aware, like when I—if you have a tooth

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pulled, it just fills in. Yeah, there's going to be a hole, and it's going to fill in. What's it going to fill in with? It's just going to fill in. Okay. So this hole that had been AATA, I didn't want to just fill it. I'm thinking, I want to do something with that time. So a combination of working with John Brealey, and have his sort of magical sense of connoisseurship impact on all the decisions he was making in treatment, [I thought], I need more of this study. So we're talking 19—whenever the Getty goes completely, takes AATA—'87 or something.

02-00:48:58 I'm at an AIC meeting, and Arthur Wheelock, who is the curator at that time at the National Gallery, gave this wonderful talk about a Rembrandt—Joseph and Potiphar's Wife—and talked about every element in the painting. Like this little box means that, and she's doing like this because—and my cheeks just got all hot. I thought, I have to get a PhD in art history, I just have to. That hole of the AATA, that's what I'll put in it before it just fills in on its own and I don't have that space.

Then, at the same time we're planning our own PhD, and I realize I can't [fully] be on my own students' committees if I don't have a PhD.

I first thought I was going to work on—I went from Tintoretto—I was going to do it on Tintoretto. Then I was going to do it on—[J.M.W.] Turner. I was going to do Turner, because I had read how much—Getty, the fires in California, change the sunsets so that the particles in the air, from the burning, give you a chromatic fabulousness of the sky. This is when I was a visiting scholar at the Getty, and I was thinking, You know, it's so terrible. We're all saying how beautiful the sunset is because it's these fires, yet it's beautiful. So anyway, we're all going through that. And I learned that the volcanic eruptions when Turner was traveling through Italy made a huge difference in the skies, and that shows up in his paintings. So, Oh, I'm going to do this PhD on Turner and weather in Italy. And then I found out Joyce Townsend at the Tate had access to over a hundred Turners that she was going to sample, and so, no, not going to do Turner.

02-00:50:53 I ended up with [James McNeill] Whistler. I'd already worked at the Freer, and ended up working on the Peacock Room. But the curator of the Peacock Room did not want me to write a dissertation on the Peacock Room. It could be in one chapter, yes, but not the whole thing. So I ended up doing a dissertation on Whistler, loving every minute of it. Because it's now post-Linda Nochlin. I had almost two PhDs: Whistler and women, which got nixed by my dissertation supervisor; and I ended up with sort of Whistler and men, but it was how Whistler changed his technique in every decade according to who his best friend was, who was always a male. Whistler, who advertised himself as this totally original creation, copied the pre-Raphaelites in the 1850s, copied Fantin-Latour in the 1860s, and Delacroix and Courbet. And then moved into—sorry, then Fantin- Latour in the seventies, and Mallarmé, and such, as he moved into the nineties. I traced him decade by decade, looking—so you could tell who's—you could tell who was Whistler's best friend by looking at his brushwork in each decade. I did

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topographical connoisseurship with friendship, and had a wonderful time of it and got to know the Whistler people, who were quite fabulous. My world was then Glasgow and the Freer, which had the Whistler archives divided.

I didn't actually finish my PhD until the middle nineties, but we'd already started our PhD [program]. But our rule is that the majority of people on the dissertation committee must have PhDs—not every single one of them. If they started in 1990, we didn't have people doing their dissertations until '94, their defense is '94, '95, and by then I'm finishing. So that went okay.

02-00:52:58 But anyway, it really changed thinking. Peggy Ellis was quite right that it helps the field of conservation to have more people be able to write logically, outline their thoughts, as good PhD dissertation supervisors hammer on you to make sure you do. If you have four or five of them, they're all hammering from a different angle. You get through that, your writing is better. I now function in that way for many of the students. We have a lot of people [for whom] English is not their first language, like Portuguese, and so forth. I help extra in those cases.

02-00:53:41 Tewes: I'm curious, particularly with this project, how you think about the relationship between conservation and academic work in your own work with Whistler.

02-00:53:56 Stoner: Well, because I did the dissertation in the Art History Department, they said, "Look, we're not conservators. We can't grade you, so do it in art history." So I was only allowed in the last chapter to do cross sections and talk about paint buildup from a technical point of view, because I had to go jump all their hoops for whatever it was, four [earlier] chapters.

I was so blown away by Gridley McKim-Smith, who—[Art History] PhD faculty, now deceased, at Bryn Mawr. She did social history and the cross section, with big-man-in-town [Peter Paul] Rubens coming to see [Diego] Velázquez in Madrid. Velázquez painted with a white ground until—wait a minute, do I have this right? I'll probably get this wrong. Anyway, you'll get the point of it. I think Velázquez was painting with a red ground, and so red ground and glazing and all his paint [layers]. One of the few very famous, money-making artists during his lifetime was Rubens. Big European diplomat, arrives in Madrid, makes a great splash—and [uses] a white ground. And so, as soon as Rubens has come and gone from Madrid, Velázquez's ground goes white. That's social history seen through the cross section. I aimed at that for my last—and [Gridley was] an art historian, but she is very good at—was, is deceased—talking to conservators and incorporating their findings into her work.

02-00:55:41 And so what I did was how Whistler scraped down his paintings. He had a major mistress, Jo [Hiffernan], in the [18]60s, and then Maud [Franklin] in the [18]70s. And then he falls in love and actually gets married [to] somebody of the proper

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social class, to make it okay: Beatrice, who also paints. [Soon], she's dying slowly of cancer. Earlier, he could scrape down the paintings. He went for an all over au- premier-coup look, where you could see all the canvas weave through it. His final painting he never finished—[one] that Mr. Freer ended up with, so I had access to it at the Freer. He and Beatrice, who also painted, would paint beautiful little teenage girls with curly red hair in little dresses that Beatrice would make for them, together. This last unfinished painting, Beatrice was still alive, and they [had been painting] together. So I go into suppositional work with my cross section of how he couldn't scrape it down when Beatrice was there. And then she died, so he left—because it's the most crack[ed], crawled, strange painting you've ever seen because he didn't scrape it down. It's all alligatored. I say the alligatoring is grief, and so forth. I'm not sure they bought it, but they didn't correct it, they let it go on through. That's as technical or as conservation-oriented as I was allowed to [be] in my dissertation.

02-00:57:12 But as we say in the PhD, your master's level work as a conservator is a three- legged stool: chemistry, art history, and practical studio skills. PhD—no practical studio skills, it's really just two legged. You're doing the chemistry or the art history combined, and it is not—you might solve cancer, but you're not doing any surgery. You might do research. If that makes sense.

02-00:57:41 Tewes: Yeah.

02-00:57:42 Stoner: So the conservation doesn't exactly overlap into the PhD.

02-00:57:54 Tewes: I'm also curious what it was like to not only run a department, but also be a student yourself.

02-00:58:05 Stoner: That was tricky, because there would be a temper tantrum among faculty or something, and I'd be solving it as the Chair. And then, oops, I have to be at a seminar down the hall at two [o’clock]. Sorry. And off I would go, and go into this little room in the dark with these beautiful little gem-like slides and some wonderful person talking about [looking at great paintings]—[sighs] it was strange.

I was also in the class with some of my own students, because our master's-level students have to take a certain number of art history classes. So there I'd be, hoping I don't embarrass them when I give my seminar talks, since I'm the Chair of the Department and they're second-year students. That was tricky, and that's why they were very clear about [what] I was not [supposed] to [study]—the professors in Art History—I'm not going to do conservation. I have to do their world. I have to step into their world and level up to them, not just do my own thing.

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It was strange. The guy who ended up going into dentistry, which was so right, I was working on something late at night at the Winterthur Library, and he came and he said, "You know, I think if you tell the people in Art History that you're Chair of the Department of Art Conservation, they might go easy on you." I'm thinking, Uh, one, they know that I am the chair of the Department. [laughs] And two, they're especially not going easy on me, because of that. So you see, he didn't belong in conservation or anything that required a lot of critical thinking.

02-00:59:56 Tewes: I am in awe of your time-management skills, [laughs] I must say. You know, I hadn't truly intended to talk about your Whistler project today, but I think maybe it is a good time, and that does connect with the Getty. And again, we're bouncing around timewise, but I believe you started some of your work around the Bicentennial in 1975 in the [Peacock] Room.

02-01:00:32 Stoner: Yes. What happened was Tom Chase, he and I were together—he's still alive— starting the Oral History Project, and he was my [advisor and colleague]—he didn't really do [oral history], maybe did one interview [with William Young of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and we interviewed Mervyn Ruggles of the National Gallery, Ottawa together.]. He and I were together on the Getty Conservation Advisory Committee, so we sort of cross over a lot in the same way. I had worked at the Freer for the Bicentennial, and when I was interviewing at the Getty and he was advising me all the way about that, and about Jim Greaves and Ben Johnson, because he was also [an] early-day-of NYU student. I mean, it's so incestuous, because there just weren't many people.

I'm going back and forth interviewing, but—well, another complication. My mother died of cancer, and my father was all alone, and I figured I needed to populate the house [in Washington, D.C.]. So Tom Chase and I cooked up that I would come work three days a week at the Freer for the Bicentennial on the Whistlers, and stay with my father and keep him busy and clean out the icebox, and things like that. So that worked very nicely.

02-01:01:44 So I worked 1975 to '76 preparing the Freer [paintings] for the Bicentennial. It neatly worked out later that when I decided to get the PhD—no, not Tintoretto, no, not Turner—Whistler!

Oh, also I should have mentioned another epiphany, like Arthur Wheelock on "I must get a PhD" was Patricia Leighten, who was giving a talk. I was auditing a whole bunch of classes, sort of just sampling, in addition to the ones I had to take. She was giving a beautiful talk about symbolism and Gustave Moreau, and things like that. And then she turned to Whistler, who she declared was a Symbolist. Nobody knows what to do with him. He's not quite an Impressionist, he's not quite an Expressionist, he is the early Jackson Pollock with his fireworks, blah, blah, blah. She said, "No one has really done a good study of Whistler." And then

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lightning bolt, bang, cheeks get all pink. I'll do it! So I go back to Tom Chase and say, "Can I have access to the Whistlers at the Freer again, to write a PhD?"

02-01:02:54 And then I had another learning experience. When I was a conservator for the Freer, I'd show up [and they’d say,] "Is this table okay? Do you have enough light? What do you need?" I come back as an art historian, and they say, "I'm sorry, you can't see that, except on Thursdays. You'll have to come back." And wow, is this different. Because I was serving them, and then they were serving me, and very different.

02-01:03:18 And the curator switched, who was the curator, at the different times. But Linda Merrill, who was a curator at that time, had a very odd attitude toward conservation, which people tell me some English people do—[she’s American but she did her dissertation study in London]—the best way I can say it is like she treated conservators as if they were the janitors. So that if you have a big party, you don't say, "Didn't the janitors do a good job cleaning the room?" And so she's writing about the Peacock Room and doing talks about the Peacock Room, and she doesn't mention me and Wendy Samet, who have done all the work. Because you know, of course it has been cleaned—and it looks good—but you don't give out the names of the janitors. I have all these various little epiphanies about how I'm treated as a female, and art historians versus conservators, and things. But that was one.

Also, another during that time was Linda Merrill had made this, in Whistler world, earthshaking discovery that people said, "Oh, Whistler did do drawings." He said, "No, I made no preparatory drawings. I just painted as I went along." She found where people cited this little drawing of the Peacock Room and said, "Oh, this is wrong. You see, he is doing a preparatory drawing." She figured out that he was banned, because he may or may not have had an affair with Mrs. Leyland. Mr. Leyland owned the Peacock Room. And he was banned, he was never allowed to enter the room again. He went bankrupt with the [John] Ruskin trial, went to Venice, and was telling somebody about the Peacock Room and drew this little picture. It was not a pre-drawing, it was a post-drawing. She had made this discovery with proof—I don't remember exactly how—and told us. And then she said, [gasps] "Don’t tell anyone until I have published it, because I lose the ownership of it if you talk about it." So Wendy and I [said], "Oh, okay. We won't talk about it," and we didn't.

02-01:05:27 But it was another epiphany about the difference between an art historian and a conservator. Because if I clean this little area of the Peacock Room, and I do a good job or a bad job, I own it. But if you're an art historian and you find this wonderful little fact, if somebody publishes it before you do, you don't own it anymore. [I guess that's] why they're sometimes weird and jealous, that's all. Conservators are also sometimes weird and jealous. But it was an interesting

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difference in: you don't own it until you publish it, and we own it for better or for worse at the get-go [of our treatments].

02-01:06:03 Tewes: That is an interesting distinction. Well, what did the Peacock Room look like when you started working on it in 1975?

02-01:06:12 Stoner: Wait, wait. I didn't work on the—I worked on independent Whistler easel paintings in '75 and '76.

02-01:06:19 Tewes: Okay, okay.

02-01:06:21 Stoner: And then Tom Chase was crossing the room—it was very funny. It was at the Getty. We're at some event, and I'm crossing the room to say, "Is it okay if I write my dissertation on the Peacock Room?" And he's getting across the room, saying, "We're going to have a big [Freer renovation], and would you come in and work on the Peacock Room?" This would have been mid-eighties. But then Linda Merrill nixed that I could [write] on the Peacock Room as a focus, and I'm happily glad, because what I did was better. Wait, what did you ask exactly?

02-01:06:57 Tewes: What was the state of the room?

02-01:06:59 Stoner: Oh, the state of the room. Okay, so the Peacock Room, can you picture it at all?

02-01:07:04 Tewes: I did see some images. It's—

02-01:07:06 Stoner: Okay, because it's all these different borders and levels. And so what we laughed about was it was as if someone said, "Oh, I don't do windows." The previous restorer had cleaned some of it, had cleaned the fighting peacock mural, had cleaned around the top areas of frilly gold peacock feathers on blue. But the dado, which are like the chair rail going all around the whole room, about this layer, was—looked like brown framing with peacock feathers in between. They simply never removed two or three decades of discolored varnish off that, so no one knew it was gold; they all thought it was brown woodwork. And so that was the shattering thing, as we put it. Linda Merrill brought in the—I think it was [a] Gilbert and Sullivan [lyric: "A] greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery." And so the dado was greenery-yallery, not brown. Whereas the fighting peacocks changed very little, the framing, the shelving and all of that had—[these previous restorers apparently] just [acted] like, We don't do windows, we don't do shelving, we don't do molding, we don't—the previous people had brightened up the major spotlight places, and left alone all of the push-pull beautiful back and forth of the "greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery" of all the levels like this. So by just cleaning the woodwork—I mean, we carefully removed discolored varnish from

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many things. But this is where it really showed, was all of a sudden you saw that the molding was this bright, twinkling—it was not actual gold gilding, but Dutch metal. Slightly darker, but still twinkling metal gilding all around the edges. So it came to life and just twinkled in a beautiful way.

02-01:09:15 Then we had to figure out the lighting, because 1876 to '77, when it's painted, you don't have electric lighting. You have then hanging drop lights with oil lamps, and how shiny would the ceiling be? We finally got contemporary photographs showing how much the gas lamps were reflecting off the ceiling, so we knew to go ahead and make it shiny. It really was much more of a jewel box when we were done. Some areas didn't change at all, because they were already multiple times cleaned.

02-01:09:57 Tewes: Did any of that surprise you?

02-01:10:01 Stoner: Yeah. I mean, we thought it was wood, dark wood, and then it turned out to be gilded, Dutch-metal gilded bronzy-looking mixed in with green speckling.

Other things we loved was when I crawled under a desk, working on the background there, and some of that area had been ignored by people who put on discoloring brown varnishes. So we'd find teeny weeny, little treasure troves of original Whistler that had not been gooped with, because it was under—almost as if you were going into a fireplace under the kneehole of desks all around the sides. So we had some very cool little discoveries like that.

02-01:10:50 Tewes: Very cool. And about how long did it take you to complete the treatment for this room?

02-01:10:59 Stoner: I have to look at—to be exact, but roughly speaking—Winterthur, very luckily, was going [through renovations]—the top two floors were being redone, so I couldn't even come into Winterthur, so this was [fortunate timing]. We were teaching on the lower floors in terrible, little, scrunchy rooms. So I was glad to go, one or two days a week, to the Peacock Room. I was senior conservator and Wendy was project coordinator. She lived in Baltimore, and we both worked at Winterthur. She lived in Baltimore, so she was, I think, four days a week in the Peacock Room, and I was one or two days a week in the Peacock Room, so we weren't full-time. There were huge construction things [occurring at the same time]. They were re-digging the courtyard, I mean, it was just a madhouse during all that time. How can I estimate this? I think maybe we did—the Getty funded it. [laughs]

02-01:11:52 Tewes: Yes, tell me about that as part of the timeline.

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02-01:11:57 Stoner: I think it was, I guess, maybe somewhere around $200,000, because I had to go— oh, here's a memory. I had to go out and speak to the whole damn Getty board to present: "Thank you for the funding of the Peacock Room." I was at this table of billionaires at the dinner, and the table discussion was about grandsons being kidnapped. "And what do you do about that?" I mean, Hmm. So I just listened. Most of the people at that dinner had died in the next six months, I remember. It was very elderly, very rich people.

Anyway, so what we did was go up on the scaffolding and clean a square, just to show—oh, then another thing I should have mentioned: the ceiling changed tremendously. The ceiling was wood slats that had glued canvas straps across it, and Whistler had done the peacock feather all over it. But the next restorers, because the room was moved from the Leyland's home in Princes Gate to Obach's, the gallery; and then to Mr. Freer's home in Detroit; to the Freer [on the Mall in Washington, DC]; taken down during World War II to consolidate the leather, which was bulging forward, and put back up. So how many times is that moved? Each time they pulled down the strips that connected the wood slats on the ceiling, and what they got to doing toward the end of it was gluing back the canvas strips, and then sponging on dark green paint with a sponge, like this. So it was nowhere near the twinkle of blue and gold when they got done doing that during all the moves.

02-01:13:42 Our original presentation to the Getty—Wendy did [the treatment of the sample section]—was up on the scaffolding cleaning a big square, maybe four feet by four feet, and [sending] big beautiful [photographs of the area] out to the Getty, and that got the grant to support the treatment. And then I had to go out—I don't know why Wendy didn't, but I had to go out. I remember I did like a red eye or some [such]—so I have a vague memory of drinking a lot of champagne with billionaires and getting up and giving a talk about the Peacock Room. That was memorable. I'd forgotten that entirely. Anyway, I think everybody was okay and happy with the results of the Peacock Room, and so forth.

But that's right, I should have said the changes were the brown dadoes were not brown; they were twinkling gold and blue. The ceiling was extremely different because of the past restorers, who had just used dark green paint and sponges, because they did not want to have to inpaint all of the canvas strips that connected the wooden slats. I'd forgotten that.

And you asked how long it took. So the number-one thing was the square, getting the grant from the Getty—'87, '88 we start on it, and then somewhere around '91 it opens again. Anyway, that's all written down in articles.

02-01:15:07 Tewes: Maybe about '93 you reported on it, I think.

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02-01:15:10 Stoner: Okay.

02-01:15:13 Tewes: So the work happened earlier.

02-01:15:13 Stoner: I think we'd finished it, but we then wrote papers and stuff.

02-01:15:19 Tewes: That was a lengthy project, though.

02-01:15:20 Stoner: Yes! [laughs] We had quite a team. I was there one or two days a week, and Wendy was there four or five days a week, and then we had a number of other helpers. We had a baroness come over from Austria who just did one door, because she wanted to use Richard Wolbers's technique. So we arranged that, and so forth. [We also had conservation colleagues from Philadelphia come and help: Carole Abercauph and Barbara Ventresco, then graduate student Nancy Pollak, and the young baroness, a conservator from Austria. And Peter Nelson, who had trained with Charles Olin—he was five days a week for quite some time.]

02-01:15:44 Tewes: I guess we should also say that the money you received was from the Getty Grant Program.

02-01:15:48 Stoner: Yes. And it was the full Getty Board of Trustees. It's the only time I was in the room with that group, when I gave the report.

02-01:15:59 Tewes: We'll talk more about your larger association with Getty later, but I am curious considering—

02-01:16:05 Stoner: My what association?

02-01:16:05 Tewes: Your larger association.

02-01:16:06 Stoner: Larger. Oh, okay.

02-01:16:09 Tewes: There are many different times you've touched the Getty. But you had often been an advisor for them, and now you're in the room asking them for money. How did that feel?

02-01:16:17 Stoner: I think Linda Merrill, the curator, asked for the money. We just helped prepare the grant proposal.

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02-01:16:23 Tewes: Okay.

02-01:16:25 Stoner: But then I had to report on it. I don't know why they chose me to report. They just said, "Will you go out and do that?" "Oh, okay." Because it really should have been Linda Merrill or Wendy, but it was me.

But I was on the GCI Advisory Committee with Luis Monreal and with Miguel Angel Corzo. He's the one who dissolved it in his uniquely strange way, which was to call up and say, "I have wonderful news for you! I'm giving you more time." And the committee was dissolved. Oh, and then he did the same thing when he hired away our scientist from the Analytical Lab here at Winterthur. He hired Alberto Tagle at the Getty. He called me and he said, "I have wonderful news for you! The Getty and Winterthur will be in an even closer relationship. We have hired your scientist."

02-01:17:41 Tewes: I think, in this last session [for today], I also want to talk about some of your additional conservation work outside of the Getty, one being while you were working here, part of your job at Winterthur Museum was to actually do paintings conservation. Can you tell me about that?

02-01:18:05 Stoner: I was hired as a staff member at Winterthur in 1976, and my job description was to treat Winterthur's paintings and to teach for the University of Delaware Program. So I did that in the fourth floor, which we can go and visit in a little bit if you'd be interested.

02-01:18:21 Tewes: Oh, yes.

02-01:18:22 Stoner: And then Charles Hummel, in his wisdom—originally they were thinking of actually making Winterthur a regional center, because of the Delaware Art Museum, the Brandywine River Museum—all these museums around here have no conservators. Luckily they dumped that plan, because any time somebody tried that, Oberlin and the Fogg among them, it's impossible to treat your own collection, teach, and serve the community. You end up being just torn to bits, and drawn and quartered.

But we were allowed to do private work. So the work day, in my first six years here, was 8:30 to 4:30. So from 12:00 to 1:00, or [evenings and] weekends, I could do private work. This is very good, because Winterthur's collection is 1640 to 1860 American, but our program is teaching Egyptian to yesterday. So if I'm never treating anything but American art, what am I [as a teacher-mentor]? Luckily, there were a couple of collectors nearby who [collected] seventeenth- century Dutch, and brought me in seventeenth-century Dutch panels and all kinds of things that I could do privately and talk about with the students. I was either

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treating Winterthur's collection or private things. I couldn't actually do forward motion on the private things, except on evenings and weekends, but I could talk about the kind[s] of decisions one had to make, and that was very nice.

02-01:19:52 And then by 1982, my paychecks started coming from the University of Delaware. Then I'm under different rules, which means I'm allowed—if I'm a civil engineering professor, I can go out one day a week and consult with people building bridges, so I became that. I could do evenings and weekends, as usual, but now I had one full day off [a week if I wanted that]—thus comes the Peacock Room—to do other things that are related to painting conservation, which I teach. So I stopped in 1982 working for Winterthur's collection, but I'm still occasionally brain-picked by my successors, who want to know, Well, what exactly happened about something in this 1976 to 1982 period? I don't want to only be a professor—or again, I shouldn’t be a teaching surgeon if I'm not doing surgery and not using the newer things that keep being thrown at us. "You've got to try this new Heiber tear mend from Germany." "Okay."

02-01:20:52 That's when I fell in with the Wyeths, because of—keeping up. I attended a fabulous conference in 1980 at Ottawa, which is, I think, the first conference on the conservation of living artists' work, and so all of Canadian Artists Equity people were in there, and all these various conservators. And talking about how you make a decision if the artist is still alive, [or] if the artist has died and the wife is still alive, [or] if [you’re dealing with] the foundation of the artist—like when is a Jackson Pollock declared—it's in a fire. When do you say, "Yes, this can be restored," and [when do you] say, "No, it's gone[ and no longer represents the artist’s work]," and then you have a witnessed destruction? And the lawyer or the artist's wife [must agree], blah, blah, blah. All these people have to agree, and then the painting is completely destroyed. Or it might be paid off by insurance. The insurance people take the painting and have it restored, and sell it again to make back their money, and then it's iffy. All these concerns about very recently dead or still-alive artists.

02-01:22:01 I thought, Well, I'm in Delaware. The great papers were by the LA people and the New York people or the Ottawa people—and there are a lot of great Canadian artists. And I thought, Well, there are the Wyeths. So I first interviewed Jamie Wyeth about his technique. I could interview artists, take notes. Because one of the key statements was Robert Motherwell bought back and destroyed one of his own paintings, because a conservator had varnished it and he never wanted his paintings varnished. We were taught in school [in the 1960s]: you varnish everything, because somebody might graffiti, somebody might pollute, whatever. So here we're starting to say, No. Conservation rules are negated by an artist not wanting it varnished, blah, blah, blah. In 1981, I interviewed Jamie Wyeth and found out that he would varnish only the eyes of geese to make them limpid. And then he had been very upset, because some conservator had varnished the whole painting when, in fact, the eyes were supposed to glitter [independently], and so

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forth. Then I started having babies and was busy, and I came back to the Wyeths when I stepped down from being Chair of the art [conservation]—again, the tooth not being filled in, the hole here—[claps] Wyeths.

02-01:23:28 And I was asked by the director of the Delaware Art Museum to do a whole booklet on the genealogy of [the Wyeths]: Howard Pyle, to N.C., who taught Andrew, who taught Jamie—and the genealogy of the brushwork—and did that. And met Andrew Wyeth, became his conservator for the last twelve years of his life. Had all kinds of adventures, including—one of my favorites I was just thinking over is things that would not have happened had I not gotten involved with the Wyeths include—do you know Monty Python and Michael Palin? Michael Palin did a documentary on Andrew Wyeth, and I got to spend a whole day with him up at the Brandywine River Museum [with] colleagues making egg tempera. He didn't know what that was, and then he wanted to make it. We had brought two eggs, and [we had] Brian [Baade] and Kristin [deGhetaldi] from our program, and then [he] immediately made a mess of those two eggs. We had to run down to the kitchen, get a whole dozen eggs, and then he and I were singing and goofing around. He sang, "I'm a lumberjack, and I'm okay," and then sang it in [mock] Swedish. Just a wonderful day. Again, this wouldn't have happened if it weren't for connections with the Wyeths, so I’m very happy that that chain came along.

02-01:24:42 Tewes: How did the work you were doing with the Wyeths, how was that received?

02-01:24:48 Stoner: [laughs] Well, an interesting, multi-layered question. A lot of people hate the Wyeths because the—Wanda Corn, a wonderful art historian, has done a whole piece on this. I'll try to shorten it. It has to do with politics and World War II, and the center of the art world. Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Hilton Kramer, and the whole idea of, Where is the center of the art world? There was a fearsome movement to move it to New York, to [focus on] abstract art. And there's a wonderful Life magazine—a little bit before this all goes into play, Andrew Wyeth has his first show at the age of twenty in 1937. It sells out completely, and he becomes a boy phenomenon at the age of twenty. His painting Her Room went to the Farnsworth [Art Museum] with the highest amount of money ever paid for a living artist's work. He was hot stuff. Then out came the knives. And they were terrible. There's a moment in time in Life magazine, maybe 1958 or something, where they have the two poles of American art: Andrew Wyeth and Jackson Pollock. Everybody goes, Yay! Then out come Clement Greenberg and Hilton Kramer, and they beat down Andrew Wyeth. Anyone who likes his work is a Republican—an interesting [generalization], and anyone who likes his work is entirely rural, they work in the Department of Motor Vehicles, they have no taste; [they’re uneducated]. On and on it went.

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02-01:26:39 I'm hired to do the booklet in 1997, and I get pies in the face. Absolutely. When I try to go to the National Gallery to look at his Snow flurries winter fields paintings there, they treated me like, So you want to work on Elvises on velvet? Why? I mean, it was like, Why? Why are you doing this? I was the head of something, [an AIC] awards committee, and [was in charge of awarding] the $5,000 University Products Award to Inge-Lise Eckmann. Her husband, John Lane, director of the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art or the Fine Arts Museum, de Young—I can't remember. Anyway, we were working on doing a Wyeth exhibition, and Jim Duff, [Director of] the Brandywine, said, "Talk to John Lane if you see him. I think he did a Wyeth show." So okay, I’m giving his wife a $5,000 award, he's there. I say, "Oh, did you have a Wyeth show at your museum?" He said, [speaks loudly] "Not on my watch." Ooh. And this just kept happening.

02-01:27:52 I interviewed Andrew Wyeth the first time in 1997 and thought, This is a brilliant, funny man. Why are no art historians here in line to talk to him? So I decided if I had then been writing a dissertation—well, Wanda Corn wrote her dissertation on Andrew Wyeth, and Hilton Kramer said she was psychotic for doing that. So we all knew the territory. And when I went to the Museum of Modern Art to spend time alone looking at Christina's World, the conservator there was just horrified, and it was like I brought out a tray of cockroaches. She wasn't going to look at it. I thought, Okay. So I just talked to myself and said, "Isn't this interesting how this is painted? Here, look. There is no atmosphere, it's like all the air is sucked up. It's really surreal." And then she came up and said, "Oh, I never noticed that before." I thought, Ha, ha, ha. But anyway, so that's 1997.

02-01:28:55 Complete sea change, and he was still alive to see it, where Hilton Kramer and those people died and new young people were—how you do, you rebel from your parents—were just rediscovering Andrew Wyeth. They had a [full] College Art Association [session] run by Ann Knutson of the Atlanta museum [High Museum of Art] called something like—not reinterpreting, reunderstanding Andrew Wyeth, [Rethinking Andrew Wyeth in 2005]. And all these young people came out and gave brilliant talks on different phases of Andrew Wyeth, and I thought— [little musical sounds]. So in any case, he lived long enough to see some of that, thank heavens. Because he would pretend it didn't hurt, but when you hung out with him, you knew it hurt him very deeply.

And the Helga Paintings, people [mounted a huge]—they're not as good as some of his other paintings, yes—but took the moment to attack and say that his wife Betsy knew about them all the time—she did not—and that it was all a publicity stunt and, I mean, just mean things. Particularly Howard what's his name, not Howard Hughes the millionaire, but [Robert] Hughes of Time magazine—I can't think of his first name. Anyway, he had had a lunch with Andrew Wyeth in Maine a month before the Helga Paintings were announced, were revealed. He was so angry that Andrew hadn't told him, he got out his knives and did a constant attack

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on his—and then the New Yorker [Calvin Tompkins] wrote, when I was now writing on Andrew Wyeth, called his work baby poop, just that he paints in tones of baby poop. I mean, you just couldn't [invent] the maleficent feelings that the critics had. It's over now, which is nice.

02-01:30:54 I'm glad that I got to know him for twelve years, and interviewed him a whole bunch of times, and have now written a number of articles about the multiple meanings of a lot of his work and [his materials and techniques]. Also, his work is very tricky to treat, because he misuses—he uses tempera, the old Renaissance technique as if he is Jackson Pollock. [The splashed tempera sometimes] doesn't hold up very well, so [there may be] consolidation issues, and so forth.

02-01:31:26 Tewes: Why doesn't it hold up as well as the original used in the Renaissance?

02-01:31:32 Stoner: It was very strict rules in guilds and everything else in the Renaissance. And you never paint on top of tempera. Tempera is done in very thin, tiny, little crosshatchings. If you read Cennino Cennini and follow the instructions and— Andrew Wyeth was also actually taught by his brother-in-law, Peter Hurd, who was studying Cennino Cennini. He was taught to do all these teeny tiny, little dilute [egg tempera] paint, thin lines, and that holds up brilliantly. [After his first correct use of tempera, for the rest of his life] he would splash, he would do his little—there are little places in a talk I gave where I show magnifications of Jamie's grass below a pig or Andrew's little [microsplashes]—and people think it's a Jackson Pollock, but he's splashing tempera. He doesn't do it big, he does it itty bitty, and it doesn't hold up.

02-01:32:22 His favorite historical character was [the Marquis de] Lafayette. He was a truly a history buff, particularly George Washington and Lafayette, the Battle of the Brandywine, which is all right here. One painting, he actually put Brandywine mud in his painting of the Brandywine and part of his house with this huge mill wheel. He actually mixed Brandywine mud, because Lafayette was buried with Brandywine mud in his coffin. So Andrew puts Brandywine mud into this painting—just like Jackson Pollock and the cigarette butts—and it falls off. What happens when Andrew Wyeth finishes a painting is it goes into the Mill House, and we all have cocktails and we look at it and everybody reacts, blah, blah, blah. Then the next day, it goes into the Brandywine [River Museum]. Well, it went into the Brandywine River Museum and started crumbling, the mud coming off. And so the visitors the next day were treated to Andrew Wyeth and Helga Testorf in there, trying to paint it back on again, which didn't work, of course. But in any case, so there's all those things to deal with.

02-01:33:37 Tewes: We've made a few references about this, but I think we should talk about the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation's Oral History Archive Project.

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02-01:33:48 Stoner: Okay, thank you. You are using the new term.

02-01:33:54 Tewes: Yes, what is the historical term?

02-01:33:55 Stoner: I was originally working on the Foundation, so we were the International Institute for Conservation-American Group. IIC was founded in 1950. IIC-AG was founded in 1960. In 1973, it converted from International Institute for Conservation-American Group to the American—Norbert Baer, my former teacher at NYU, called it, "Ache, Fake, and Jake." Ache was American Institute for Conservation [AIC], Fake was Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation [FAIC], and Jake is the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation [JAIC]. All those things went into effect in 1973.

I became the executive director. Elisabeth FitzHugh of the Freer was the executive director of FAIC for the first year-and-a-half. Then they were going to lose their tax-deductible status because they hadn't [gotten donations or done any projects]. I became the executive director and had to quickly come up with projects, because—it didn't raise any money, because it didn't have any projects. So I had to [create] projects [we could raise money for]. We did Wash and Gouache by Margery Cohn, we did John Winter’s [small book] on Japanese painting, we did all these different projects. Meanwhile, Mr. [John] Gettens had died, and said in his—ten days before he died he gave a speech in Cooperstown at an AIC meeting, saying, "We must begin a history project and record informal doings," that without this, "we cannot have formal training programs without a full knowledge of our history."

02-01:35:29 They had a meeting a year later at the Freer to honor Mr. Gettens. And I was framed, because I was the AATA girl, and I could alphabetize and I could organize, and they went, Hmm. So Tom Chase, George Stout, Mrs. Gettens, and Richard Buck kind of [cornered me]—I didn't know this was happening until sort of in retrospect, and I ended up running the Oral History Project under the auspices of what George Stout and Mr. Gettens, in absentia, had told me to do. Our opening interview was, I guess, 1975 at the AIC Mexico City meeting. We had a roundtable with Mr. Stout, Mrs. Gettens, Mr. Buck, Tom Chase, and me all about the founding of conservation at the Fogg [Museum], the Monuments Men, all these different things. That was ground zero. And now, there are [more than 400] interviews with pioneer conservators, conservation scientists, and some enlightened art historians.

This fell on my shoulders. I went and talked to this wonderful woman—I have to look up her name. You know how very elderly ladies used to dress in sort of a silk [navy] blue with little [white] polka dots all over it, and [dresses] like that? So there she was, and around her were all these boxes of reel-to-reel tapes, falling out of the boxes. [And she said]—I forget, some low number—only 40 percent [were]

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transcribed or something. And we were immediately—and have stayed—99 percent transcribed. But in any case, I remember that. And she gave me a little instruction about nobody listens to the tapes. Some people do. Everybody wants the transcripts, blah, blah, blah.

02-01:37:33 I went to the AAS[LH], American Association for State and Local History. Columbia and the Archives of American Art, which was then—E.P. Richardson, who later—or earlier—was director here. So anyway, I made a kind of study. There was no oral history program. It was also kind of a bastard thing. People didn't think it was a very good idea. People said, "Nobody will tell the truth." Gettens and [George] Stout, actually in their interview[s]—one was Mr. Gettens writing it down before he died, and Stout in person, [later]—how they met was completely different. We said, "Well, that's oral history!" One of my favorite stories was about, in the history of oral history, a little town in France or something, where everyone had a story about when they were occupied by the Germans and everybody talked about it, [but] they never were occupied by the Germans. But that doesn't mean it isn't important. I would keep saying, "Well, Gettens and Stout don't even agree on how they met, and we just want everybody's story, and we [will collect these stories]—"

It was very important [lesson to prepare me] for the Wyeths, because the Wyeths never tell the truth about anything. Whistler didn’t tell the truth about anything. For instance, after Hilton Kramer gave a hideous, hideous, mean review about Jamie Wyeth, "the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and it’s still rotten," and blah, blah, blah. Andrew was in a restaurant in New York, and there was Hilton Kramer. And he went over and said, "I don’t mind all the terrible things you say about me, but I wish you wouldn’t do that about my son." I’ve been in the room while Andrew Wyeth told this story. And then [he] said he put out his hand and Hilton Kramer took it, and they shook. Then some weeks later he tells the story again, and he puts out his hand and Hilton Kramer won't take it. Jamie Wyeth's personal assistant/secretary [Mary Beth Dolan] said to me, "Why are you writing about a family that never tells the truth about anything?" I said, "Well, it's like Edwin Drood [an unfinished story by Dickens], you know? You pick which version you want to [use]." But the point is not whether Hilton Kramer [actually] took his hand or not. The point is for the audience right then, he wanted Hilton Kramer to take the hand. In this audience over here, he wanted him to ignore it. So that's [the point], in some way, in interpretation [for their] history.

02-01:40:09 Because now there are [a number of] oral history programs and I don't have the time [to take one at this point in my life]—but there's one at Hagley [Museum in Wilmington], because that's the museum here that does history of technology, and they have all the records of the DuPont Company and blah, blah, blah. There's a guy who teaches that, and so I've sat in on some of his [lectures]. He has said things I didn't know, such as save all the corrections. Because some of the people, when I—in the old days, before we had mailable email, we would send people a

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Word document. Well, before that it was typed with carbon paper. Some of them would have it completely retyped by their secretary with all their corrections, and I didn't always have a good carbon copy. The oral history guy at Hagley went on and on about the importance of what they change. And so now I'm better at that and trying to save that.

My favorite was this wonderful woman who's British and Austrian, [Bettina Jessell], and I gave her—she didn't want anything on email, and this was in 1990—I don't remember, I could have been on email. But in any case, it was the funniest thing you ever saw. She typed out little pieces of paper and glued them on, and wanted to say a whole lot more, and it would fold like an accordion. So I saved all that, of course. It's hard to photograph or Xerox. For instance, she had said in her interview with me that Helmut Ruhemann said, [speaks in a German accent] "Helmut Ruhemann said I was the best inpainter he ever had." That was pasted out, folded over. I said, "But why did you take that out?" [speaks in an accent] "Oh, I thought that was just too bragging of me." I'm really glad I kept all the—so in other words, so the adventures in what people say and do in their— which I'm sure none of this is new to you.

02-01:42:13 But in any case, I learned oral history in the trenches with what I could from Columbia, AASLH, and then Rebecca Rushfield. We are co-coordinators of this, and she is much more—I'm doing too much, as you can probably tell. I have a show right now we workshopped in New York, on Jewish refugee musicians in Shanghai teaching Chinese people how to play the violin fabulously. So I had to do a whole lot reading about that, and some of them are oral histories. Rebecca is very good about looking stuff up. She hears there's an oral history seminar, she goes. Or if it's too expensive for her, she can't go, cover the distance, she studies all the events. She has now become a scholar of oral history and informs me what I really should be doing in this case with so and so.

02-01:43:11 That's how it happened. I've interviewed about 60 of the 398 people so far. It's one of the things I teach. So in this room, I have all the second-year students come in before they leave us and go off on fabulous internships, and I try very hard to virally infect them with AATA. Abstract. "So okay, you're going to this studio at the Met, and your boss has just written a wonderful book about Velázquez, and he doesn't have time to abstract it—you abstract it, because it's a technical appendix about the cross sections, and you abstract that. He will like that, everybody in the world will get a copy through AATA. It's a win-win. Do it!" And some do. The other is you go to a place and your—the guy is retired or just left the museum— do an oral history. I would say out of the ten that I [discuss this with] in this [Belknap] room every year, one or two do oral histories, and one or two do abstracting. But I try. Not usually the same people. They don't overlap.

02-01:44:24 Tewes: What is it, do you think, about oral history that is an important way to talk to conservators?

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02-01:44:32 Stoner: Because I now interview artists, too, and there are [many] artist interview projects [going on now].What is so weird [to me] is how different they are. Artists are used to promoting themselves up one side and down another. I thought, Oh, I've just had the most wonderful interview with Andrew Wyeth. He told me all this stuff. And I found it was all published and it was all [memorized]. So I had to get better at asking questions.

What they all tell you about oral [history] artist interviews is you just talk about this object. Because that's not repetitive. You say, "Well, why did you choose to make the eye like this?" And then you get real, honest [answers], because they are big egos, they lie, they tell you exactly—and oh God, Christine Podmaniczky is the curator for N.C. Wyeth. She's just retired, but [was] at the Brandywine [River Museum]. She inherited the [historical situations] that if a beautiful, blonde German girl brought in a [painting]—not at all an N.C. Wyeth and showed it to Andrew Wyeth, he'd go, "Oh honey, yes, that's by my father." Because she was a beautiful German girl with blonde hair. And then [the] beautiful girl, twenty years later, comes to see Christine and says, "Andrew Wyeth said this was by his father," [to her dismay]. They'll say anything, as did Whistler. What he said about what he did in the 18—well, there is actual diary and letters, what he did in Paris in the 1850s, but what he told his biographers in the 1890s is entirely different. You expect that with artists.

02-01:46:05 Conservators have never been interviewed before. They're behind the scenes, they can't—first they say, "Oh, I don't have anything to say. I don't have anything to say. No." And you say, "Well, you studied with Bernie Rabin, and it would be really great—" "Oh yeah. I can talk about Bernie Rabin." The only way you get to them is they don't usually [want to talk about themselves]—and then it comes out, and you say, "Well, did you invent anything? Did you come up with a new [method]?" "Oh well, yes, I'm the first person who tried to—" and then on and on it goes. But it is so different, because they have not usually been interviewed before, they're uncomfortable about being interviewed.

02-01:46:44 And I notice you've asked me to sign [the legal release] at the end. I used to try to have them sign in the beginning, which was a terrible idea, because they didn't know what they were going to say and if they were going to be embarrassed about it. And at the end [they sign], because they're so glad they told you all about Bernie Rabin, because they want you to know about Bernie Rabin. And on it goes.

For the most part, George Stout knew exactly what he wanted to tell me, and whatever I'd ask him he ignored. Mervyn Ruggles, who was a—part Canadian Indian, but was head of the National Gallery of Canada—I've never forgotten this interview. I said, "So how did you first get into conservation? Were your mother and father interested in art?" And the other thing, my husband is on the TV all the time. And he's, [speaks loudly] ["This is Patrick Stoner and I will ask you about

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your motivation for this role."] And that makes people [nervous] like this. So I always stumble when I start asking questions, because if I used my theater background and delivered it like Helen Mirren, it would make them nervous. So I stumble and gurp about, and then they can speak without feeling insecure. But I said to Mervyn Ruggles, "Did your parents do art?" He said, [speaks quickly] "I think that conservation began in Canada in 1896 when—" And I just—[laughs]. He wasn't going to pay any attention to me, he knew exactly [what he intended to talk about]—so I mean, the different poles of stumble, stumble, "No, I don't think you want to know this, this is not important" versus "This is what should go on record."

02-01:48:21 And oh, another funny one was this wonderful man. He apparently was independently wealthy, British. And Bettina Jessell, who did all the funny little pasted-in things, said, [speaks in an accent] "Oh, if Patrick wants to clean a Gainsborough, he just buys one." And so this was Patrick, and he was very funny. We would be working along and then he'd say, "Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off. I want to tell you something." And then he'd tell this not all that odd thing, but then I couldn't get [the recorder] back on again [subtly], and we were back in the track, you know? And so—I always tell this—don't let them make you turn it off. Just say, "We'll take that out of the transcript," or whatever. Those are some of my oral history adventures.

02-01:49:10 Tewes: Stories. Having worked on these interviews for, gosh, what, forty-five years now—

02-01:49:17 Stoner: [Since] nineteen seventy-five.

02-01:49:21 Tewes: Getting close. I'm wondering if there are trends that have emerged from the interviews, that you haven’t necessarily seen in the academic work coming out about art conservation.

02-01:49:32 Stoner: Actually, I need to take a break.

02-01:49:33 Tewes: Sure. [break in audio] Okay, we are back from a break, and we were just going to discuss trends you've seen emerge in the Oral History Project over the years.

02-01:49:47 Stoner: Well, I think the trends are very controlled by the fact that if you think about the first school was NYU that began in 1960. So in 1975, we don't have old-enough people to interview who have gone to a school. So mostly, the first two decades are about apprentice-trained people. They're insecure about that in some ways, and proud of it in some ways. For instance, Mario Modestini, great Italian restorer—his father was a restorer and his grandfather was a restorer. And so

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when it got to the question of what is the best preparation to be a restorer? He says, "Well really, your father must have been a restorer and your grandfather must have been a restorer." That was essentially everyone's answer. How they were trained was the way you should be trained. That was pretty across the board in the way that people would answer the questions.

And then back to the Getty, one of the favorite, favorite debates that I'm glad I witnessed once—I actually sort of seeded it to make sure it happened [when I could listen in]. Everybody said that almost every Getty advisory committee descended into this battle between Gaël de Guichen and Norman Bromelle—I did interview both of them—[asking them] which was the [best] way to train [conservators]. And Gaël de Guichen, who taught for many, many years, he's French, who spoke Italian and taught at the Rome Centre. He believed that you could teach anything in a classroom situation. Norman Bromelle believed you could only learn as he had done, by apprenticeship. He had apprenticed with the great Helmut Ruhemann, the German at the sort of—

02-01:51:45 This is another thing, that Hitler—as one person at the Institute of Fine Arts said, "Hitler shook the trees, and we pick up the apples." He shakes Germany, and everybody leaves and goes to NYU to teach, or goes to the National Gallery [National Gallery, London]. And another wonderful—sorry, off on a slight tangent, but I'll be back. Neil MacGregor, very, very charming man, who was director of the National Gallery, London, I was telling him about—he did not know that Hitler—we all know that Hitler wanted to be an artist and did a lot of [landscapes and prints]—and he didn't do very well. He got mad at all artists. He also tried to be a restorer, and he restored a ceiling painting in Vienna, and it—he did not get on well with other conservators. We've had a few reports by a man named Michael von der Goltz about the plight of the German restorers during the war. [Hitler] didn't like artists and he didn't like restorers, and they [also] had an awful time. They weren't allowed to talk to other restorers or know new methods or anything of that sort. But anyway, I was talking to Neil MacGregor and said, "You know, if Hitler had been accepted by other restorers, there might not have been a World War II." He said, [speaks in a British accent] "Oh yes, then he'd have come to the National Gallery." Because what had happened was all the renegades from Hitler came—well, renegade is not the right word—but all the people escaping from Hitler came. So Johannes Hell, [whose wife was Jewish, after being kept on an island as an enemy alien, worked] for the Dulwich Collection, and Helmut Ruhemann at the National Gallery, were escapees from Hitler.

02-01:53:32 Anyway, so Helmut Ruhemann is the great German restorer at the National Gallery, London. And Norman Bromelle sat at his knee and was his intern, and so forth. One of his lines in his oral history is that the great Leonardo [da Vinci] Madonna of the Rocks, he said, "Well, of course Helmut restored the Madonna, and we did the rocks." But Norman really believed—and he helped found the

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Hamilton Kerr Institute—the only way you learn painting conservation was at the knee of a great master, and you were the apprentice.

And so apparently this would erupt at—every Getty meeting would be Norman and Gaël, these two great figures in international conservation, having a battle. And Norman just saying, "There are some things you cannot teach in a lecture. You must show, you must do, you must have the person standing beside you." So the efflorescence of this was Gaël de Guichen gave this great lecture about how to eat spaghetti. And it was his retort to Norman Bromelle, from the Getty battles, that you can teach anything, no matter how touchy-feely you think it might be. But it was wonderful. The audience was roaring as he [illustrated] each [step with little drawings and elegantly narrated] twirling the spaghetti on the fork. [coughs] Sorry.

02-01:55:14 Tewes: I think as a final wrap-up to the Oral History Project, I'm interested in how that's changed what you think about art conservation.

02-01:55:29 Stoner: Well, the Oral History Project interviews that I did changed my life—easily. The people I first met—John Brealey, Paul Philippot, William Suhr—I would not have met them if I weren’t [involved with the project, following Gettens’s and Stout’s suggestions]—because I was warned against [most] of them—not against Philippot. But my teacher at NYU, Larry Majewski said, "Oh, John Brealey is very strange, but you should go find out, write down what he's doing." [After meeting Brealey and speaking with him at length], I said, "If this is strange, this is what I want to learn." The same with William Suhr. Caroline Keck had given misinformation that he chased young men or women—I can't remember which [she said] he chased—anyway, he didn’t do either, as far as chasing—around the table if you went and worked for him. [He was not a #MeToo abuser long ago, nor when I met him and knew him the last seven years or so of his life.]

02-01:56:31 But in any case, I would never have met these people if it weren't for the Oral History Project. And then I did everything, turned—moved mountains to get away from here—not away from here, but to have a semester [door opens] off to go and work with John Brealey as a visiting scholar. And it was only because of doing—I was warned against him, went and interviewed him, and thought, OMG, this is a person I must work with or I cannot continue to teach. I ended up doing three interviews with him, going back. On the second interview, I kept saying—he was explaining to me exactly how you should keep harmony in a painting. And finally, we just put down all the recording everything and just went together to the Met. I talk about it like I was Eliza Doolittle going around, and he'd [talk in front of paintings, and I’d say], "I think I've got it. [speaks loudly] I've got it!" You couldn't write that down—you had to look at paintings alongside him to get it. [Actually, to really continue, I did the same looking with two of his star disciples: Dianne Dwyer at the Met and Mark Leonard at the Getty, later.]

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Back to Norman and Gaël—but that completely changed my teaching. And then William Suhr again, S-U-H-R, wonderful, wonderful German. In fact, his grandfather was born in Ohio in a log cabin and [then his father was an actor and] had a hearing problem, so [he and his parents] ended up in Germany to solve the hearing problem. He became the great conservator at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. And so everybody thought of him as German, and well, you know, his grandfather was born in Ohio. So these great pioneers, I'm just the luckiest person in the world to have spent time with them.

02-01:58:12 It's interesting. Some of my students get really interested and listen. So good to have done that. And [Paul] Philippot, his father was the great [Albert] Philippot, a restorer in Brussels. He was an art historian, Paul Philippot, and head of the Rome Centre. But I felt like he would not come—he normally worked in Brussels, but he wasn't going to let me meet him in Brussels. I had to take the Chunnel from London to Brussels, rent a car, drive three hours south, abandon the car, and cross a footbridge to a completely non-electrified house with everything battery- operated. And it was just the most wonderful three hours ever. And also, from him I learned that if you only speak one language, you are poverty stricken, because he would jump from [language to language. For instance,] "Histórico- crítico, it does not exist in English." He and the Moras, the great Laura and Paolo [Mora], [wrote a wonderful book and worked together] in Italy. They give me joy and [underpin] everything I do in conservation or teaching. I'm thinking of John Brealey when I'm cleaning a painting, or William Suhr—and just so much I got from them.

And so often in oral history, particularly with conservators—not that group who are very famous, but some people—nobody's ever listened to them before. And then they want to see you again and they want to send you Christmas cards, and you just think—well, because conservators are not all that noticed. I mean, if we are successful, we are invisible. And we are reversible, so everybody's going to take us off in the next generation. This is underlying when you're asking them to talk about themselves is somewhere—and my husband, from theater and TV, says, "All of you conservators need agents," because we won't generally sell ourselves. I'm not quite that way because I do have a second life in theater, so I— that makes a lot of people uncomfortable with me, because I can and do sometimes sell myself. But sometimes it's selling my program or raising money or placing this student or something. I think it is a good skill, but it does—a lot of conservators are very put off by that.

02-02:00:49 Working with Andrew Wyeth at all divorced me from a number of people. Getting Caroline Keck's will has made a lot of people mad. And having worked in theater makes a lot of people annoyed, but there it is.

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02-02:01:03 Tewes: It's all part of you. [laughs] I guess as a final closure for today, you mentioned that you were executive director for FAIC, 1975 to 1979, and you'd mentioned earlier today that there were some challenges being a woman—

02-02:01:22 Stoner: Oh yeah.

02-02:01:24 Tewes: —in that position. But I was wondering if you could tell me about maybe where the organization was at in these years. What were the challenges the organization was facing at the time?

02-02:01:34 Stoner: It's funny that you should ask that, because Sue Sack—I don't know if you've heard her name before. She was the conservator for many years at Brooklyn [Museum], and she was married to a lawyer in the early days of AIC. The only law advice the AIC got was through Sue Sack's husband. That's the way it was; it was very informal.

I was struggling at that point with—I was managing editor of AATA, and I was executive director of the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation. So finally, Sue Sack put it a beautiful way. She said, "AATA knows what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to put out a book every six months that is the abstracts of the international literature of conservation. We all know that's our mission, and we do it. FAIC has no idea what its mission is, and whatever you bring up, they don't like." So I introduced a public lecture each AIC meeting. Because you know, here we are in Kansas City, and nobody in Kansas City knew last week what a conservator is. And now we've all left, and they [still] don't know what a conservator is. We should have a great—a Robert Feller or somebody, get up and give a talk in a public thing for that. I was like shunned, like I was this publicity-seeking person, and all that. Oh, and then, because FAIC is sponsoring the [Oral] History Project, I remember the president of the AIC, in irritation, said to me, "Isn't the Oral History Project done yet?" I went, "It's history. It keeps going!"

02-02:03:12 And so it was constant, trying to deal with people who were very—he's a book conservator. Boy, he knew about book conservation. But when it came to—and then I was trying to put together a fundraising brochure for the FAIC. They would not let me, the committee, this is—when the AIC board, which got elected every year—or sometimes people stayed on for two years—were sitting together, they were the AIC. Add me, and it was the FAIC. So I got this kind of motley group of people who had not had executive positions before, [were hyper focused on details and not an overview], and were [often] difficult to deal with. I was trying to put together a jazzy brochure that would make people want to give money. In fact, Tom Chase, he said, "It's a camel, a horse designed by a committee." Couldn't be male or female, couldn't be a paper conservator or object, because that

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would be making a choice, and you couldn't offend anyone. It hit every trashcan, I'm sure, instantly. It was a little brochure that said, "Foundation of the American Institute" on a mauve plaque on a beige background, that said, "We do [this, this, and this]." No pictures. And I thought, [sighs] because see, I have a theater background. I've already produced an off-Broadway show that was reviewed in the New York [Times]. And I knew that you have to be glossy and interesting, and telling conservation people that was a dead end. It's gotten a whole [lot] better. They now have all these publications. They are glossy, they are bright colored, and have wonderful pictures, and it's all in place. But it was selling something no one wanted to buy at that time.

02-02:04:57 So what I did manage to do is we got the FAI[C]—they mostly ignored that, and still do, the Oral History Project. We got some important books published by some people who wouldn't have ordinarily written a book, just saying, "You know a lot about Chinese inks. Can we do a—" "Okay." So it did some very, very worthy things. It started supporting people in travel to go to a conference, and things like that. But as Sue Sack had said, [AATA] has a mission. They had no idea what their mission is, and they still—

A very recent kerfuffle is changing the name. The membership of whatever it is, 3,500 people, did not participate. We were just told one day that—and it's now Foundation for, as you said, Advancement [in Conservation]. The Oral History Project is not really raising money to advance conservation, so it sort of bastardized us by changing the name. We were a nonprofit function for research in the future. [Luckily, it is now safely housed] at Winterthur, because they kept moving the AIC office. So thank heavens Winterthur, when Charles Hummel hired me and I said, "Well, I come with this project," he opened the doors. He wrote a letter and said, "This will now become officially housed at Winterthur," so that they [knocks on table] won't throw us out. But now we have beautiful housing and the cold storage. We used to be little carbon paper, non-electric typewriter, and now we're on the Winterthur main drive. So we're [knocks on table] safe. [laughs] Because they update or they—whatever you do every year, every evening, to make sure nothing is lost.

02-02:06:44 But yeah, no, the AIC/FAIC was just hair-pulling in the beginning. Sexism against—people kept saying I was too immature to be doing what I was doing, and so it was just this constant battle of trying to show I am old enough, I can do this. [laughs] I will do this. I am doing this. Never mind, I'll just do it. That's very [much] gone now. Peggy Ellis is a bright woman, who is the director of the NYU Program, is the president right now. And so it has changed a lot.

02-02:07:24 But in the seventies, Tom Chase—I don't know if this is valid. But anyway, male feminists and people who clean paintings gently. I challenged some people, who were sophisticated and older and knew a lot of people, "Okay, make a list of all the people in—the males in conservation who you think treat women fairly, and

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write that there. Okay, now make a list of all the male painting conservators who clean paintings gently, sympathetically, and harmoniously. [These lists match!] Why is this? Or if you name all the male chauvinists who are hideous to women, and name all the people who clean paintings very stringently and do it their way and flatten a painting." [Those lists match too!] So anyway, I don't know what to do with that.

02-02:08:26 Tewes: Just an observation you were making. [Stoner laughs.] Huh.

02-02:08:30 Stoner: Tom Chase, who was sympathetic to—he's still on the AATA board, was in 19, whenever, 60. He wasn't in the first group [of AATA Editors]. He was by 1972 or something like that. And John Brealey, people like that who respected women, turn out to also be very respectful of original artists. I don't know that there's a formula there, but there's something going on. I don't have time to write it up, but maybe somebody will. [laughs]

02-02:09:04 Tewes: Well, we've covered a lot of ground today, but is there anything you want to fill in that we've been discussing?

02-02:09:11 Stoner: I hope in the middle of the night something—there was something I wanted to tell when we were in with the Peacock Room, and it went out of my mind. I just hope it comes back, and then I'll tell you tomorrow.

02-02:09:20 Tewes: Oh gosh, I hope so! [laughs] Okay. Well, thank you, Joyce.

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Interview 3: November 9, 2019

03-00:00:00 Tewes: This is a third interview with Joyce Hill Stoner for the Getty Trust Oral History Project, in association with the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley. The interview is being conducted by Amanda Tewes in Winterthur, Delaware, on November 9, 2019. So thank you for sitting with me again, Joyce.

03-00:00:21 Stoner: Glad to be here.

03-00:00:23 Tewes: As we are wrapping up our time together, I wanted to get more into some of your early associations with the Getty. We mentioned yesterday your long-time work with the AATA, as well as your application for a conservator position in the early days. But I also want to talk about some work you did in the eighties with the art—Paintings Conservation Department, I should say. So in June and July of 1985, you were a visiting scholar there at the Department. Can you tell me how that situation arose?

03-00:01:00 Stoner: Well, Andrea Rothe, whom I had met because he knew John Brealey, who I mentioned yesterday was one of my mentors, Andrea would come by the Metropolitan Museum [of Art]. He had worked for some sixteen years in Italy— and we'll come back to that when we talk about the tour he led for the group in his department. He had been a prime internship supervisor for my students, so I had visited and seen what beautiful work he did, how articulate he is about various things. Because of my work with the history of conservation, I believe that was the—he also had me come and give a lecture, one of the big Getty lectures in a big, beautiful auditorium. He was planning to have the Moras, Paolo and Laura Mora, come that summer, and invited me to be a guest scholar. It was not as formal then as it is now, where you apply and a number of people then compete, and such. But I had a wonderful little apartment in Santa Monica, and came out and worked with Andrea and treated a small Italian Renaissance painting.

It was a marvelous summer, because he had his two panel-painting experts, Gianni [Marussich] and Renato [Castorini]. At this moment I can't remember their last names. I was taking videotapes of everything. Andrea would say, "Put down the video and just watch." I thought, But no, I'm responsible for telling all this to my students later. I remember Gianni and Renato came to the Getty once a year and took off—just working as this, like a beautiful ice dancing team working together. And what would take many people six months, taking off a very, very large painting the latticework wood cradle, and it became butter in their hands. They would just, tsch, tsch, tsch, tsch. And in two days they'd taken off the cradle and then mended the panel. It was marvelous to be there and watch Gianni and Renato.

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03-00:03:09 And the Moras came for—I may not have this right. I came back out to the Getty to see the Baldinis—or maybe I've mixed it around. But in any case, he had for his staff really—and I got to be a sort of honorary second-tier staff member—we had a week with the Moras learning tratteggio. It turned out I found out things like Laura Mora loved tap dancing, so we would sing together and do funny things on the side. And then the Baldinis, Ornella Casazza and Umberto Baldini. I have a little notebook where I've written down so much and indexed it on—so the Moras did tratteggio, which is tiny little centimeter lines vertically. But the Baldinis—both [couples reflect] the theories of Cesare Brandi, and they interpret them differently. So the Moras [did] tiny, little vertical lines, just truly beautiful.

And when we all went to Italy together later, we went to the Moras' home, which is the same beautiful area in Italy outside Rome that Ingrid Bergman—and oh my, the movie director that she married or lived with or whatever, [Robert Rossellini]. And you wanted to walk about and take little petals off the trees or leaves to sniff them, because everything was a sensual experience. We ate outdoors in a picnic with Paolo's mother, who was still alive at that point. And they seemed aged, and here was his mother. So Andrea opened the door for his staff and me to these amazing experiences.

03-00:04:50 So during that time at the Getty I gave a talk, had these experiences with Andrea—oh, I didn't finish about Ornella Casazza and Umberto Baldini. Their theory was you followed the—you did a tratteggio, but they called it chromatic integration, chromatic integration in Italian, and you followed the lines. So if a man was holding a spear—let's say it was St. George and the Dragon—goes out this way, the Moras would inpaint it all with little vertical lines. And the Baldinis would go, follow the pattern of the sword. So I came home immediately and taught all this over and over again. So grateful to Andrea for including me in those things. It was a marvelous two months.

We found daycare for my daughters, who were three and seven, at a funny little place with a British woman who said, [speaks in a British accent] "Be sure they bring their bathing costumes." And so for the rest of the time when they were children, they would say, [speaks in an accent] "We need our bathing costumes."

03-00:05:55 But it was a totally twenty-four/seven all-around experience to be a visiting scholar at the Getty working with Andrea, who has come back [to speak to our students at Winterthur] many times. He just recently died, and we're all so sad. He waved his arms and was always very expressive about everything he said, and was a truly marvelous mentor. We had both, at one point, worked with Bernie Rabin. And when Bernie Rabin died, Andrea would say, "We are both orphans," and so we would talk about that together. Oh, and then John Brealey died, and we were orphaned again. He was a dear, dear man. He wasn't highly organized in the, let's say, making charts sense, but he made up for it beautifully with his beautiful treatments, and he was especially interested in panel paintings.

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03-00:06:46 Crossing over to Getty initiatives, the Panel Painting Initiative, run originally by [Antoine] Ton Wilmering, woo, in the late nineties, I think. In any case, Andrea gave many talks for that, and was highly qualified to talk about the history of panel painting [treatments]. I got to see Gianni and Renato in person doing their cradle removal type duet dance. So he was a marvelous person, and it was a marvelous time at the Getty. We were not in, of course, the beautiful acropolis on the hill. We were in the little buildings out in Malibu, behind the Herculaneum- design[ed] building. But a wonderful time.

03-00:07:34 Tewes: You mentioned you were videotaping all of these experiences. I wonder: what were the main takeaways you wanted to share with your students upon return?

03-00:07:45 Stoner: Well, the practical, of exactly how Andrea used Araldite to connect panels. The metaphysical of his wonderful, wonderful attitudes towards aesthetics and passion for art, and so forth. So trying to do all of that.

He also let me go along on a little trip to—[coughs]. Excuse me for this cough. We went to Siena, Arezzo, Rome—Siena, Arezzo, Florence. I had to go back to teach and had to miss The Last Supper and going to Milan. But those four areas. And just to act out the amazingness of Andrea: when we got to Siena, he said, "Now, put all your things away." We all put our things [away]. And so going on this trip: Andrea, Mark Leonard, Yvonne Szafran, and Elisabeth Mention. Everybody put their things away, and he wouldn't tell us what he wanted to— "Run up the hill. Hurry, hurry, hurry." We all ran up the hill, and behind all of this was the sunset at the Piazza [del Campo] in Siena at the top of this hill. He wouldn't tell us. You don't find people who do this sort of thing anymore, or getting you there in place for an extreme aesthetic experience. And so we all ran up and [experienced] that.

03-00:09:19 Another time we were driving somewhere, and Mark was driving a rented car, and the windshield wipers weren't working terribly well and we all got wet. We were all in crummy clothes [and Andrea] took us to this amazing Italian restaurant. I think this is Florence. Here we're all feeling like drowned rats and come in and it's just all the waiters in their little white gloves with [white napkins] over their arms. And amazingly, someone who spoke English would come and say, [speaks in an accent], "You are now going to have baby butter peas." And we each had a waiter behind us who would reach over to the little silver dome—and I watched to see a shared signal; I couldn't find a signal—and they would all go, [whistles] like that, all the little domes [were pulled] up [and away]. It was, I think, the most elegant dinner I've ever had. And here we are, we were all in our drowned-rat outfits. He had planned so many things like that to have complete immersion in the best of Italy.

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03-00:10:22 And the point of the trip was his sixteen years in Italy, how things had changed. That when he began in Italy, you almost never matched your inpainting. It was the famous time of if you had a beautiful fresco and large losses, you wouldn't match the surrounding area; you would make it all a neutral tone with just beige going in. And so when you came in as a tourist, you looked at this beautiful fresco with these sort of beige amoebas all over it, and it was startling and strange.

03-00:11:01 At the same time, the Baldinis were doing chromatic abstraction, which meant if the fresco had a lot of red, a lot of blue, and a lot of beige, they would invent a kind of fuzzy ball made of tiny little lines of red, blue, and beige, which they called the neutral, and then sometimes they would even do this with a spectrometer to mathematically calculate the neutral and make these fuzzy ball amoebas in the losses. And that was strange.

And Ornella Casazza, famously the Crucifixion—oh my, I suddenly dropped the name of the artist—it'll come in a minute—that was photographed floating down the Arno during the flood—Cimabue, Cimabue Crucifixion. Of course there were many, many photographs, as people pointed out, of the Crucifixion before the flood that could have been used to reconstruct missing bits of Christ. But they had picked this method of chromatic abstraction, and so it looked—if you know Star Trek—like tribbles were all over Christ, little fuzzy things, because they had used this chromatic abstraction theory. You could have just connected the [losses in Christ’s body and] arms, based on a photograph. But the idea was, under Cesare Brandi, We totally respect the artist, and we do not interfere by making up a part of the arm. Well, the deniers said, "Well, you interfere a whole lot more by putting [in] this fuzzy ball." So in any case, those were the kinds of discussions we had in Italy.

03-00:12:42 And the overall point was he would take us to these different cities, show us paintings that he himself had treated or watched wonderful people treat. Like Alfio Del Serra was one of the superstars that we visited his studio, and we would see he had an altarpiece and like eleven saints all lined up. Each of the panels of the saints needed different amounts of reconstruction and treatment, and so forth. And wonderful discussions about how much is too much, and which one do you start with? Do you start with the most damaged or the least damaged? Just wonderful discussions.

We visited the—I think it's the Baldinis—yes, their studio. Andrea is saying, "Put down your camera. Put down that video camera," and I'm, tsch, tsch, tsch, trying to remember this. And backing up to get a good picture of—it was too amazing— Botticelli's Venus on the half shell [Birth of Venus] and Printemps. And I'm backing up to take a picture and realize I almost backed directly into the famous Springtime by Botticelli, Printemps. [Tewes laughs] I mean, it was just so dense with amazing works of art. But what I noticed the most was—it was out of its frame—at how much the amazing background of leaves had been done in copper

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resinate. And where the frame [rabbet had covered the edges of the painting], the [leaves] were bright green, but the copper resinate that was exposed through many years had turned a dark brown. I shouldn't say a dark brown, because everyone would notice that, but it was browner. And so being there first, the absolute surprise and, ooh, as I almost backed into the painting. And then this amazing experience, to see the actual edge of what it looked like where it was protected, versus the exposed copper resinate and how it had browned.

03-00:14:48 One amazing experience after another, like the restaurant, the sunset, and then visiting all these amazing studios. It was a life-changing experience, thanks to Andrea that—and thanks to the connection with the program I got to be included on. And so that was an absolute not to miss.

Oh, another story was, which I tell the students all the time, is how, of course, if you're a doctor and you, oops, leave the forceps inside somebody, they will die and be buried and that's the end of it. But he always showed—I think this is Arezzo. We went to the church where he had treated a number of the paintings, and pointed to a painting, and said that obviously the seventeenth- or eighteenth- century restorer, who would have used something like chamber lye, which is chamber pot—very strong alkaline substance or caustic soda, and was trying to clean the painting and clearly fell into it, because his handprint is there in the paint, and it will never go away. The patient is not going to get buried. So every restorer who comes along later is going to reveal this handprint. I wonder if Mark Leonard talked about this in his [oral history]. Because it was an amazing, amazing experience.

03-00:16:18 Another thing I learned at the Getty, just talking about the Paintings Conservation [Department] at the Museum, was the way Andrea, through the influence of Cesare Brandi and John Brealey, planned the cleaning of the paintings in the Getty Museum. Let's say you have five seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes lined up, and you take this one out and remove the discolored varnish, put it back—it's a horrible impact on the other four. So how you plan the order in which you clean the paintings in the rooms so that the audience or the visitors are never taken aback by something that stands out? John Brealey's phrase was, "Nothing should look as if it has just been restored." So keeping in mind balance and harmony, which is Paul Philippot, one of my top three favorite interviewees for the history project. Cesare Brandi and John Brealey and Johannes Hell were [similar in many ways about] the sense of harmony. Harmony of the painting to itself, within itself; and harmony in a different way, of how it is displayed in the room, so that you enjoy the work of art and you aren't distracted by restorers and their decisions and throwing things out of harmony, and so forth.

So working with Andrea Rothe, having that privilege, and I was so excited to work with him that I really wanted to do an article about the paintings conservation at the Getty. I remember especially—it's on the record, of course, in

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Museum News. But some of my memories were—I think I have something like 120 articles in my CV.

03-00:18:15 Tewes: [laughs] Yes, you're very prolific, Joyce.

03-00:18:17 Stoner: [laughs] But the two moments that I remember most fondly—and I try to do this for my students. I cannot be these two men. But both Charles Hummel, who hired me at Winterthur, and John Walsh, who indulged me at the Getty, [looked at] rough draft[s] of my article[s]—of course, typed out at this point; we didn't have word-processing. They had put a little dot beside the sentence they wanted to say, "Well, you might take out the ‘very’ here." It was just so polite and respectful, because of course I've been through a lot of people who just, as they say, bleed all over the paper with red ink. But instead, these little dots. And John Walsh, who had had a few little comments about, Had I read Strunk and White, [The Elements of Style]? I'm using too many verys, and many other just wonderful things that I carried forward. This was all before I got my PhD and had all these other people come and attack my work.

May I speak about John Walsh? I would like to.

03-00:19:26 Tewes: Oh, please!

03-00:19:27 Stoner: Because he's, again, another incredibly memorable person in my life. In doing the oral history interviews, I've noted that there are—I would love to have, just give me a room with white walls, and I'm going to do the genealogy of painting conservation attitudes, and the genealogy of trained—or how shall I put this—art historians who were exposed early in their training to a super conservation community, which guided the way they behaved as future museum directors. One is the Fogg [Art Museum], where we think of our conservation as being born in this country in 1928 with George Stout and John Gettens and Paul Sachs and Edward Forbes. They had this—what's nicknamed the "egg and plaster" course, but they taught all these art historians how to use fresco and how to paint in fresco, how to do tempera, and so forth, which the technical, physical presence of a work of art goes into their mind. And those people [who learned from them], many went off to be museum directors, who then hired conservators and worked with them, and loved going into the conservation studio. As opposed, as I said yesterday, [to considering the conservator to be] the janitor that you didn't talk about.

03-00:20:44 So John Walsh came from—the two great, what shall I say, nest[ing] places or birthing places for excellent art history in the future would be the Fogg/Forbes and Sachs, and then William Suhr, S-U-H-R at the Frick [Collection]. I think I mentioned yesterday he was the senior conservator at the Kaiser Friedrich

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Museum. But his grandfather had been born in a log cabin in Ohio, so he was thought of as this great German, but he thought of himself as an American. But in any case, due to Hitler, he had migrated—actually, I think he migrated before Hitler was a problem. He was hired at the Detroit Institute, treated things for many museums throughout the central [US]—[and also] San Francisco, taught there at Mills College for a little bit, and then became the great restorer at the Frick. I interviewed him in 1976, and fell in professional love, and then was invited to fabulous picnics in his garden in Mount Kisco, [New York]. Edgar Kaufmann, who of course owned Fallingwater, thank you very much, said to me, "Now, you know what he—" the nickname was Billy Suhr. "When Billy is working in his garden, if he takes a rock out and puts it in a little frieze and the rock does not have proper patina, he inpaints it." So this again, Sensurround experiences, like visiting the Moras with Andrea. And so all these famous people were at these lunches in the garden with German sausages, and so forth. [William Suhr very gently showed me, a little American girl raised on peanut butter, how to eat German sausages, as Andrew Wyeth later showed me how to eat a lobster. Actually there were jokes about peanut butter at the Edgar Kaufman picnic lunch. One of the museum directors asked people if they had tasted peanut butter. They all shook their heads, no, they hadn't. But they talked about how good almond butter was, and you could just put almonds in a Cuisinart.]

03-00:22:28 So William Suhr was the great restorer at the Frick. And John Walsh was one of the assistant art historians who—one of the problems with great restorers is they don't tend to like to keep good records. John Brealey once laughs, "Ha, ha, ha. We'll treat all the paintings and tiptoe away, and not leave a single record. Ha, ha, ha." Nobody should know that quote actually, but it does speak to him. He really wanted the treatment done, not just spending—as he thought the Fogg people spent too much time just writing and not doing sensitive treatments. So again, I tell the students, "Learn writing from the documentarians, learn treatments from the Suhrs and, well, the Brealeys and so forth." But William Suhr, brilliantly, had young art historians behind him as he cleaned the Polish Rider [by Rembrandt at the Frick] and they took the notes. So there are beautiful records at the Frick written by the likes of John Walsh. I don't know if I can rattle them off, but John Walsh, Evan Turner, quite a number of future museum directors. John Walsh was actually my teaching assistant—not for me, but for my teacher at NYU for the museum studies course, A. Hyatt Mayor, who wrote the [early] great book on prints [and taught the Museum Studies courses at the Institute of Fine Arts (IFA) in 1969 and 1970].

There's a picture in the Met[ropolitan] Museum [of Art] Bulletin of 1970, of me in a miniskirt pointing like Dainty June—"I'm Dainty June, what's your name?" [I played "Dainty June" in Gypsy.] I'm doing that point to two dummy boards, "selling them" [to the Met], which was the student exercise at NYU Institute of Fine Arts. The top curators from the Met sat around in a room like this, so you're talking [to the] head [curator] of Greek and Roman, head of European [Paintings]—this august, frightening body. I remember crossing [town] in the

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[Seventy-Ninth Street] crosstown bus, and I've never been so nervous in my life. We all had to rent, so to say, or borrow from [a dealer—mine was on] Madison Avenue [Ginsburg and Levy]—an object worth under $1,000 and try to sell it to the Met.

03-00:24:40 Particularly in 1970, nobody thought much [about] American art. I'd come from William & Mary; I knew about American art and dummy boards. They'd never heard of dummy boards, which are cutout wooden [silhouettes, sometimes almost life-sized,] that began in Holland in the seventeenth century, then England in the eighteenth century, and America by eighteenth and nineteenth. It's like a portrait done on wood, but cut out like a paper doll. You would put them, people thought, in front of a fireplace in the summer when you weren't using it, in a long empty hallway, and there'd be soldiers and little children and a woman peeling a potato. There's all these amazing dummy boards. There's one little one in the National Gallery in Washington. They're not many around here, but there are a lot at the Victoria and Albert.

03-00:25:27 Anyway, I was right! Not one of these august curators had heard of dummy boards. So here I am in the Met Bulletin with my [two little Dutch dummy boards], pointing to—and I'd also heard that Dietrick von Bothmer made everybody cry if you didn't have your—even though he was an art historian and not into X-raying, one of his trip-up things was, "Have you seen the X-ray of this?" So, I X-rayed my dummy boards, and I had them sitting there, and I was pointing to the X-rays. And I won. They bought them. John Walsh is sitting there in the photo, because he's running the class with A. Hyatt Mayor. I'm proud to say that in the Age of Rembrandt exhibition at the Met, they put out my dummy boards [in the exhibition]—this is about ten years ago, I guess.

John Walsh, who is amazing in that he's a seventeenth-century Dutch scholar, but has recently gone in for [the] video art [of Bill Viola] and followed artists—I mean, he's a wonderfully eclectic man. He's come and visited here [at Winterthur], and I've given so many tours of the collection. But with John Walsh, he asked questions nobody else has asked, made observations nobody else has. He went on from being the TA and teaching at the Met and the Institute of Fine Arts to the Boston Museum [of Fine Arts]. And I can't do his [CV]. I'm sure it's searchable. I hope he'll be interviewed as a past director of the Getty. But in any case, he was director of the Getty [Museum] during my wonderful time [there]. I can't say he hired Andrea or Andrea backed him. I don't know [in] what order they got there, but I was there when they were both there, and it was wonderful. So I presented to John Walsh my ideas for the article and what I wanted to do, and honor him and Andrea about attitudes—because the US is full of a lot of warring people with different attitudes [but for a thoughtful article about attitudes that I could believe in, I could "strike it rich" at the Getty with John and Andrea]. He now commutes. He's retired and he commutes from—I think he has a home near San Francisco, rather than Los Angeles. He has a teaching gig—has done, for like

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the last five years at Yale, and comes [to teach classes and lectures] for six weeks [or perhaps a semester].

03-00:27:45 And I had to give—I'm still nervous from this experience—[one of two] keynote addresses at the Rijksmuseum conference on the history of treatment of Rembrandts. And frankly, I've not treated a Rembrandt. I work in an American museum. I do do some seventeenth-century Dutch, but not Rembrandts. In any case, John Walsh had just done, the year before, a seven-part lecture on Rembrandt at Yale that was beautifully videotaped. Everybody said if you tried to go, you were in the back or you were in the spillover room watching it on video. Here was this beautiful video, so I watched every one of them, and I told everybody it was like being in a spa of art history, of these just beautiful descriptions. He even covered the Charles-Laughton-as-Rembrandt movie, and he and some movie director did a panel on what was right and what was wrong with this movie. I mean, he is fabulous.

I then met with him the following year when he was at Yale to talk about—I'd already done an oral history with him, which was wonderful. And this article is not yet written, because I have so many other deadlines. But he organized, while he was at the Met, with John Brealey, again, an incredible ripple-effect seminar of inviting in senior museum directors to hear about John Brealey's attitudes toward—so John Walsh himself is a product of the diaspora of William Suhr. So here's John Walsh asking John Brealey to recreate this for museum directors all over the country. Four or five years or something, it was done. Some, of course, were naysayers. They're going to [promote] clean[ing] things like the Kecks [did], and that's that. Or Ruhemann: you just take off all the dirty varnish, and what you get is what you get. And so John, with his team at the Met at that time, put on these beautiful, I think, week-long seminars. I've got all the notes in a bag that I need to write as an article. Because of the, again, the ripple-effect influence on the museum directors. This would have been, I think, middle eighties.

03-00:30:11 So John Walsh carried all that with him to the Getty, [and] was, I think, a wonderful director. Then retired, comes out to Yale, and again ripple effects more. Again, he did this whole fall on Rembrandt. He also teaches a class for the regular Yale students. The next year, he did American landscapes, and was doing [Albert] Bierstadt and Thomas Cole, and so forth. Is there anything this man cannot wax eloquent about in a totally inspiring way?

So anyway, my summer at the Getty had all of that sort of in progress, either on one side or another of that history. And I wouldn't have traded that for the world.

03-00:30:56 My husband, who had had to decide between going to City University [of New York] to get a PhD in theater or going to UCLA, had—was very unhappy [at first] that we had gone to Winterthur and not the Getty or LA County [Museum of Art], and so forth. But during that time, he was able to begin as a PBS radio announcer

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and fundraiser, and all the things he does on the air, get in with whatever studio it was that then multiplied. Because as one studio hears, they're like—Robin Williams and other people would actually ask for my husband [Patrick as an interviewer]. It just happened the last—a couple of days ago—Tom Hanks wasn't going to give many interviews for his Mr. Rogers [movie]. But in any case, because Tom Hanks had said, "Come to me directly if you are turned down for an interview." He had turned down, generally, all interviews. And just two days ago, Pat shared with me and the daughters his invitation from Tom Hanks to do an interview. So that all began because of the Getty summer visiting scholar stint.

03-00:32:18 Tewes: [laughs] Full circle.

03-00:32:21 Stoner: Long answer to a short question.

03-00:32:25 Tewes: Well, I want to follow up with some of that, because when you're writing this article about the Getty in 1986, and you let people like John Walsh take a look at it and have some commentary on that, what did you want to get across about what the Getty was doing in conservation at that time?

03-00:32:43 Stoner: Well, I was trying to do my own John Walsh ripple effect, which was I had written an article—I think my first one was George Stout, which the bottom line was—for the Pioneers of American Museums Series, the bottom line was the Fogg and trying to get art historians to look at works of art. Who's the audience for Museum News? It's not many conservators, it is curators and—we hope. I don't remember the order of them, but I did George Stout; I did [William Suhr and] John Brealey; and I'm starting to do the same thing about the Getty, which is these people are changing the way American conservators look at things, number one. Or maybe number one is, oh, curators—here is an absolute bait to work with your conservator and learn things.

I'm still doing it, and I'm still failing in many cases. I should be careful what I say here, but a group of art historians—I tried very hard to get them to come. "Winterthur is so far away," nah, nah, nah. And so, Kathy Foster, who is a wonderful person I work with on the Wyeth Foundation for supporting different American art initiatives, said—I said, "How can I get art historians interested?" She said, "Embarrass them." There is a situation—and she said to be careful and not use any names, and so forth—where a curator who was doing a whole book on portraits of African Americans picked the cover of the book without seeing the painting in person. It was a painting of just a regular white guy from the eighteenth century that had—or maybe early nineteenth—that had been overpainted by a restorer to turn him [into an] African American, and that was the cover of the book. It was treated at Williamstown [Art Conservation at The Lunder Center at Stone Hill], where I have—I was actually chairman of the board at Williamstown at one point, and so knew that regional conservation center well.

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They had done the UV and the X-ray, and so forth, which I got to see. [I shouldn't really go public with this, but it's a great case study to give a nudge to art historians to pay attention to conservators.] Like the old story of The Night Watch is really during the day [but got the nickname for the title when the painting was covered with discolored varnish].

03-00:35:35 But the Museum News people always choose the title, so they had "The Getty Museum Invests in Conservation," because when the outside world hears Getty, they think money! When you work with the Getty, you realize sometimes the budget is cut, and you can't bring all the people you wanted from out of town for that event, and so forth. But the outside world—because, for instance, when I was choosing between the Getty and Winterthur to work and I was, at that point, the executive director of the FAIC, which was going to lose its tax-deductible status unless it raised money—so what was my address going to be? Was it going to be Joyce Hill Stoner, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum? Or Joyce Hill Stoner, J. Paul Getty Museum? I mean, you can't win when you're fundraising [with either address]. People are like, "Well, just go into your own pockets." In any case, that was a laugh.

03-00:36:30 I know we just say Winterthur Museum, because, I mean, Mr. du Pont himself would send his chauffeur in to bid on something, because if the name du Pont came up, everybody thought, Money, money, money. He would say, "I'm Mr. Francis," and not even use [his last name]—so I understand when you're in a nonprofit world and having to fundraise, you don't want to sound like you don't need anything.

03-00:37:00 Tewes: So this was about the Getty's position in creating and developing the [Paintings Conservation] Department?

03-00:37:08 Stoner: Yes. So the idea being that, as anyone starts a department—and the Getty was a fairly new kid on the block—what decisions they make and how they make them. That was my aim. I haven't reread the article recently, and I hope it came across that way. It's of course now digitized, and people can get it easily, and I hope do look at it. We always have some curators who want to work with conservators, and some who just don't. And some who were brought up—and I'll name names here, just—Princeton is famous as a place to get your PhD where you don't look at the work in person. You look at the library, you go to the library, and you look at slides. You look at—whatever now, the art store. But things happen, like you put a cover on a book that if you'd looked at it in person you might have realized had been much overpainted.

03-00:38:11 Tewes: I also want to think back really quickly to the trip you took with the Getty staff to Italy in April of 1986. Did you actually get to visit the Sistine Chapel with them?

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03-00:38:23 Stoner: Yes, absolutely. I should have mentioned that. Our first stop was Rome. We went up the scaffolding, which was a wonderful thing to do, and—I'll never forget that either. We had to leave all cameras below, and it was—Nipponese television [Nippon Television Network Corp.] was funding the treatment, and they called the shots, and they wanted to be the owners of any images. So we were practically airport checked, leave everything down there and go up into what looked like a yellow shower curtain several stories high, which was the little elevator, and you went in and went up. And then you're on the scaffolding, and the scaffolding was put into the same holes that Michelangelo has used for his scaffolding. You look over and see these mighty holes on the side. During that trip we went to the Sistine Chapel, the Brancacci Chapel—they went on to The Last Supper. So those three projects were all in effect.

And I'll just add a little gender comment. All the people on the Sistine Chapel scaffolding were men, and all the people at The Last Supper by Leonardo were women. And the Brancacci [Chapel], run by husband and wife, were co-ed. So I just think that was funny.

03-00:39:48 But, in any case, Gianluigi Colalucci was the head conservator for the Sistine, and he was wonderful. Andrea opened every door. We all ate with him and chatted with him. And he loved Andrea, because everybody loved Andrea, because he was just so humanistic and loving and caring. We had Gianluigi Colalucci. As Dianne Dwyer Modestini remarked, finding somebody to treat the Sistine Chapel as the head of the project was quite a challenge, because if they're too young, they don't know enough; and if they're too old, they're not going to last the seven years. So Gianluigi Colalucci was the right man in the right place at the right time, and there he was up there. They all had atomic absorption of all the little swabs to show they were not pulling up any original Michelangelo paint. We went all around. So here I am looking up at the ceiling and thinking, Ooh, ooh, I can't touch, but—and then, Gianluigi just said, "Now, you can see the spolvero, which is when you pounce—if you've done your drawing, and then you roll like an embroidery wheel, a marker over it, and punch it, punch, punch, punch. Then you put it up, and you pounce with a little bag of pigment, and the spots—you pull your pounced [paper cartoon] down and you see all the [little dots]." So standing up against it—and so he was patting it to do this—so I start patting, too! I touched it, and so forth. It was just a marvelous experience.

Another thing that came up was that—I did not go the next time when they were—and I don't know that the Getty did either, but the next project was the Last Judgment. Just one comment there was, if you think about the Sistine ceiling, it's very beige with all the wonderful figures and sibyls and so forth and the flood scene. We went up during the flood scene, and the—as Gianluigi Colalucci pointed out, that was his first part of the ceiling. He had never done fresco before. Woo! So, he goes up, does it, and the giornate, how much you can do in a day, are much smaller, because [he's just starting out]—and then he hits stride when he

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does the sibyls and the prophets around the edges, which is lower than the ceiling. And there's this incredibly silly thing on the Internet called Second Life. But Vassar recreated the Sistine Chapel in Second Life. So if you go in with your avatar, you can fly up and float, and do like I was doing and be—of course it's photographic. But for the Sistine Chapel just a side note.

03-00:42:43 In any case, the Sistine Chapel ceiling is remarkably beige, and The Last Judgment is remarkably ultramarine blue. And overall, if you're doing chromatic abstraction and saying, Okay, what are the main colors here? They didn't do chromatic abstraction in the Sistine Chapel. But Michelangelo had to pay for the lapis lazuli blue for the ceiling, but the pope paid for the lapis lazuli for The Last Judgment, so that is why—and so wonderful little things like that. Andrea also was pointing out how beautifully—having not done fresco or a ceiling before, Michelangelo figured out when he's—somebody is coming like this at you, [sticks out arm] how to make the perspective double effective, of this is much more in focus than that, because it really gives the three-dimensional effect.

03-00:43:38 Tewes: Right, your hand appears larger than the arm itself. I think in later years there was some controversy over whether or not that chapel had been overly cleaned?

03-00:43:53 Stoner: Oh my goodness, yes! So people going into conservation first heard about the Florence flood, and then we had a flood of applicants. Next, they hear about the controversy over the Sistine Chapel—flood of applicants. So that's kind of a good thing coming from a bad thing. Let's see, I can—I'll try to do a little summary of the Sistine controversy, because that's, again, something I teach a lot.

03-00:44:17 Tewes: Exactly.

03-00:44:19 Stoner: So when we went up it's the flood scene, and it's essentially a bridge that you stand on going into the holes, Michelangelo's holes in the wall. And we could see all of that. What they were doing, they did the opposite of Michelangelo. They cleaned the prophets and the sibyls first, and then—they treated first what he painted last. So now we're at where he painted first, and so there are extreme floodlights going onto the treated places. We were hanging off the scaffolding, looking at how glary and strange the prophets and the sibyls look because of the floodlights. The [lights] were the wrong [color] temperature, and so I would put my hand out to shade [the cleaned sibyls] from the floodlight and see how beautiful [the ceiling] looked with my hand shading it. That was the first controversy. Italian artists all got bent out of shape and say, "It's ruined, ruined," because they were looking at the floodlighted areas. [coughs] Excuse me. That was thing one, okay.

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03-00:45:41 Getty oriented again—and I keep saying her name—at a dinner at Yale, to [Antoine] Ton Wilmering, "Do you remember Birute Vileisis?" "No." But one of my wonderful memories of the Getty—and I can't remember why I was consulting her—she [was head of the] Getty Grant Program. Oh, I did! I bet this was when—I managed to get a grant, because John Brealey said, "No painting conservator should restore a work by—" I'm suddenly dropping his name. Anyway, a famous artist—[Hans] Memling! "—Memling without having been to Bruges." That you have to see the light in Bruges, you have to see the climate in Bruges if you're going to be so bold as to treat a Memling. So I sold this back at the Getty, I think to Birute Vileisis in the Getty Grant Program, that I need money to send all my ten students each summer, the second-year students, to Europe. I got $1,000 per student. It was only a $10,000 grant, and I think people said, "How did Joyce manage to send ten people to Europe with $10,000?" But anyway, it was long ago. If you're doing leather from Ethiopia, you have to go to Ethiopia. I was aiming it at paintings people, but of course the other specialties had to go where they should go.

03-00:47:06 Now this is leading up to information on the Sistine Chapel. Birute Vileisis may—yeah, I think Columbia, got her PhD in art history and knew James Beck there. James Beck is the one who led the controversy, the next-step controversy, which is still going [all these years later]. So anyway, James Beck, who has died, had first—so okay, I'll back up and try to make this very short. Birute Vileisis told this—oh, I want to add one more thing about her. When she first got her PhD from James Beck—we'll return to that—she worked for the IRS. She said, "Everybody with a PhD in art history should have to work for the IRS, because you're in charge of saying, 'Is this tax-deductible amount this person has declared really right?'" If you give a painting by your aunt to the local historical society and say it's $40,000, an art historian can address that. She said you really learn a lot of nuts and bolts [that would apply to insurance appraisal] doing that, which would be true if you end up in a museum and you have to send your best Van Gogh—how much insurance is it going to be? Do you really want to do it? Blah, blah, blah. [coughs] Excuse me.

Birute Vileisis also said that James Beck was a very difficult professor to work with, and I have some personal backup experience on that, too. In any case, he tended to sort of #MeToo the female students, said she. But more to the point of this, after Time magazine featured art historian Leo Steinberg's work on how the Christ child's genitals are depicted throughout art history centuries, and everybody—whoa! That made the cover of Time. The next thing [that] happened was James Beck tried to push forward that Cezanne's Bather was a homosexual, hoping he would get the front page of Time. This was a yawn. I'm not sure how he tried to prove it, but it didn't work. Then he attacked the Sistine Chapel. What does that tell us? Is he really trying to help the art world in its interpretations and decisions?

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03-00:49:36 He established ArtWatch [International], and I've actually, flipping forward thirty years, had some of our undergraduate students get a job with ArtWatch and find out—they wrote, the title of the article was to be, "Undergraduate Programs in Art Conservation," and so she did due diligence in research and put it together. And they said, "No, no. This has to be an attack. This has to be how people are coming out of undergraduate programs and ruining works of art." That again tells you where this is all going.

[Some early ArtWatch types] got together a group. They marched on the steps of the Met about overcleaning paintings. They just attacked, attacked, attacked. When there was a wonderful symposium at the Frick, the [organizers] were really worried they were going to actually storm the doors, because he rouses up—I actually went—we had a fabulous conference, maybe 1995 at the Royal Academy [of Arts] in London and next door at the Royal [Society], a court of royal academies of this and that. And James Beck—and by then his, what shall I say, his evil intent righthand man, Jacques Franck from the Louvre area and Michael Daley from London—David Bomford told me later that they had to have one employee work one half-day a week keeping up with the attacks from Michael Daley on the National Gallery, London. So this has become an industry of attacking, even with the death of James Beck.

03-00:51:26 But I attended, because I was there for this conference. We found James Beck in the back of the room at the beginning of our conference on the history of painting conservation. He said then, as he said to me when I actually started, because he published an article in the [Chronicle] of Higher Ed about how he's a tenured [full] professor, so he can say the truth without [fear of] any retaliation. I wrote back and said, "I'm a tenured [full] professor, and I want to know if you've ever worked with a conservator." [coughs] Excuse me. He actually said, "I don't want someone to change my mind." And that's pretty much what he said in the back of the room at the Royal [Society]. [He] was [apparently] trying very hard not to take in information. He lectured at the AIC to show how the Sistine Chapel had been ruined. He had the before-treatment photos—this is before PowerPoint, so we're doing double slides. He had a slide of "before" and then "ruined." Tom Chase, who we [spoke about] a lot yesterday, was in charge somehow of shepherding James Beck around, and James Beck said, "Is one of the projectors brighter than the other? I want the ruined side on the brighter projector." So I mean, we have all the evidence in the world he was not a neutral person.

I was on what the provost called a kitchen cabinet at the University of Delaware when I was director of the master's program. Wayne Craven, senior art historian of American sculpture, was on the cabinet, and we would go once a month and have breakfast and talk about what people were fussing about on campus. He walked in, Wayne Craven, and said—no, no, sorry, the provost walked in and said, [speaks loudly] "Joyce and Wayne Craven are going to be at each other's throats today." And we went, What? Because James Beck had published an article

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in the [Chronicle] of Higher Ed saying that conservators were truly terrible in every way—I'm shortening it—and that art historians needed to really rein them in and tell them what to do, and this and that. So we saw this together at this breakfast, and Wayne Craven looked like he was going to explode, "James Beck, James Beck, let me tell you about James Beck. He called me up and he said, 'Who is Hiram Powers?'" Now, Hiram Powers is the dean of American sculpture, this is the most important person who went and trained abroad, and so forth, in American art history in sculpture. "And I told him who Hiram Powers was. He hung up the phone and supervised a dissertation." And so everyone disliked James Beck. He became notorious, as he apparently wished to do, after attacking the Sistine Chapel; established ArtWatch; had many, many protégés.

03-00:54:47 Back to the Royal Academy 1995 thing. Stephen Hackney from the Tate and I and Roy Perry all attended the James Beck seminar the next day. It was truly horrendous. The audience was all artists. The panel was: James Beck, art historian, Columbia; Jacques Franck, artist, France; and Michael Daley, artist, London. They felt because they were artists they—they've never done any technical history in art history. They'd never looked at a cross section. They didn't even understand what a conservator did. I don't want to do this out of proportion, but I guess being in a Nazi rally would be something like this, because the three on the panel were just rousing them up to hate conservators.

03-00:55:46 I tried to speak three times, and it was like a dog fight. Well, first they said, "Conservators don't even tell what solvents they use. They don't tell anything." Roy Perry said, "Yes, we do. We publish reports." "So what do you take—what do you use? What do you use?" "Well, one of the things is acetone." "Acetone melts paint! Have they seen what they do?" And then I said something about, "A good conservator always works with a curator, and they work—" and then I was interrupted by Michael Daley on the podium screaming at me. "The blind leading the blind." You've got the picture. I started trying to talk about Whistler, because I'd just done my dissertation or was somewhere in the middle—no, I'd done it on Whistler, and started to talk about how carefully one approaches—nobody talked, they just screamed. And screamed at me, "Nobody should ever clean a Whistler." At that point I just shut down. And so they have been the continuing attackers of the Sistine [Chapel conservation].

Michael Daley came and heard me speak at a conference held at the Royal [Society] not too long ago. [My talk] was on the history of conservation, and I [covered] the history of cleaning, and tried to [present very thorough versus] gentle cleaning, and quoting Philippot and Brealey and Andrea, and things like that. This is almost embarrassing. He decided I was one of the "good ones." So I get occasional mail from Michael Daley saying, "Well, you should know now we've totally proven that the Salvator Mundi Leonardo is not by Leonardo." He just sends me these little things. Not personally, but I'm obviously on some kind of mailing list. So I'm horrendously aware of what they're continuing to do.

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03-00:57:54 When I did my oral history interview with Hubert von Sonnenburg, '96 or so, he warned me, he said, "I've cut off all phone calls except ArtWatch." Because ArtWatch was on the march, because in the gallery at the Met were a pair of Rembrandt portraits, and in the label on one side it said, "This is the man, so and so, who was recently cleaned. And this is the wife, and we will soon be cleaning that." The ArtWatch spies found that [label] and were marching on the Met to protect the woman and not have her be cleaned. And everybody learns that with attackers like that, putting them off will just rev them up more. He told his secretary if they call to interrupt the oral history interview, because that's too important. I mean, not that they had a brain in their head, but the idea is it would just—"Oh, the Met won't answer us," would roar. I mean, it's just extraordinary.

As a kind of fake news, it has gotten to a lot of people who distrust conservators. I'll speak to a ladies' group, and they'll say, "Oh well, do you agree that they ruined the Sistine?" This [would] have been like a year ago, so it's still going. They've sowed enough seeds. One would like to think, as the phrase goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity, because people learn more about conservation. No, not in this case, because the ArtWatch is so [un]relenting and simplistic, it is damaging, and it continues to be damaging. And it started with the Sistine.

03-00:59:44 Tewes: That's so interesting. I had no idea that it was ongoing.

03-00:59:46 Stoner: Oh yes, oh yes. A favorite story is John Brealey—so the Met has [had] this very consistent and beautiful [approach to cleaning]—so I tell the students the best field trip I could ever take you on would have been twenty years ago, and we'd go to the Met and then we fly to the National Gallery, London, because they are the direct inheritors of opposing cleaning theories. Hubert von Sonnenburg started at the Met in 1959 and was trained by Johannes Hell, the opposite side of the Burlington Magazine controversy. He left to be chef des chefs at the Doerner [Institute], and John Brealey came in. Hell only trained six people, so two of them go to the Met, one by one. And then John has a terrible stroke around 1990, and is replaced again by Hubert von Sonnenburg. So you have this—who had fallen out with the Doerner people—consistent approach.

03-01:00:54 John had just arrived at the Met—we're talking 1975 when there was this great to- do—is that right? Yeah—on the steps, and it was filled with artists screaming. The director or somebody went out and asked, "What's going on?" And they have, [imitates angry artist] "The Met is ruining paintings, the Met is ruining paintings." John said he was in this restaurant eating and had his napkin here [around his neck], and he said he took off his napkin, went out, and said he wouldn't meet with the whole screaming one hundred people or whatever on the steps, but to send in a delegation. So this guy becomes James Beck's second in command—oh dear, I've now just dropped his name. Anyway, a New Yorker who is a painter. They came in, and John took them to see Juan de Pareja by Velázquez that

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Hubert had recently cleaned. John had just gotten there, so he hadn't cleaned anything yet. And Juan de Pareja is this wonderful portrait of an African man wearing a white collar. John took the napkin and held it against the white collar and said, "You see, varnish is still on the white collar. My predecessor and I were trained by the same man, who was a very gentle cleaner, a held-back cleaner," and they were won over completely and sent him a calligraphy framed piece inducting him into their artist society. And John said there were three misspellings.

I should take a break. [coughs]

03-01:02:48 Tewes: Yeah, let's break. [break in audio] Okay, we are back from a break, and we're going to talk a bit more about your other associations with the Getty, one being: starting in 1983 you're on various ad-hoc panels for the GCI, the Getty Conservation Institute. I was wondering about the work you were doing with them in those early years.

03-01:03:08 Stoner: I'm afraid I can't do it all chronologically perfectly. But I was really delighted— this was during a time I was the director of the master's program. So '82 to '97 is my fifteen years. Now my successor and former student, Debra Hess Norris, is on triple the number of things I was on during that time. I was consulting for the National Institute for Conservation, the Getty Conservation Institute, the Williamstown Board, blah, blah, blah. Now she is all that and many things more. But in any case, adventures galore. I mentioned yesterday being present with Norman Bromelle and Gaël de Guichen activities.

One of the things was a didactic panel. Marta de la Torre decided there weren't enough shared teaching materials for the different [conservation] programs internationally. And so we worked with Steen Bjarnhof, who is a wonderful—I called him the Bernie Rabin of Denmark, which wouldn't mean much to anybody but Andrea maybe—and Mikkel Scharff. [Mikkel wrote] a chapter in my book, because of this wonderful Getty connection, of putting together a whole series. We're talking slides, not PowerPoint, sadly, of how to line paintings with nesting stretchers and using pressure—suction tables as opposed to vacuum tables. It was wonderful, and we met—Marta would call us together two or three different times in—we were in Denmark and we were in London and so forth. Again, any of these experiences impacted my teaching, and I hope were helpful to the Getty. We would talk about what we need, as in instructors. I've mentioned already the Arrowhead grouping, where she would pull instructors from all over the world to come and share thoughts of what can be taught and what the students [must] bring with them.

03-01:05:09 AATA was a continuing thing all that time, and the changing board of editors who were international, fabulous people to work with. AAT, I worked with briefly, the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, and attended a meeting in Williamstown. I'm just guessing, from my corner of the woods, that it decided not to go too far into

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conservation, because it doesn't have a lot of conservation terms, nor a committee replacing us to investigate conservation terms. I just showed this big slide image on PowerPoint of AAT, from my talk on George Stout. Because AAT itself is probably an offshoot of George Stout, who in his last years went on and on about the importance of terminology. I always put, as a beginning thing for my opening lecture, is, "Language is the parent, not the child, of thought." It's an Oscar Wilde quote, and it means that number one, if you know more terms, you can do more sophisticated thinking. And if you speak many languages, you have many doors [of critical thinking] open to you.

That's another thing about the Getty, was everyone—there were jokes. There's a wonderful—so Recent Advances in Conservation has been the title of a number of books starting back after the [explosion of literature after] the sixties. And so here a magazine came out called Recent Setbacks in Conservation. There was a joke in it about how, Oh, I'm applying—"If you want to apply to be a secretary at the Getty, you must have two PhDs and speak in three languages." Anyway, we laughed, but there were a lot of people at the Getty who [seemed to have extreme qualifications].

03-01:07:01 I'm mixing chronology, but probably my last strange and unusual initiative for the Getty was—so Luis Monreal was there for my sort of first half, and then Miguel Angel Corzo actually shut down the Visiting Committee. But I was totally inspired by the Picture LA: [Landmarks of a New Generation] initiative that he did start, and there's a picture of him in each of the booklets surrounded by the kids from the area. It's a good plan, and it needed to keep going in some iteration. But the idea was to inspire—just between when we met yesterday and today, Kaywin Feldman, who is the new director of the National Gallery, gave her talk at the Pavilion. No splitting hairs, she said, "The number one priority for all museums in the future is diversity." And that white people will be the minority in just twenty years—white people are already the minority of people under eighteen or fifteen or something. So appealing, encompassing, attracting, collaborating with people of color.

Okay, Miguel Angel started this, this is what it was, and it was wonderful—and nobody remembers it anymore. [laughs] So I'd like to pump up its notoriety. Anyway, Picture LA, Picture Mexico City, Picture Mumbai, there's a list that— I'm leaving out some, but you get the picture. The idea was having a professional photographer, appropriately bilingual, go to Mexico City, LA, Mumbai, and other places, and arm fifteen [young] people of color, kids, with cameras to take pictures of the meaningful sites for them. It might be the local barbershop where your father went and learned the news of the day or something. It might be the mailbox, where you met your best friend every day after school. So it was the idea of—historic preservation is not just the Sistine Chapel. It can be your world, your culture, and you want to take care of it. [The project seemed to cut back on the occurrence of] graffiti; [neighborhoods became proud of their landmarks] as we know from outdoor murals and all of those projects. It was wonderful, and the

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books were published. I have a set of them upstairs. The two people most involved were Miguel Angel Corzo and Mahasti Afshar, who's Persian at the Getty and speaks every language you want, I think.

03-01:09:44 I decided we'd do Picture Delaware, et cetera. But the Delaware project is with downtown kids in Delaware, and arm them with cameras and did it, and did a book that matched exactly in format. It was a white book, horizontal. And also, because I do so much work with theater, did an accompanying musical with Cab Calloway School, which is a charter school, has a lot of kids of color, and to get in they have to do full formal Broadway tryouts, singing and dancing and everything. So these kids are good. We did a Landmarks, the Musical, accompanying the Picture Delaware [book]. The Delaware Art Museum bought in with me on that and did the exhibition of Picture Delaware. We performed at the Delaware Art Museum Landmarks, the Musical, and then Charlie Cawley, our godfather of funding for many years from MBNA, funded it to go to Maine. We traveled around and did this musical, and it was—the cover was the Wilmington Train Station by Frank Furness, and its clock and so forth. I wrote a song about time and the clock, and what we do with time, et cetera.

03-01:10:58 And then Mahasti came out to see it, and that was a wonderful visit. We did Christmas cards for a while. I don't know where Mahasti is now. Because I also work with the Wyeths and she didn't know who they were, she came to see Picture Delaware and stayed in the DuPont Hotel, and then said, "Please take me to see your Wyeths." I thought, Oh, how funny. My Wyeths. [laughs] We went out to the Brandywine River Museum, and this is a spectacular moment. This is Like Water for Chocolate, of what's inside a painting for people with sensitivities. She goes and looks at the works of Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Jamie Wyeth, with me babbling along about their backgrounds and tastes and whatnot. She turned to me—I almost start to cry when I tell this—and said, "Do your Wyeths like Sibelius?" And they all painted to Sibelius! Sibelius is the composer of—[sings] Be Still My Soul was a hymn based on it. A painter of Norse mythology in the earth—I mean, sorry, a composer, a composer of musical mythology in the earth. She said, "Your Wyeths are Norse gods connected to the earth." As soon as I got her to the train station I called up Jamie and said, "Oh my God, this just happened." He said, "I only listened to Sibelius the whole time I was painting when I was learning with my father." I said, "I know, I know." It's in all the biographies and so forth. [laughs]

03-01:12:42 N.C. Wyeth had them all pull up plants and garden and understand the earth. In Maine, they all had to be in the ocean and do fishing, and they had to understand the water. He inculcated into them this love of land and farming and fishing. And Mahasti looked at the paintings and got it. Mahasti told me that she has a sister, and her father would go to the opera and come home at 1 a.m. and get them out of bed, and play the opera record of what he'd just seen. So this is Mahasti's

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background. Okay, this is the background for people who can look at the painting and hear the music, original synesthesia.

But anyway, all of that came out of Picture Delaware. And Mahasti, wherever you are, I wish you much wealth [and happiness].

03-01:13:37 Tewes: So many different layers of all your different projects meeting right there. I like that. Is there anything more you'd like to say about the GCI Advisory Committee?

03-01:13:46 Stoner: Okay. I joined it maybe halfway through Luis Monreal's tenure and got to know Hubert von Sonnenburg, which was marvelous, and many other people in that group. And the excitement of—we watched the acropolis in Brentwood [Getty Center] go up. And sometimes joint with the Advisory Committee for the Museum, which included Angelica Rudenstine and John Walsh, blah, blah. We'd start with the Richard Meier model of anything. So first it's the acropolis on the hill. And then we go back the next time and it's partly built and we all have to wear hardhats, and we go around and look at every—I mean, all of this is just truly magnificent. I sat with Harold Williams in the plaza once—it's now built and everything—and he comes over and sits with me and we're chatting, and he said, "I just had to fire Richard Meier as the garden designer." I thought, And you picked me to tell? Wow. He said that he had to hire a different designer for the gardens, because Richard Meier, having done the building, was having the building overshadow the whole landscape architecture of plantings. And so he took a stiff drink and fired Richard Meier from the garden—I'm sure there was repercussion of that—and hired a separate landscape architect who did the gardens and so forth. So that was a memorable moment at one of the lunches of the GCI.

03-01:15:32 Oh! I don't think I've talked about this. Okay. I think that's Luis Monreal time. Now we move to Miguel Angel, who leaves as we finish Picture Delaware. Oh dear, I just lost the thought, a very important thing I wanted to say about Miguel Angel Corzo and what went on in the—anyway, we continued to watch.

So the next thing we watched was—we're in the acropolis now, and we watched the Richard Meier modeling of the [Getty Villa in] Malibu, and how that's going to go. I, of course, get extremely personally excited about recreating the Roman amphitheater, and I cannot wait to come back and see Aeschylus and Euripides and whatnot in there. Then it turns out I've never been able to, because the surrounding public does not like the noise, so it's done, what, once a month or something, not when I can come.

03-01:16:25 Lost the thing with Miguel Angel. A memorable moment was Miguel Angel did not like having an advisory committee, so he turned it into—Luis was good about it, wanted feedback. Miguel Angel turned it into a dog-and-pony show so that

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each of his people made a presentation about what they've been doing [at] lunchtime. We had one extremely forcefully spoken woman, Heather Lechtman, who would say, "You shouldn't be doing that, you should be doing this." He would generally just shut her down and not let her speak. And then we soon were told—I got this phone call that, "I'm so pleased to tell you that you have more time, and we are dissolving the Getty Conservation Institute Advisory Committee." But during the time it was hale and hearty and meeting, it was totally fascinating. And I'd always check in on AATA when I visited and so forth.

We would have lunches and we would have—this one occasion we had doubled this room with a huge table to accommodate the GCI Visiting Committee, and John Walsh and Angelica Rudenstine and the Museum Visiting Committee, which was beyond fascinating. Because John Walsh, his people would go, "I think there's a—" particularly Angelica would say, [imitates accent] "I think you've entirely wasted your money when you've done this: da, da, da." John Walsh would say, "That's a very good point," and write that down, and he listened to his advisory committee. Any time the GCI Advisory Committee, particularly Heather spoke, Miguel would interrupt and change the subject. Again, in my history of observing management activity—and then soon thereafter we were dissolved.

03-01:18:21 So, the whole idea of having—it's an interesting thing. John Brealey set up his own advisory committee meeting at the Met and Michael Gallagher has continued it at the Met, including John Currin, a living artist, who then—one time we were on a field trip to the Met, and he introduced us to John Currin. I mean, it's just, that's how life should be. And Miguel, apparently it didn't suit him. I was on a committee, Museum Studies Advisory Committee at UD [University of Delaware], where a similar thing happened. The woman heading it, heading Museum Studies, doesn't like meetings, doesn't even like to inform people by email. And so, pshew, no more meetings of that advisory committee. That was interesting to watch. But so many good things happened that were probably on the books and doing fine.

Some little strange moments I remember—Frank Preusser was a candidate—Dr. Frank Preusser from Germany was a candidate in between Luis Monreal and Miguel Angel, and was—we have a lot of search committees. I always explain, with no names, Frank Preusser, who was a candidate for the position, had to escort all the other candidates around the GCI to tell them about it, which I think is a little bit inhumane. But anyway, that happened. He was in charge of the Watts Tower treatments, Frank Preusser, and we had a couple fieldtrips there and he was so gracious. [He] died right—six months or so after we had a fabulous group of students and everybody going out to Watts Towers. But Frank Preusser is another person—I hope this is helpful. I'm doing my little profiles on Birute Vileisis and John Walsh and—

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03-01:20:19 In this case, Dr. Frank Preusser gave me wonderful tips about taking my daughters to museums. He said he always took his children to the gift store first and you buy postcards, then you have a treasure hunt. And so I tell this to everybody and all these parents do it. Thank you, Dr. Frank Preusser. But I took—again, where I'm a visiting scholar, and [my daughters] are something like three and seven years old, and we go to the Huntington and go up on the floor with all the great six-footer British portraits. People thought, Oh, children. Oh no, they're going to be noisy. They had their gift store things, and then they'd say, "Mommy, look! It's Pinkie!" And they ran to—or was it Blue Boy? Anyway, it was a tall Gainsborough. The other people went, [gasps] like, Oh, what brilliant children! Well again, it was exactly the Frank Preusser idea.

And then another time at our Advisory meeting, we got to see the new buildings for the new Getty program, and I can't think when that started. Oh, and I have to talk about looking at the different programs before it started. But in any case, plans were afoot to use the Villa for a training facility to have—and I think they take six people a year, every other year, something like that. Many of our undergrads have gone on to the Getty/UCLA Program. I remember Frank Preusser taking us on a tour. And because we just have one room, which is the student lab, and if it's furniture conservation, it's got all kinds of vises and carving things. If it's the textile conservation block, it's—the Getty had a different room for the different—Frank Preusser said, "It's absolutely obscene, all the space they have," and I remember that quote. In any case, it is gorgeous, where if they're going to make fresco samples and do this and that, they have one room. If they're going to take samples in microscopy and anything like that, they have another room that can seat all of them—I think the two years in one, so that would be twelve people.

03-01:22:36 To prepare for this program, the Getty, as is typical, put together groups to go out and look at other programs that relate to archaeological and ethnographic conservation. I was on the committee with Dr. Liz something, tall, gray-haired woman who was an archaeologist. Maybe King, Liz King. We went to Arizona, and looked at the University of Arizona and the Arizona State Museum as a possible team, of what became UCLA/Getty. And then Terry [Drayman]-Weisser and I went to Pittsburgh. Both of them were amazing experiences. Neither one was chosen; I think that was the right decision. [laughs] But boy, was it an adventure.

Arizona had the state forensics guy—and I can't think of the name of the TV show that's all about forensics. But anyway, they say, "Oh, he's Arizona's—" not Kelsey, something like that. Anyway, the students—and we noticed, the same as us—mostly girls, ten people a year, and two boys maybe—one boy maybe. That's the first time I could say, "Oh, okay, art conservation, art history, and forensics in anthropology are all more appealing to women than men. Interesting." One of the students said to us as we came up on the elevator, "Oh, you know, we hear there's

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a murder on TV"—Quincy, Arizona's Quincy is the name I was thinking about. Anyway, "We hear there's a murder and we hear that on TV, and then we know there will be a body in the sink tomorrow." And then we heard about how—that you go through, not exactly special testing, but if you can't take it, you can't come here. They even got a note back from Kodak—before digital cameras, of course. When you have a recently murdered person, you put something inside their mouth to open up their mouth so you can do a dental picture for ID. Kodak sent it back and said, "We cannot subject our employees to photos of this sort." In any case, it was fascinating that Arizona's Quincy would have been the sort of forensic conservator to deal with [conservation] students if they'd [started the conservation program] there. The Arizona State Museum is, of course, quite wonderful.

03-01:25:22 And I'll sneak in a little side note here. Lee Kimchee was the head of the IMS [Institute of Museum Services] before it became the IMLS [Institute of Museum and Library Services], so it was the Institute of Museum Services, IMS, government body to give grants. Lee Kimchee, at one meeting—I was on some kind of advisory [committee] for them—said, "If you're going to testify in the Senate, wear red." I testified in the Senate once with the guy, Ray Thompson, from the Arizona State Museum. This fits into the Getty Museum. Because when you testify in the Senate, nobody looks at you. You're just speaking directly to the person who's going to type it up for the record, and everybody's doing other things and [passing around] the pages and something. But apparently, if you wear red, that helps some. Ray Thompson said, "I take a tarantula." He's standing at the podium and he puts the tarantula on the podium, and everybody is [immediately] looking. We both testified together for funding for the—it got funding—for [NMA, National Museum] Act [of 1966], where it was funding for programs in museums. But anyway, the tarantula was obviously his friend, would go across the podium. And of course you had the whole body of senate people watching, and he'd go, tap, and it would go back across and so forth. Anyway, Arizona State Museum had some great people.

03-01:26:58 Then the other place we went, Terry Weisser and I—was again, an amazing gender study. In this case, it was a major archaeologist, whose name I don't remember. What we did when we were on these gigs was when we went in to the president of the university and the vice president of the university, and we went into the museum director's office, we're just scoping out who would be the leadership team in this place. We were left alone in offices a lot, so we'd make notes of what books the people had in the office. The great senior archaeologist at the University of Pittsburgh had no books, no books, but pictures of him standing like this like with his gun or [his girlfriend, or] something like that. And he had a big aquarium. Because two women were coming to look over the possibility, he rented a car that was kind of a luxury car with loud music, Sensurround-type music, and we couldn't hear over it. We finally had to say, "Please turn off the music." In other words, what we got from that was what he thought would impress women. One of his things in his office—he had, his résumé was like

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twenty-three pages long, but he was never the single author, and so it was all these archaeological digs and finds and all of that kind of thing. So anyway, tipping into these other worlds to help the Getty try to decide what team would be good for—but Terry Weisser and I were both thumbs down on Pittsburgh after this experience.

03-01:28:37 Tewes: So what made you choose UCLA—or recommend and respect?

03-01:28:42 Stoner: Not every one of the team went every place.

03-01:28:45 Tewes: Okay.

03-01:28:46 Stoner: So my assignments were the Pittsburgh team and the Arizona team. I was not on the Getty team. Now that it's established, I visit and know the people and that kind of thing, so I can't offer insights on what the visiting examination experience was like for UCLA/Getty.

03-01:29:06 Tewes: Got it.

03-01:29:07 Stoner: One of the things that I hear is—yesterday we talked about founding a PhD program. UCLA puts more weight on having a PhD than any other place I've encountered, which makes it very hard for someone like Ellen Pearlstein, who is about as senior and brilliant as you could ask for in archaeological and ethnographic conservation. But she has no PhD, so they put her in something like—they couldn't find departments to put the people, and so she was put in something like Library Science or something. I'm sorry about that, and maybe the visiting team couldn't even tell that.

But now, the new director of the Getty/UCLA program is Dr. Glenn Wharton, who, in a way—I don't want to put me into this, but like Glenn, he and I are both very practical, practicing conservators, who also got a PhD. His PhD is pretty wonderful. He got it in Australia on King Kamehameha in Hawaii. And like me tripping over the topic through the Peacock Room, he tripped over the topic by being on Save Outdoor Sculpture. He was sent as a [part of a] team to treat, with the money raised from the government and the National Institute for Conservation, the huge sculpture of King Kamehameha in Hawaii. His assignment was to take off all the corrosion. It turned out—and this is the seed of his dissertation—the native people paint the sculpture once a year. It is sacred and all those layers are sacred, and you don't just come from Washington and scrape it off. [laughs] In those days conservators thought, Oh, this is what we should do. It's [for the] betterment of the sculpture, and get rid of that corrosion and save [the underlying materials], and so forth. He ended up doing dissertation-worthy—and it was published—research on interviewing all the tribal members of what exactly

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should be done, blah, blah, blah; worked out a complete compromise of working alongside of [the native people], putting the right materials—nothing is right or wrong—putting the most long-lasting materials in their hands and having them do the treatment. That book is another ripple effect of dealing—which is what the Getty/UCLA does a lot—with Native Americans and Native American art and NAGPRA [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act], and all of that.

03-01:31:56 It is a crime that Ellen could not be as senior—she's still there. I think she couldn't ever be head, because of the damn UCLA feeling about PhDs, and she's so brilliant and already practicing, she doesn't have time to now get a PhD. She and Glenn have different worlds.

Glenn also happens to be a superb—he does not only Native American ethnographic, but ModCon, so he's interviewed a whole lot of artists and worked—and a lot of us talk about how similar ethnographic, and modern and contemporary are. You must honor the tribe or artist, you must take their wishes into consideration, and often you [must decide to] do nothing. Because it is not right to interfere to the degree you would need to to do a full conservation treatment which will wipe out—it's like yak butter on some Tibetan sculptures. It's put there religiously, and you cannot take it off. But your curator, who wants to put it in the center room, says, "Take off the yak butter." You say, "No." So in other words, Glenn is the person who published on the key of that, but it could be the living artist—it could be Matthew Barney putting Vaseline on the steps of the Getty. [door opens] Sorry, interruption made me lose my thought.

03-01:33:18 Tewes: Okay.

03-01:33:21 Stoner: It's like Matthew Barney putting Vaseline on the ramp of the Guggenheim [Museum]. That Vaseline is not a good, shall we say, long lasting—well, it won't last—but a conservation material, but it is the wish of the artist. This is a future thing that will go on with UCLA/Getty, of continuing to make fabulous ripple- effect decisions along these lines. I guess what I'm getting into here is the Getty has been integral, and I hope will continue to be, in these extreme ripple effects. John Walsh wasn't exactly a Getty—but a Getty personage, doing the John Brealey seminars, and so forth. And [Antoine] Ton Wilmering doing the Panel Paintings Initiative, followed by now the Conserving Canvas [Initiative], which we're in the thick of. Because we have our Conserving Canvas coming up in December, and people descending upon us en masse to discuss, with Getty funding, the treatment of two huge William Williams portraits, which are upstairs.

03-01:34:28 Tewes: So a continuing relationship between the Getty and Winterthur.

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03-01:34:32 Stoner: Oh yeah, I hope so. But in any case, it has been a win-win with raisins on it for me, and I'm trying to seduce into the circle as many other people as I can. Debbie [Hess Norris] is already completely connected and doing all her things, because what Debbie is doing—I can't cite whether Getty is involved with MEPPI, which is Middle East Photographic Initiative [Middle East Photograph Preservation Initiative]. But she goes all the time to places I can't spell and has all sorts of workshops in how to—I am not needed in Beirut or Japan, because I do Western painting conservation: tempera, oil, panel, blah, blah, blah. But every nation in the world has photographs, and every nation in the world wants to know how to preserve them, from family to institute. So she goes to the warring tribes of various places in the Middle East, and has people who cannot be in the same room with each other normally in the same room with each other, all wearing head scarves and all treating photographs. So Debbie has outdistanced me in all these different ways. I think if the Getty were structured the way it was in 1985 to '98, Debbie would be on absolutely every committee. I was just lucky that it was my time when I was director of the program, when Getty was absolutely expanding and doing cool stuff.

03-01:36:09 Tewes: We'll get more to your larger observations about the Getty later, but are there any other specific connections that you want to point out that you've had with them?

03-01:36:17 Stoner: Picture Delaware. I probably shouldn't, on camera, mull this over too long.

03-01:36:26 Tewes: That's fine. We want you to talk about that.

03-01:36:30 Stoner: Let me just look at that list of the initiatives. [reads paper] Feasibility to—well, diversity. That was Picture Delaware. I've been very involved with Rescue Public Murals, but not through the Getty, even though the three great mural cities are LA, Chicago, and Philadelphia. We work with Philadelphia.

The Getty Grant Program, I guess? Well, I did talk about that, Birute Vileisis, and it changed to the Getty Foundation. I remember being told that very carefully, and I've corrected all my history slides as a result.

03-01:37:15 Tewes: Did that alter the way that you worked with the Foundation?

03-01:37:21 Stoner: In this case, I would have been—well, I was a reviewer but also an applicant. But now that I'm not director anymore, Debbie is the applicant, and so she knows way more about that than I do. I'm trying to think of other—I'm sure there are more. Well, we've sent so many interns to the Getty and followed them. Emily MacDonald-Korth worked with Tom Learner on looking at acrylic paints, and that was related to Rescue Public Murals, because it was a matter of outdoor paints

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and testing them and finding out—they're not, any of them, going to last a century. And some will, in five years, rapidly change, so you want to get as long as you can by that, because it's such a neighborhood initiative and so important with the idea of—like the now-gone Picture LA—being proud of your neighborhood. The LA one blossomed strongly when LA hosted the Olympics, and then that one—it's interesting, it's closed down. They're not funding new murals, where Chicago and Philadelphia, I believe, still are, and many other little cities—I mean, not little cities, littler mural programs. The initiative now in LA is more to preserve what was already painted. But they're everywhere: under freeways and such. I should probably say if something else comes up, I'll pull it at that time.

03-01:39:04 Tewes: That's fine! [laughs] You know, as we move on, I do want to acknowledge that we've talked a bit about your theatrical work here and there. But one of the pieces you worked on, and I believe wrote for, was about Whistler, and so connecting your academic life to your theatrical life.

03-01:39:26 Stoner: When you have a pile of exciting information—Oh, this could be a musical! I sometimes do both music and lyrics, and did for—and I had a collaborator named Drury Pifer, who was a very tall white-haired man from South Africa who already had published a number of novels, and his wife happened to work at the University of Delaware. I went to a professional production of one of his plays, and thought, Ooh, he lives nearby. I approached him about the Whistler idea, and he got very excited about it. He decided to do a kind of Rashomon—I don't know if you know that—of three people being in an experience and everyone having a different take on it.

03-01:40:11 It was called Peacock Room: Three Versions of a Kiss, and it was getting into whether or not Whistler and Mrs. Leyland had an affair. We do know, the letter is there to be seen, that Mr. Leyland wrote to Whistler, "If I ever catch you near my wife again, I'll have you horsewhipped." The Peacock Room was painted in 1876 to '77, and the Leylands were divorced in '79. And so we brought in as another lead character Whistler's current mistress, Maud [Franklin]—I mean, current with the Peacock Room—it was fun, bringing in principles of sight, light, color, decision making as an artist, and so forth. That was fun. What I'm happy about is, again, trying to meld—

Of course, one of my favorite musicals—I just went to the Dramatists Guild Foundation gala on last Monday and won in the blind auction the Stephen Sondheim score of Sunday in the Park with George autographed by Stephen Sondheim. I've actually interviewed Stephen Sondheim for the News Journal when he came here for something, and rode in the elevator with him from some other event, and wrote him a letter originally about—because Sunday in the Park with George is a complete collision of my theater and my art, because it is about [Georges] Seurat painting the Sunday Afternoon on [the Island of La] Grande

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Jatte that's in Chicago. And Stephen Sondheim musically—I love synesthesia, like with Mahasti Afshar, and Sibelius for the Wyeths. But he actually, Stephen Sondheim, when he has Seurat doing pointillism and finishing the hat and it's [sings in staccato]. So he has musicalized the process of applying tiny dots of paint, of pointillism that Seurat did. In any case, I try whenever possible to do that sort of thing when worlds collide.

03-01:42:30 I guess one of my favorite—it moves a little bit more into the art history than the theater, is I've been doing performance pieces, because it's hard to get enough money to cast all the actors, pay the music director and arranger, blah, blah, blah. Whistler Through the Eyes of His Women is a performance piece. I finally just stopped. I started saying no, because I was asked to Tulsa, and I went to all these different museums and had to present this. It had so many moving parts, because I played Jo Hiffernan, who's known as the White Girl at the National Gallery of Art, in her long white dress standing on the wolf rug. And so I had to speak in an Irish accent, [speaks in an Irish accent] "Artists and celebrities are not like other people. And if your artist is a celebrity, well then, you can't expect normalcy." So then I had to learn a Scottish accent—wait a minute, I did—okay, lower-class British. Because my consultants—wonderful Joyce Townsend, conservator at the Tate, who did wonderful books on the techniques of Turner and Whistler; and Margaret MacDonald, who is the most amazing Whistler scholar ever—I did the piece for them after having done it a bunch of places as an art history lecture sort of thing. Oh, Marta de la Torre had me come and do it in Florida for the Florida International University. [Whistler's] second mistress during the Peacock Room days is Maud, and he actually gets married to Beatrice, his one wife, while still with Maud and not telling her. So he was a cad, in Margaret MacDonald's words. But for Maud, I had to do—both Joyce [T], who is Scottish, and Margaret, who is also Scottish, told me my Maud accent was too upper class and I had to lower it— so for British. And then the third part of my lecture is Beatrice, and she's Scottish, and they said my Scottish accent was too lower class. Joyce [T] read the whole script about Beatrice in an [upper-class] Scottish accent [into a recorder] so that I could get that right.

03-01:44:39 I love that, when my theatrical writing and performance can actually be an educational tool in art history. So what I did was have Jo talk all about her affair with Courbet and how that upset Whistler, and showing the paintings of her and the places while doing that. And then with Maud, the same thing, where he goes bankrupt, the Leylands get divorced, he goes to Venice, she goes with him and cooks for all his friends—and they can't go to the parties because she's a lower- class mistress, blah, blah. And then he actually marries Beatrice, and they paint together, as I mentioned yesterday. I can make anybody cry reading Whistler's letters to Freer as Beatrice is dying. That's where I take the cross section and show that he couldn't scrape down as he normally does, because he'd be scraping away the time memorialized when he and Beatrice were painting side by side. So things like that.

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I did another one on Howard Pyle. I actually did a performance piece with the guy who played Howard Pyle, who looks exactly like Howard Pyle. Uncanny. I played his secretary, Brinckle, Miss [Gertrude] Brinckle. We worked together with actually reading from Pyle's letters his advice to his students, and Miss Brinckle taking the advice, and so forth. But then did also a musical on N.C. Wyeth. But because Andrew Wyeth, who loved the guy who played Howard Pyle, and said, "Can you have your Mr. Pyle come and look at my newest painting?" Because Andrew Wyeth's spiritual grandfather was Howard Pyle, and this guy looked exactly like him. But he's an actor. [whispers] He doesn't know anything about painting. So I said, "I'd have to script him." But in any case, that was a strange and fun moment.

03-01:46:38 So the Wyeths invited the cast to come to things, and I was at one of my—my costumer, I just had to take some photographs to her about two weeks ago. She costumed the Peacock Room [play] and played Mrs. Leyland, and she costumed N.C. Wyeth in the Howard Pyle performance piece, and so forth. She said, "Whenever I do costumes for you, Joyce, it's like I'm going to lectures in art history." We try to base it on actual letters, but get good actors to deliver and perform. But Andrew Wyeth, Andrew came because we did it in Delaware and in Maine, and he—flown around on the plane again by the godfather of MBNA, now deceased, Charlie Cawley. People called him the "Santa Claus of Delaware," because he would fund the opera and the symphony and the museums and everything. He just loved it all. He adopted my shows and was happy to send them around while he was happily alive.

03-01:47:46 In any case, Andrew loved—it's so funny dealing with the artists, dealing with Jamie and Andrew, because they don't really listen to you, and they never tell the truth, but their vision is extraordinary. We were working on a Howard Pyle mural; it was a two-part mural. Actually, it would be hard pressed—it wouldn't fit on this wall because it was so big, and none of these spaces are big enough, but it was in parts. It's now at the Delaware Art Museum. But a colleague conservator decided that a very abraded man's face needed a moustache and a beard, and we were all against it, but—it's a big mural with a lot of people. Jamie Wyeth walked in the room, looked, and said, "What's the matter with the man in the corner?" I mean, like Mahasti with Sibelius, they keep doing [marvelous visual things]—Jamie is still alive.

I treated a painting for Andrew, for the Delaware Art Museum, that was an Andrew Wyeth, where a dealer had varnished it. His signature was too porous and didn't have enough medium in it, so when the dealer varnished it, the varnish, which turned yellow, had the signature embedded in it. So if I took off the varnish, I would take off the signature. I worked under the microscope with teeny tiny, little toothpicks, wow, and cleaned all around the signature so that it was—it was a wonderful scene of a, it's called Toll Rope, and it's up inside a bell tower. In the tempera he's done these tiny, little strokes of the rope holding the—and you

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just, it's like it is a rope, and it's beautifully done. But it's like a Jackson Pollock micro doing the rope, the funny line he walks with the bell up above in this bright sunlight coming in a very cold blue, so it was wrong to have a yellowy-browny varnish on it.

03-01:49:37 So I worked under the microscope, took it all off, except the—I mean, leaving the signature. Again, Jamie walks in the room, looks at it, and said, "What's wrong with the signature?" Because it was actually thicker, because having cleaned the varnish off all around it, it still had the varnish on the black signature—so it didn't cause color, but it caused topography. So again, at ten feet, he would see these things! This was when I was first working with the Wyeths, and I didn't know Andrew at all well. I said, "Well, the signature's completely soluble." He said, "Oh, [take it off and] have Dad put on another one." I thought, Ooh. So I called the director of the Delaware Art Museum, and he said, "Do not remove that signature unless Andrew Wyeth is alive and standing beside you." That's what we did.

He then came here for twelve years all the time, but this was [early on]—I didn't know him that well, and we met at the Brandywine River Museum. He mixed up new tempera in a film canister, egg yolk and black pigment, and I put the painting out in the Wyeth office at the Brandywine River Museum. He said, "Are you sure you can take the signature off?" I mean, I'd spent hours working under the microscope [just to save that signature], and I said, "Oh yeah." The varnish was completely soluble in toluene, and I just went, bfff, and took it off. And then he signed "Andrew Wyeth" again. He'd just had an operation on his arm, and so he didn't like his signature. He said, "Can you take that signature off?" I said, "Oh yes," and just did a spit swab, chhh, because it was fresh tempera, would be like just egg on your plate. And so he signed it two more times before he liked it. That was one of my first experiences. But I'm telling it here just because of the idea of eye of the artist, and being able to spot and see things so extraordinarily well.

03-01:51:40 Tewes: Plus, it's a great art history story! [laughs]

03-01:51:41 Stoner: It's also funny because it was a 1956 signature, and he re-signed it in 1998, which was very important if you're dealing with Whistler, because Whistler's butterfly signature changed every decade. So sometimes it would be an unsigned painting, and the person who has now just bought it says, "Will you sign it?" And he puts— on an 1876 painting he puts an 1896 butterfly. So it all connects in with how artists change over the centuries.

03-01:52:16 Tewes: A good point.

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03-01:52:17 Stoner: So anyway, back to the N.C. Wyeth musical. I had no actor that looked like N.C. Wyeth. There was no way, and with Andrew's extreme reaction to visual, we had him be voice-over from the light booth, arguing and being N.C. Wyeth. And Andrew, Helga, Betsy, Jamie, and Phyllis all loved the show. Except the actor took the curtain call, and [imitates Andrew Wyeth] "He didn't look like N.C. Wyeth. You shouldn't have had him come out in the curtain call." I went, "Oh, you have to give the actor his bow."

But, in any case, so it has been an adventure mixing the art and the theater. And again, with the sense that—I had never done this before, until this interview, but I guess I'm summing up by saying my life is an attempted ripple effect, either aiding the other people to ripple, like a John Walsh, or through the history file, oral history interviews, or trying to ripple [an important concept] myself. But the subjective part is what I believe needs rippling, which would include things like the interview with Paul Philippot; the Picture LA from the Getty; Marta and her ideas of how to circulate didactics and bringing in all the professors from different training programs in conservation, and sort of doing Vulcan mind scans on them to get what they think, which then we share among ourselves. [laughs]

03-01:54:04 Tewes: That's a good way to think about that. Well, and that also brings us, as a segue to our next segment, thinking about changes in the field of art conservation over the years. We've talked about the history of the field and the various ways that has changed. But I'm wondering, in terms of specifically best practices and technology and mentorship, where you see the field changing from your beginnings in the sixties.

03-01:54:39 Stoner: Well, it sure has, I mean, tremendously. An easy answer is Ton Wilmering and the Conserving Canvas is the—anyway, Stefan [Michalski] from Canada got up, and he was the next to the last talk, and said, "We'll see you at Greenwich 3.0." Which meant the original Greenwich was 1974, when nobody talked to one another. Half the people were apprentice trained, and this person—"Wax line, wax line. That's all. Glue line, glue line." Everybody had their method, and nobody talked about it in print, because conservators aren't so good at publishing, particularly practical [conservators]—"I used hand wax lining, and I did [it on this]." But [Greenwich] was actually like a three-ring circus, lining real paintings in each corner. I mean, it was an extraordinary event. David Bomford wrote an essay on it called, "Three Days That Changed Conservation." And it really, truly did, on structural work. And Ton Wilmering has put together the "Return to Greenwich." Stefan Michalski's quote was, "See you at Greenwich 3.0." We just had Greenwich 2.0, thanks to Ton Wilmering, in October, and at some point in the future perhaps there will be a return. That is on the technological practical treatment of paintings. And as we talked about yesterday, everything has exploded, and so there are so many ways to mend a tear, just to take one tiny example. The tear mending was a big feature in—much change. That has been a huge change, because of the thread-by-thread weaving introduced by one man

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named Winfried Heiber. They've just even made a new tool for it, which we're on the line to get—it will become available on November twentieth. He's Winfried Heiber, and this new tool is called a Winnie in his honor. He's deceased. But it's a way to have heat applied to your needle as you're working, which we didn't have a way to do before. So that's an easy, small change.

03-01:57:02 Cleaning paintings, nobody still agrees on. There's still the inheritors of Hell and the inheritors of Ruhemann. They've gotten a little closer together. A wonderful thing was—we've mentioned the Baldinis and the Moras. If you were a pupil of the Moras, you did not speak to the pupils of the Baldinis, you just didn't. It was like the children of Trump and the children of Clinton or something; they're not going to go out to dinner—or they might. But in any case, they stayed away from each other professionally. There was an inpainting conference in London I think about five years ago, where they sort of stood up and said, "We're talking to each other now." Because they've mostly died, the Moras and the Baldinis—I think Ornella is still alive. That's another odd trend, which his—John Brealey's quote was, "The treatments in the United States are all ancestor worship." So like I worked with [Gustav] Berger, I'm going to use BEVA; I worked with Bernie Rabin, I'm going to use PVA—without questioning. And so he arrives here in the mid-seventies, and now there is much more blending, just like the symbolic blending of the tratteggio and chromatic abstraction people from the Moras and the Baldinis.

03-01:58:24 So I think this comes with the enhanced amount—not every graduate of a program is going to be terrific, but there were forerunners—when NYU produced only four a year at most for ten years, then Cooperstown ten a year starting in 1970. There's something parallel in all the European countries. There's like three programs in the UK that take about ten people, three in Germany, blah, blah, blah. Certification is going to be a big problem that's totally unsolved at this point. But Germany, you go to a school, you graduate, you're certified. Canada is a little bit more organized that way. We are not. We're still [in disagreement about certification]. But as John Brealey was saying, ancestor worship. We are still, in some ways, prisoners of that. Because I have to coach the students before they go on an interview, if they're going to be interviewing with somebody who is from the Brealey side, they cannot say, "Your painting conservation lab." He hated that word. He would say, "Lab? We do not have a lab." [He preferred "conservation studio."]

03-01:59:36 Oh, I was oral history interviewed by the National Gallery over the huge controversy over the cleaning of Rembrandt's Mill. Because John Brealey had lunch with me just a few days after the event, and he—boy, he poured out how upset he felt at that event. But in any case, he said that—it was one of those mismatched moments, but they were having some walls painted or something, and the easels were all out of the room. Only dangling from the ceiling were these fume hood trunks, and so he said, "It was a lab. It looked like a place you would

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take small animals and put them to sleep." And everybody wearing white coats, and so forth. It sort of personified what he really didn't like about American conservation, was hyper scientific and flat on the table, no aesthetics, no sense of passion about the—and in his New Yorker article he said it's "People treating paintings as if they are layers of colored mud." And so when you say, "May I visit your painting conservation lab," you are bringing all that on the table, of showing your insensitivity. [laughs] I'm obviously exaggerating, but there are people who get tripped up by some things like that.

So understanding the history of the ripple effects of the different ways of training—it used to be entirely apprentice, then it was sort of half apprentice, and now we're getting to the point where almost everybody is program trained. It doesn't mean they're terrific, but there's a higher percentage of people who have an unresentful ability to combine art and science, to combine passion/aesthetics with understanding the cross sections, without being insecure about either side. Because a lot of the problems came from people who were trained by apprenticeship and felt bad about it. And then there's another group who are private conservators, who think, I have no museum backing. People don't like me, people don't trust me. And so it's usually something like that.

03-02:01:59 But now, more than half of our almost 400 graduates are in private practice, and we're glad. Because if you have a painting in North Dakota or Georgia, you have to go to somebody in private practice, so we want them to be—to thrive and be good and take all the principles that are right for their own heart or the things—I have strong opinions, but people are very good who don't agree with me—but to have very good trained people in all the different states, where there are no museum consortia where you can get names of conservators or use the museum people on off hours or something. An obvious change would be the idea that, as just was bound to happen, more of the practitioners have been trained in programs, which means they have George Stout's three-legged stool of art history, chemistry, and studio art. Or library science and bookmaking and history of libraries and books, and how to recognize bindings.

03-02:03:10 One way to talk about the Getty—and this is not a Getty example, but it's the kind of thing with Ton and the Conserving Canvas and the Panel Initiative—what kind of impact funding agencies—so we're just talking about the Getty Grant Program, although the Getty Museum is leading the way in a type of excellence. And then the Getty Conservation Institute, with its publications and scientific research, are leading the way.

Ooh, lost my train of thought. Oh! Impact of granting organizations. An example is there was a wonderful program to become a book conservator at Columbia, which folded. Someone needs to do an oral history on that. I don't know why it folded, but it folded. The leaders of it moved to the University of Texas in Austin, and it thrived for a bit, and then it folded. I don't know why. And so there is Ellen

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Cunningham-Kruppa, who did her dissertation on the history of Paul Banks, and used our oral histories of him, and he worked in both of those places. She probably knows exactly what happened, so it's known. I don't know it.

03-02:04:33 But the funding agency that came in—and here I want to, because here now is a brief biography of impact from a member of the [GCI] Advisory Committee, Angelica Rudenstine. I've never seen anything like what she did, and I was director when it began, so I was under the hot light. What she did was decide to personally survey the field of conservation and what it needed. She took all the people she could kind of skim off the top as outspoken leaders, and traveled and met with them in person. In my case, it was in the DuPont Hotel, and it really was like being in a police station with a hot light on you. She said, "What does conservation need?" And then argued or asked for details with anything I said, wrote it all down. She did this with I don't know how many people, a tremendous number of people. She went into a corner and put it all together, and then came back out of the corner and announced, "The Mellon [Foundation] will now fund photographic conservation, science and laboratories, training—" and she had a list for art history, and so forth, too—and went about changing the face of the field from her point of view. She didn't destroy anything, but she pumped up, tremendously, certain areas she detected were lacking.

And one of them, which impacted very much us is book conservation, because Columbia failed—or closed. Texas closed. So every one of the training programs gets two fully funded—well, we're ten, so we get two fully funded. Buffalo is ten; they get two fully funded. NYU only is five or six, and they only get one funded. They're called LACE, Library and Archives Conservation Education, and I call them the Lacettes—they don't like that. So they all work together in the summer and do bookmaking seminars, and they have to learn a fifteenth-century binding, a sixteenth-century binding, a paper binding of the nineteenth century, blah, blah, blah. And so they all, for their summer project report, show the amazing books they've made, and then the books they've treated with sympathy and understanding of the materials, and preservation of, as much as possible, of the original structure. That's a big change, is that now the existing training programs have become satellite book programs, with the demise of Columbia and Texas.

03-02:07:14 And also, Angelica did—so now her oral history that I did, not yet released, because she doesn't like computers. So I had to print it out in triple space and send it to her, so it turned out to be like, I don't know, fifty pages, and she hasn't had time because she's so busy. She decided that many museums were woefully lacking in their scientific departments and expertise in machinery. And so she went after them, pinpointed, I guess, on the map the distribution. My favorite story in her oral history was she said she went to the director of Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, I think Jim Cuno, C-U-N-O, and said, "We want to give you a matching grant to beef up your—" and not her words—"your scientific department." He said, "No, thank you. Not one of our priorities." She said, "All

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right, you don't have to match it. We're going to establish a scientific department at the—" and they did. It's connected to Northwestern University, and it's fabulous and it thrives. That is the most assertive grantmaking I can describe, to my knowledge.

03-02:08:43 a Tewes: And so that's been an important part of shaping the field, of having funding to do this.

03-02:08:47 Stoner: The Mellon has been extraordinary in doing that. I think they're all friends. You would think—they have like an annual meeting of—oh dear, I can't—Ton's boss—I just had dinner with her. Don't put this on the tape. I can't remember her name.

03-02:09:02 Tewes: Oh, that's fine, we don't have to talk about that one.

03-02:09:06 Stoner: But in any case, the new head of the Getty Foundation—we don't know yet what tack she's going to take. Just like we don't know much about Kaywin Feldman, and now she is the first female director of the National Gallery—where she's going to go—but she gave a lot of signals last night.

But in any case, you look at Angelica Rudenstine and you see, oh my God, this kind of meteor-smacking-the-earth impact that she has had by—and then she's done the same thing with photo conservation, because she decided that wasn't professional enough. I can't give details of what was—because Debbie holds that in her brain, so I know if I need it, I can ask Debbie. But in any case, certainly fifty years ago, nobody had that kind of sense of looking at the overview and deciding [what was needed].

03-02:10:00 So the Getty aided me in being able to increase connoisseurship. And John Brealey, in one of his low moods, said, "Oh, if I went under a bus and never came to this country, it wouldn't be any different." I thought, Oh my God, is that wrong. People will continue to hate John Brealey, just like they hated Andrew Wyeth. I deal with a lot of people other people hate, but are still influenced by the ripple effect coming from other directions, so they don't realize the source. But I would say a huge change is the connoisseurship in conservation, that the—and it's almost like the British invasion, because it's David Bromford and David Bull and John Brealey and a number of others.

It wasn't even important sometimes in America to match your inpainting, as long as it was reversible and removable. Which, obviously, if you're looking at a portrait and there's a big place here that isn't matching inpainting, it's going to really impact on your vision—and more open discussion of all that. There is a very clear Venice—I mean, Greenwich, then it went to Venice the next year, but Greenwich/Yale future. And then inpainting, sporadically different all over the

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world. And then that great conference in London where the Baldinis and the Mora people got together, has had spottier, smaller—but it has resulted in the same kind of thing, which is much more awareness of various approaches, realizing how important it is to have a case-by-case decision-making tree, that—like we have upstairs, which I hope you'll be able to visit. We have perfectly matching extraordinary inpainting. Then we have inpainting for the Walters Art Museum curator, who doesn't want fillings, because she wants the shallow little fishponds, empty fishponds—even though they're matched—to show what's original and that this is replacement. And that still abounds, as it did when Andrea took us around and showed us the history in Italy. A big change is the awareness of international approaches. Nobody had that. When I graduated from NYU, I thought I had all the answers, and they were pretty direct, and they're pretty much the Keck heritage, which is not unlike the Ruhemann heritage—and so much to learn.

03-02:12:42 And then another problem, which came out in Conserving Canvas that is a trend and a change, and it's a little bit scary—and Gianfranco Pocobene, who has trained [at Queen's University] and is the mural guy of the Northeast US and is the [paintings] conservator of the Gardner Museum, but runs a private practice at the same time. Giving an intern to him, which we've just done—two recently; one two years ago, and one right now—their foot in both worlds: the slow-down museum, spend a lot of time, look under the microscope; and the this-has-to-go- out-on-Tuesday side of private work. Okay, so setting the stage of the issues of how fast you have to be in private work to stay afloat financially. Museums, do they have a conservator at all? Do they have a curator who will speak to the conservator?

03-02:13:43 And then the idea that we have so many new machines that not many paintings are getting treated in a lot of places. We have right now an intern at the Rijksmuseum and at the Mauritshuis, which are perhaps—and two years ago we also had an intern at the Rijksmuseum [and] the Mauritshuis. There has never been a place so fabulously equipped with the latest and greatest imagery and microscopy, so that you know that, of course, they discovered the whole problem of lead soaps, which is the first new extreme change in the twenty-first century. As you're cleaning a Rembrandt and there are these funny little bumps, and you think, Ooh, and you take them off. It turns out, even a Rembrandt—so what is that, 300 years old. Anyway, it's still mobile. Nobody knew that in the twentieth century. And Petria Noble and Jaap Boon are the leaders [then connected to] the Mauritshuis [and Rijksmuseum] of treating a Rembrandt and realizing the little pustules are continued action of the lead in several pigments, and also in zinc pigments. It's turning out there are many more metal soaps than first thought, but it started with lead. And the linseed oil, depending on cleaning solutions that we used in the past, blah, blah, blah, are still in motion coming up through the paint film and causing havoc. What do you do about that? The more we know, the more we're inclined to not do any treatment with things like that, because it's so

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startling. If you're a private conservator in 1960, you'd take off those pustules, [claps] and you inpainted. You'd go ahead.

So in some ways a fear that both Gianfranco and I, at a dinner last week shared, which is paralysis. A sort of analysis paralysis of you know so much, you realize everything you do could cause harm, so do nothing. But this is due on Tuesday or this has to travel across the country in a crate, and you'd better fix those bubbles or they're going to come off, those blisters, they're going to come off in transit. It's what I would call that is maybe the downside of learning too much. And what happens in a micro way with students in the program, they went through a pre- program internship, and they just did what they were told. They have very good hand skills, and it was fine. Now they get shy and timid and paralyzed, because they know so much of what people did in the past, like fall on the painting with caustic soda and put their [hand on it]. "Oh, oh! I'm not going to clean that painting." Or, "I'm only going to use petroleum benzine," or something that's very, very, very mild and not doing very much. So anyway, that is a big quandary.

03-02:16:48 As our graduates graduate, if they go to a museum, the path is one way. And there are a lot of Mauritshuis/Rijksmuseum analysis loan checks, very small first-aid things, and not—and Ton knew this when he put together Conserving Canvas. Because you can work in a museum for fifteen years and never line a painting. If you're in private practice, you probably line fifteen paintings a year. And so they've gone like this [points in opposite directions].

Carol Snow at Yale is an example of someone who is objects conservation, extreme thriving private practice, who came back to a museum. She doesn't waste time. It's wonderful looking at her, because she comes from a private background, and time is money. She's in a museum now and she's on salary, but she's still got the sense you don't waste time. But she can do the microscopy and all that sort of thing. Those issues: the different worlds of ethical private practice and ethical museum, the analysis paralysis of finding out so much or realizing that someone took off that yak butter and now we'll never know that was a ritualistic object. And so those are changes and predictions.

03-02:18:09 Okay, then add to that, because when I had to give a big talk at AIC and they said, "We want the history of conservation from cave painting to pop art in twenty minutes—and also predictions for the future." So I did it. I said, "Fasten your seatbelts," and did this show. I did the George Stout three-legged stool has become a twelve-legged settee, where you have to not only know chemistry—and I'll just speak paintings—chemistry, art history, and studio art, but [also] public outreach, preventive conservation, how to talk to the Getty Grant Program or the Getty Board of Trustees to get a grant, blah, blah, blah, public outreach, museum management—if you're on a loading dock and the people unloading the painting don't speak English, [how to communicate]. I mean, all the different things that make [up what is now] your twelve-legged stool. And now it's all popped up in

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Greenwich, and it's growing everywhere—sustainability and going green. I turned my twelve-legged stool into a green twelve-legged settee. So anyway, I guess those are—

03-02:19:17 Tewes: The big changes.

03-02:19:19 Stoner: Big changes and things that—and why we just keep stuffing all that into our first- year blocks, because everybody's got to have that under their belts before they make decisions in critical thinking. One of our students has suddenly rebelled, where they—we have a summer work project talk every Wednesday afternoon at four on the different—"I was in Dallas, and I did this and this." One of the students has decided no more paper plates, no more plastic cups; bring your own plate and cup. That's totally new; nobody thought of doing that before. Matt Cushman, who spoke at Yale and is my lab spouse—studio spouse upstairs, has brought it up now firmly about the ethics of sustainability in what solvents we're using and putting them down the drain or disposing of them, and the whole long- term green effect. [laughs]

03-02:20:23 Tewes: Lay that at their feet. Well, what kind of impact do you think the Getty has had on the field?

03-02:20:31 Stoner: Well, a tremendous lot. I'll stick my neck out here a little bit. The difference between the Getty and the Mellon is Angelica is an extremely assertive initiative- establishing person, and surveyed the whole field of what it needs, and then came in like a powerful Greek god and did it. The Getty, I remember Harold Williams said, "I want people who will write their own job descriptions," and that's frightened a lot of people. They did not want to do that. They wanted to be told what to do: if you do this you will be rated three on your personnel evaluation, and if you do all this you will be four. Okay. I know the [lay of the] land. Writing your own job description—what? I remember that, and I remember people being upset about it. Some people stayed, some people left, and some people came out of the woodwork to do it. Some were successful, some not so successful. But what's the result of that?

03-02:21:48 I don't know a lot about a lot of parts of the Getty, but the ones I've been a Getty observer about—like Ton [Wilmering]. Ton came from a museum background where he was a furniture conservator, I believe, and so that was his world. He did a Panel Painting Initiative, which was wonderful and needed. I'm going to draw a conclusion unfairly from that, because I haven't met all the other people at the Getty, but it seems to me an example of someone who wrote their own job description and did some powerful things, but it was totally dependent on his view. Not a criticism, just an observation. Whereas Angelica—I don't know what Angelica thinks. I know what Angelica dug up out of the world and put together,

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and then she became biased based on the results. [Ton did go around and interview many people, but Angelica kept her cards close to her chest when she interviewed people from throughout the field—you never knew what she really thought. It was pretty clear that Ton truly wanted to do a Greenwich reprise.]

But Tom Learner, Frank Preusser, Marta de la Torre, some of the leading people at the Getty have had very strong personal views and have done wonderful things. But you see where I'm going with this. It seems to be, like Harold Williams, you write your own job description. John Walsh. What you deeply believe in. I could work for Harold Williams. I'd be very happy working for Harold Williams, because I have very strong personal views about what ought to be done. I'm afraid I wouldn't have been very good as Angelica Rudenstine's [employee] going around and I'd say, "Yes, but—" and, "Do you really believe that?" "No, that's not a very good person to follow." I'd do better at the Getty than the Mellon. So personally, I think it's fine, I just think it's a difference.

03-02:23:40 So as a result, the Getty has—and then something I know almost nothing about that the Getty is terrific in, because I know it only from the Getty bulletins I get, is architectural preservation, the Sphinx, huge projects. I don't think huge. I think huge about painting conservation, but I don't think about photographs in Beirut. The Getty has really, I think, carved out a different niche for third-world architecture: India, Middle East, and so forth. And I cannot, because it's not my world, say, "Oh, this was hugely successful." I don't know. But I know they're doing it.

I was a little sad that they turned completely away, it seemed, until Ton and Conserving Canvas, away from paintings conservation, which I love. Because that isn't on their—it's like James Cuno at the [Art Institute of] Chicago, "Not on our priority list." But we're getting it anyway. So their priority list, I'm not clear who establishes that, because I don't go to any advisory group committee meetings anymore. I know that they have done amazing and wonderful things. I've been part of some of them, and I applaud them. But I will hazard and tiptoe to say a little Angelica might be good to see what are the deep needs. But individuals have, on their own, written their own job descriptions, decided where needs are, and have—like another need that is being solved brilliantly at the Getty is—I think Tom Learner is, if not in charge, on the board of the future of publishing books on modern and contemporary art. He wrapped his arms around that, and it is going forward and it's really good, really good.

03-02:25:49 So the Getty has made, as I've outlined in the past interviews, many extremely important initiatives. Founding the Getty/UCLA Program, my goodness! Because many people pointed out that it's very hard. Well, although we do train archaeological and ethnographic people, and we send them on digs, and they go along with the Getty people, and so forth. But it was felt there was a greater need, that there wasn't a program [completely] devoted to that. And now it is, and it's

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thriving. I was on [an] advisory committee to look into whether or not there should be a PhD at Getty/UCLA, and I'm saying, "Yes, yes, yes!" So that would make three: the one at Delaware, the one at Arizona, and the one at UCLA. I nominated somebody for it who I thought would be very good. I thought they were going to start taking people either this year or last year, and then they decided not to. Now I've lost track, so I don't know what they're [currently doing]—but again, [it's important] to have a PhD, because of all the problems we've cited about people not getting hired, especially at universities.

Caroline Keck's point was a curator who has a PhD is not going to listen to a conservator who doesn't have one. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's probably sometimes true. And it has been said, if you're trying to speak for the work of art, perhaps you will be listened to more if you are doctor so-and-so. I'll just throw that out there. But so, UCLA putting in a doctoral program is a very good thing—with the Getty, is a very good thing.

03-02:27:33 I wish there could be more shows in the amphitheater that I could go to. [laughs] But we can't wait until all those [complaining] people move or something. Maybe the next people that come and buy those houses will be people who want to see theater, and that will change.

03-02:27:49 Tewes: One can hope.

03-02:27:50 Stoner: Mm.

03-02:27:51 Tewes: Well, considering you've seen the Getty from its infancy, what do you see for the future of the institution?

03-02:28:00 Stoner: As Harold Williams said, they're going to write their own job descriptions, I guess. So we don't know. It's going to depend on the people. In my little window, I see—I'm glad—I'm sorry-grateful, like Stephen Sondheim says, that Tom Learner is the head of the whole GCI, because he is such a mover-shaker, and I know from personal experience once you become head of something, that crops off at least a third of your time administrating and helping people who are crying about this and that. I think he's a great mind and is going to do good things. I mean, he's head of the Scientific Department, not head of the GCI, but he was one of the scientists just going along in his path of prominence and excellence. Now he's got to deal with the whole Scientific Department.

03-02:28:58 Tim Whalen is terrific. He's a good listener. We look at the three heads of the GCI and we look at Luis Monreal, who was a charmer, and I think is still charming somewhere in the world—and a terrific dinner party associate to sit with. Fabulous! He was put in a prison in Pakistan or something, because his plane had

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a bomb in it and it blew a bit out of his suitcase. So since his suitcase seemed to have had the bomb in it he was—so I mean, something like that was always happening, and you just couldn't believe it. And as I think I said yesterday, both Miguel Angel [Corzo] and Luis Monreal just said, "AATA is not sexy, and meh." But Tim even—I think the budget is less now, so he can't do as much as he could have in the years past—he really gets it, what AATA is and what it can do. Again, just speaking from my little window. That's really important and that's great. I assume that will, under Tim, will be fine. And then we don't know—and if he retires and who would replace him—what the Getty will do next. It has the great potential to do many things. If we look at the Museum—I don't even know who's director of the Museum right now.

03-02:30:31 Tewes: Oh gosh, it's [Timothy Potts].

03-02:30:32 Stoner: But in any case, John Walsh and David Bomford did so many wonderful things. David Bomford didn't have much time, but—and I cannot speak to the amazing experiences I had with Andrea [Rothe] continuing under Ulrich Birkmaier, who's now head, because he's so new. We've got a group of people banging on the door to intern at the Getty Paintings Conservation Department, and we have one of them who has a PhD in organic chemistry. This is our first to have—Buffalo has had one—our first student who came with an organic chemistry PhD, extreme experience in con[servation]—well, not extreme, very good experience in conservation, has come and has really done well and wants to actually split her life—nobody has done this before—as half museum paintings conservator and half active, practicing conservation scientist. The Getty would be a wonderful place for her! She could work half with Tom Learner and half with Ulrich, but we don't know what either one of them would think about that. They might say, "Oh no, you can't split." Or they might say, "This is a wonderful bridge that we can— Tracy [Liu could] help cross that bridge for all the people in both departments." So can't say, but the potential is there. There is no other place in the country that could do that, could host her so brilliantly.

03-02:32:04 There's some unknowns there. The unknowns are the new people who we don't have a track record on yet. And then when the current people like Tom Learner and Tim Whalen move on, who knows who will replace them and what bee they will have in their bonnets. If I were queen—I'm not—I would offer a very strong person like an Andrea or a John Walsh—I'll speak in the past to stay safe—to adopt a little of Angelica, so that the Getty continues in its track to do incredibly well-informed, fabulous initiatives. [laughs]

03-02:32:52 Tewes: That sounds like a good goal. Well, Joyce, as we're wrapping up here, I'm interested to hear what you hope you have personally contributed to the field of art conservation.

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03-02:33:07 Stoner: Oh my goodness, I hope I have. I would say, with thanks to powerful mentors like George Stout and John Gettens to start off with, I just went with their ideas for AATA and the FAIC Oral History Project, and with energy, and I hope they would approve. I think both projects—I mean, I didn't start AATA, but I remember I kept it going in a low point when everything was stuffed in the drawer and Ann Davidson went off to Europe. Oh, I didn't put this in the interview, but the type had always been sideways on the spine, but more information kept. We're going to have a supplement, and supplements on all the different ways that purple was made in ancient times, by Shirley Alexander. So it was teeny tiny. I remember Mr. Gettens saying, "May I talk to you about AATA? I think the type on the spine is too hard to read." Okay. But sideways for Volume VIII, No.—red is my favorite color. I got to pick the color for all books, the first time for Volume VIII, and I made it red. I obeyed John Gettens, and I put big type down the side. So again, that's not quite a legacy, but it's continuing really good stuff.

I remember one of the out-of-work actors who was making—as I mentioned yesterday, he left the letter P in a shopping bag on a bus. I had all of these out-of- work actors working in their living rooms alphabetizing for the indexes, and I remember one of them saying, "Couldn't this be better done with a computer?" And computers were just coming in.

03-02:35:14 First it was done in the British Museum, and then through the Rome Centre, and now the Getty. It's in safe hands. I hope no one takes over at the Getty who says, "We should charge for that." Because people will just go without AATA is what they will do, especially private conservators. So FAIC—

I think helping this [UD/Winterthur] program, being its director for fifteen years during a very crucial time when it started with Caroline Keck wanting it to close down and not even do paintings, that it's safely established. It was not endowed at all [and I got the first endowment going to keep it stable]. And now I think, [thanks to Debbie] we are 70 percent endowed for the student stipends, and funded by the university to pay Winterthur to use this space, and so forth.

03-02:36:07 I have upstairs—which I hope you and your friend will visit—I have put all the painting conservation majors in the whole history of the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program on a door, in pictures. It's also a representation of photography history, because it's Instamatic photos since Kodachrome or the drugstore, down to digital and the improvement in digital as it goes down [the door]. So I hope an impact I've had on conservation is in training. Some people stay in touch with you—it's not, certainly, 100 percent—and very grateful to have done that.

What else have I done? I don't think I've had an impact on conservation by doing theatrical things. I've done some performance pieces that taught a lot of actors about art history, who didn't know anything about it, and amused people. Actually, I think more importantly is the theater background caused me to start, in

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about 1981, videotaping every single student when they talked—with that little, gray podium over there. It's so funny, we've taken slides now and then. It used to be a video camera that was this big on a tripod, and the pointer was a flashlight this big. When we first started doing it, that's what it looked like. And double slide projectors. And then it's moved to PowerPoint. I remember when the first student, Lara Kaplan, who's now on the faculty, she was the only one who did a PowerPoint one year. And the next year half did a PowerPoint; and then the third year, 100 percent PowerPoint. It has been that way all along.

03-02:38:58 So I'm happy-braggy to say that I have heard that when somebody gives a really good talk at AIC, someone says, "Oh, that must be a WUDPAC [Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation] grad." I think, Yes. Probably that's the most important. And now it's interesting, because we have this ANAGPIC, Association of North American Graduate Training Programs in Conservation [Association of North American Graduate Programs in Conservation]. And Queen's [University] had the best slides always, in the early, early days.

And because of John Brealey—oh, I didn't finish a sentence when I wanted to say how connoisseurship had changed. I graduate from NYU in 1968. I came to Winterthur eventually—I mean, sorry, [I graduated] in '73, [I graduated from William and Mary in 1968] came to Winterthur in '76 and was working on a Charles Willson Peale. And I'm embarrassed, embarrassed, embarrassed to say, Charles Coleman Sellers, who wrote the catalogue raisonné for [Peale] was alive and about two miles away, in Pennsylvania, from Delaware. It didn't occur to me to contact him while I was working on a Peale. But I worked with John Brealey. I interviewed him in '76, '77, worked with him as a visiting scholar in [1980]—and then I made sure everybody [claps], if they were working on a painting, they got hold of the living catalogue raisonné people, and they work, work, work on that. I actually had, when our students first started doing that in their ANAGPIC talks— we're talking '78, '79, '80—[A faculty member from another program said] "[Your students] spend too long on the art history," and we were the only program that did. Now every program does. I mean, it would have happened anyway, I think, but it happened a little faster because of John Brealey, to me, to them.

03-02:39:52 So I hope I've helped with increased connoisseurship. I hope I've helped with the importance of writing well, speaking well, as a motto, and aided and supported by Peggy Ellis of NYU, who said, "The more PhDs we have, the better conservators will be able to write, better grant proposals they'll write, more convincingly they will talk to their curators or put forth a little proposal for why, in the future, we should be treating these paintings." Things I believe in are all those things. Hmm. Anything you think I'm leaving out?

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03-02:40:33 Tewes: I think you've touched on a lot of your really important work over the years, but that's all I have for you. As we wrap up today, anything you'd like to tie in a bow? [laughs]

03-02:40:45 Stoner: I will think of that tonight.

03-02:40:48 Tewes: [laughs] Oh, of course.

03-02:40:49 Stoner: Can I add little things on the transcript?

03-02:40:52 Tewes: Sure, we can talk about that.

03-02:40:53 Stoner: I won't be like Bettina Jessell, and glue it all on and fold it over and give you hell to work with. [Tewes laughs] Are your interviews normally something like nine hours?

03-02:41:05 Tewes: Yeah.

03-02:41:05 Stoner: Because, see, mine are all ninety minutes, so—

03-02:41:08 Tewes: We can talk about that a little bit more afterward. But thank you so much for your time, Joyce. I really appreciated it.

03-02:41:14 Stoner: Me, too. Get rid of me. [break in audio]

03-02:41:16 Tewes: Okay, we are back from a break. Joyce, you had some addendum you wanted to add?

03-02:41:21 Stoner: Yes, thank you. Thinking back to Kaywin Feldman last night and what we have been doing, I'd like to also—and to add to the change and future: the idea of diversity. And also was discussing it, standing around with wine last night with one of our students who is a person of color from India, and so we got deeply into this discussion. Well, and we also have the gender issue. Okay.

03-02:41:56 The problem, when I was at NYU in '68 to '70, is there were curators who were paid a dollar a year to work at the Met, because they were independently wealthy. You have a tremendous heritage of that being the heritage of museums. Fast forward to our diversity initiative going on right now, which we call TIP-C, Two-

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Week Introduction to Practical Conservation. We are actively trying to seduce historically black college and university—HBCU—undergraduates who are already good in art and science to take their chemistry needed for conservation and come to the field.

We have over 400 applicants to our program each year; 80 have everything we ask for, including 400 hours of practical experience. This means they had to work for no money. And people of color, African Americans, cannot do that, because so many of them are supporting families and have jobs at McDonald's, and they are supposed to do that to help their families. So we're dealing with an impossible situation that has to change. There are a number of activists now saying we should not ever send even an independently-wealthy student who wants to be with their spouse in Washington for the summer and would like to do the techniques of an artist with the archives at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, saying— they're so activist they're saying, "We should say no to that." The rest are saying, "Well, wait, wait." [laughs]

03-02:43:41 And so it is a quandary, and it is very important, because white people, particularly rich white people, will be a minority. Kaywin said last night how important it is to have staff and visitors and the whole—look at the whole thing: the board, the staff, and everything—and they should all be diverse. But you haven't got the heritage, the people who only get a dollar a year who are happy working in museums. There are probably not that many professions where you can say people would work for a dollar a year because they're independently wealthy. But there is an allure to museums that's very special. We have to break down the forbiddenness of museums. This was even said by what I thought was sort of a wild, radical person now I agree with. But in 1976 he said, "We need to put advertisements for exhibitions in museums next to the cereal boxes in the grocery stores. That's where people are going to see it." Or on the window of the barber shop or whatever. And we, of course, have not done that, because we want people to come in who already know.

And there's also the classism of labeling, and I'm a—[claps] on this, and I'll— Georgia O'Keeffe was great on diversity. She gave a lot of her paintings to [Fisk] University. But the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum has no labels. Do you feel welcome in there if you don't know who Georgia O'Keeffe is? If you go to the Museum of Modern Art—and my mother always used to talk about the fur-lined teacup, and I wanted to look at the fur-lined [teacup] and couldn't find it. Finally, there it was, in a big bookcase with, nah, nah, nah. I wanted to find the label [and couldn't]. So museums are not being as friendly as they should for someone's first visit to a museum. That has got to change.

03-02:45:43 Last night, Anisha Gupta, who is head of the [AIC] Equity and Inclusion Committee, said that it is very, very important to post salaries on the AIC newsletter when you're advertising a job. Because, yeah, they're low. Yeah,

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Brooklyn is especially low. Some of them are laughable, that you could possibly live. And she was actually turned down. But her point was not as allure, but as a statement for people to realize—to shame the museum into putting in more money. Which is not, I think, why the AIC didn't take that tack to say, "Okay, yeah, we'll post the salaries." So a lot has to change for the diversity movement of getting a more diverse board, staff, customer, blah, blah, blah.

Okay, what have we been doing I want to trace really quickly. The best advice we got—we have had now four African American graduates, and one currently in the first-year students. The first one, Leslie Guy, who had gone to Wellesley and gotten her experience from the Pennsylvania Academy and other places, she just came over the transom unexpectedly. We don't get any credit; she heard about the field on her own. Her father, [Bill Guy], is in a wheelchair and is a diversity recruiter for universities. Debbie and I—he came to something to see Leslie speak. We pounced on him. "Give us advice! How do we get—?" because here he is a recruiter for colleges, and he's African American and bonus he's in a wheelchair. In any case, he [claps] told it like he should, and we did everything he said, which was: you cannot send white people into HBCUs to lecture about, "What is conservation? Isn't it great? And come join us." And so we made partnerships with Ted Stanley, African American paper conservator, Princeton; Ebenezer Kotei, Hagley [Museum] objects conservator; and we went in teams and spoke.

03-02:47:55 AIC started a diversity thing, but it had no follow up. Because you have some who get excited, and then they find out they have to take chemistry, and they're finishing school and they can't afford to pay the tuition, blah, blah, blah.

But at least Bill Guy pointed the way, so we have a whole bunch of African American art in the painting studio. So for tours of African American students, for our TIP-C—we've now had three years of TIP-C, of four or five African American undergrads coming in and working in paintings especially, and then little times in all the other things to get them excited about it.

03-02:48:36 Following Bill Guy, immediately we went to Spelman [College], we had a project with Spelman. We were working on a huge [John T.] Biggers mural, and I'm still Facebook friends with the three young women who came from Spelman. One of them wanted to go be a lawyer. She's not saying what she is on Facebook. One of my friends said, "Joyce, don't stop them from being a lawyer. They'll make money being a lawyer. If you bring them into conservation, they'll starve!" [Tewes laughs] There's a problem. So we did the Spelman. I was part of the Williamstown To Conserve a Legacy Project: [American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities], and now I'm part of TIP-C. This room will be filled in two weeks with the Art Alliance of the HBCUs, [HBCU Alliance of Museums and Art Galleries] so it's the professors and curators from the

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historically black colleges who have joined this inner group. They've helped us find the students for HBCU, and so forth.

03-02:49:34 We've done all this, and we don't [yet] really have remarkable yield. And so kerfuffles galore when they hired a white person to head the Brooklyn Museum, [the position in African American art]. Kerfuffle when our head of Black Studies [Africana Studies and Art], a wonderful person, Dr. Julie McGee—but she's white. I say, "Oh, we're going to bring in the curator of black studies." And the people are all excited, and their faces fall when they see Julie McGee. We've tried really hard to figure out how to do this, and we're not yet successful. These are the stabs we have made. We're going to do, we hope, with Kress [Foundation] funding, another TIP-C this coming June.

We have these African American dioramas for Tuskegee [University] that tell the history of African Americans, which break your heart when you find out—right now we have a World War I diorama. The two guys there won the [croix] de guerre from the French, but they couldn't fight alongside of American soldiers. And the 369th Infantry [Regiment] from New York became the Harlem Hellfighters, fearless, faces dark so when they ran toward the German trenches in the dawn or dusk they couldn't be seen, rescued comrades, brought them back. And these are comrades that they wouldn't have been allowed to fight beside in the United States. And when they came back [to the US as war heroes], [gets emotional] the Ku Klux Klan membership went up 600 percent. We're still in the middle of the people who would have done that to these veterans who were very heroic fighters in World War I. So through these dioramas—we've now had four. They're all about the history of black culture. They were made by African Americans in Chicago in 1940 for an exhibition. Every tour we give—we have tours almost every day here, and I do that speech—and I try not to cry—about the importance of understanding African American history.

03-02:51:47 Again, we're doing all this, we're impacting a lot of people, but none of these—so all right, the four people who've come through our program. Leslie Guy came over the transom. The next one I did have something to do with. I gave a talk when I was director of the program on Take Your Daughter to Work Day, and the student who was the daughter of the associate provost, Anya McDavis-Conway, was eleven and in the audience, heard the talk and decided to go into conservation. That is the only exact example that I can cite. And so we want everybody to go lecture, and our students are trying to go lecture, and everybody's trying to go lecture.

03-02:52:33 But our requirements are hideous for someone who would have to work for free or take chemistry, which they weren't properly grounded in by the school system they may have attended. We've got all these things to fight about.

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Now, the University of Delaware has really done a lot to try to not bias searches. But as they learned in Brooklyn, if no African Americans apply, you can't accept them as your curator, as your professor, and all of that. So that's a problem. This now hurts the gender problem, because if you hire a white male, you're hiring a minority in conservation. Tell that to the personnel office at the University of Delaware. They ain't buyin'. So that's complicated.

03-02:53:27 Many people have asked, over the years, "Why are there so many women in conservation?" I'll give you a little quick series of answers. Elisabeth Packard— this is on the other side—she was curator at the—I'm sorry, conservator at the Walters Art Gallery then—now it's museum—said, "When World War II happened and the men all went to war, [it] was the first time women got a leg up to become department heads," which she did do. So that was a good thing—I mean, World War II was not. But in any case, that's one observation. Both William Suhr and John Brealey said, "Women are more adapted to conservation treatments, because they're more detail oriented." Think registrar, librarian. John Brealey said, "They are more used to being the power behind the throne." So a woman can step out of the way for Jackson Pollock or Andrew Wyeth or whatever to shine. A male, not so likely.

My own theory is that it's, again, the requirements. We are—back to the future and change—graduating fabulous people! But they put up with a hell of a lot to get into being considered of all these studio art courses or whatever they were— nobody is usually a triple major accidentally in chemistry, studio art, and art history. So at some expense, they went back and did this. It's money a lot when you're dealing with diversity. It's time a lot when you're dealing with a gender, because the guys don't want to go back to school. They want to have a job and do this—it's really interesting, because talking to them on the phone—when I was director—again, outdated, twenty years ago—I remember taking a call from a young man who said, "I have not taken any chemistry, but when you see my art portfolio, you will realize I don't need it." Not one to be sexist here, but I cannot picture a woman saying that.

03-02:55:41 And the salaries. So for diversity, it's the lack of any salary as you prepare to get into the program. For males, it is even more than that; it is the lack of high-level salaries when you graduate. So if they're going to put in seven damn years of chemistry and art history and, check, check, check, check, check, they want more money than the starting positions are. They may end up in private work and make a killing. There is still some of the [idea that] all chefs are men and all cooks are women. Because if you take a little survey, probably half—it was more—of the heads of conservation studios around the country are male, but 90 percent of the population of the people working in the labs and studios is probably female.

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03-02:56:36 Back to problems and future planning, those are two big problems. I can offer case studies; I cannot offer a solution. But I hope the Getty will hire somebody who will be Angelica Rudenstine for diversity. I added all that. [laughs]

03-02:56:57 Tewes: I think that's a good hope. Anything else while we're still thinking about things?

03-02:57:05 Stoner: I hope not.

03-02:57:05 Tewes: [laughs] Okay! Thank you again, Joyce.

[End of Interview]