Home ABOUT US ARCHIVE LINKS MEMBERSHIP THE JOURNAL 24 March 2014 From Veronese to Turner, Celebrating Restoration-Wrecked Pictures Part 1: Veronese into Botero A rupture between words and pictorial realities has emerged in the museum world. It is the product of an over- heated international scramble to produce blockbuster exhibitions. After prising and pulling together works from many quarters, curators of temporary exhibitions write as if blind to the most glaring differences of condition and as if ignorant of all restoration-induced controversies. This widespread critical failure to address the variously – and often very recently – altered states of pictures corrupts scholarship and confers international respectability on damaging local restoration practices. In doing so, this effective pan-national conspiracy “not to notice” also compounds and sanctions the general reluctance of museums ever to acknowledge their own errors in the “conservation” treatment of art. The injuriousness of so much picture restoration is more the product of aesthetic/artistic incomprehension than of any self- agrandising intent. If every unhappy restoration is unhappy in its own way, so to speak, with Veronese, the best balanced of all painters, the most commonly encountered crime against his art is the debilitation of his firm plastic grip by restorers in hot pursuit of brightened and heightened colours. The catalogue to the National Gallery’s show “Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice” provides a usefully explicit and clear-cut case in point. Its text is entirely the work of the show’s “guest” curator, Xavier Salomon. The Above, Fig. 1: A detail of the Louvre’s Veronese The Supper at National Gallery’s director, and fellow Veronese Emmaus, as published in the catalogue to the National Gallery’s Credit Suisse sponsored exhibition “Veronese: authority/champion, Nicholas Penny, declares the catalogue Magnificence in Renaissance Venice”. “a significant book”. Formerly of the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum, and presently the chief curator of the Frick Collection, New York, Dr Salomon has (with the National Gallery’s own ten Veroneses) assembled no fewer than fifty, often very large, works. Salomon describes his own catalogue/book as both a general introduction for the public and a work offering “stimulating and original insights for experts and longstanding lovers of Veronese’s work”. In doing so, he claims that: “The two over-arching principles in the selection of paintings for the London exhibition have been quality and condition, in order to show Veronese’s art at its best.” We recognise that (as Dr Penny once acknowledged to us) it can be impolitic as well as seem ungracious to attack the conditions of generously loaned works. However, given Salomon’s own declaration on the importance of condition – which he reiterates as being “crucial” – we must assume that he is untroubled, for example, by the present condition Generatedof the with Louvre’s www.html-to-pdf.net Veronese The Supper at Emmaus and that Page 1 / 6 he is happy for it, along with all other works in this compilation, to be seen as both of the highest artistic quality and in the best possible physical condition. Concerning the condition of this particular painting, among Above, Figs. 2a and 2b: Photographs (as supplied to Michel Favre-Felix) showing the group of the mother and children on many procedural shortcomings present in the course of its the right hand side of Veronese’s The Supper at Emmaus. Fig. recent treatment at the Louvre (as here reported in 2a (left) shows this group before the painting’s recent December 2010), the restorers were discovered by our restoration and Fig. 2b shows it afterwards. Among the many injuries evident in this photo-comparison, colleague, Michel Favre-Felix, to have repainted a face notice the reductions of sparkle and vivacity in the treatment twice within five years, on each occasion atrociously, and of draperies, when, if disfiguring varnish and dirt alone had been removed, the former vivacity of those passages that was the second time in a secret intervention at which no records present and evident – even under discoloured varnish and dirt were made (– see below and Figs. 1 to 4b ). Far from – would reasonably be expected to increase, not diminish. On alerting neophyte visitors or readers to this picture’s now the logic of restoration’s own declared practices, such reversals require explanation from both restorers and grossly adulterated state, Salomon specifically praises its (supervising?) curators alike. Notice, too, the weakening of the “opulent and majestic” overall effect; its “superb” portraits; modelling of the heads and, once again, the reductions of former tonal contrasts when increases of tonal ranges should and its details in which “Veronese reached a level of be expected to follow a cleaning, not their compression. poignant harmony that was unprecedented”. This is an exhibition and an issue to which we will return but, first, another wrecked painting that is presently being flaunted in London calls for attention. Part 2: Smoke into Steam Turner’s Rockets and Blue Lights An extraordinary publicity barrage accompanied the launch of the National Maritime Museum’s “Turner & The Sea” blockbuster. It centred on a single painting – the artist’s Rockets and Blue Lights. The decision to favour that particular wrecked and challenged work passed beyond the brazen. As Maurice Davies observes in the spring issue of Turner Society News: “The most unnecessary loan is Rockets and Blue Lights … The catalogue talks diplomatically of ‘alterations to some areas of the painted surface.’ It is in fact so horribly damaged that there’s little value in seeing it in the flesh. ArtWatch talks of the picture as an example of ‘the bizarre and perverse phenomenon of promoting demonstrably Above (top), Figs. 3a and 3b; above, Figs. 4a and 4b: Fig. 3a wrecked paintings in special loan exhibitions.’ It would have shows the head of the mother before the recent restoration. been quite enough to include a small illustration in the Fig. 3b shows the head after cleaning and after the first of its two (disastrous) repaintings. Fig. 4a shows the head after the catalogue and move swiftly on.” second repainting (and as reproduced in the new National Gallery catalogue). That painting is held by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art In the early post-war years the great French scholar René Institute, Williamstown, USA (see “Taking Renoir, Sterling Huyghe (rightly) complained of the tendency of overly-invasive and Francine Clark to the Cleaners”). We first discussed its “Anglo-Saxon” restorers in London and the USA to impose entirely inapproriate modernist values on the old masters. restoration fate in an article published in the winter 2003 How depressingly ironic it is, therefore, that restorers working ArtWatch UK journal by the painter Edmund Rucinski who within the Louvre should now be permitted to impart to a Veronese head (as seen at Fig. 4a) the bloatedly pneumatic disclosed that the restorer, David Bull, had not only forms found in the playful spoof Mona Lisa painted by removed the surviving remains of one Turner’s two Fernando Botero shown above at Fig. 4b. steamboats but had defended his decision on the grounds that the boat had probably been some later restorer’s invention – even though the existence of a second steamboat was confirmed by the plural “steamboats” in the picture’s full title: Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water, and by visual records of the painting, as shown below right. As we later reported in the summer 2005 ArtWatch UK journal, the picture had been restored in preparation for its inclusion in a travelling exhibition (“Turner, The Late Seascapes”) which began at the Clark Institute and moved first to Manchester and then to Glasgow. It was said that seventy-five per cent of the picture’s surface (which had last been restored and relined in 1963-64 by William Suhr) was repaint and that by removing this paint Turner’s own brushwork would be liberated. What was “liberated” was a wrecked work in which a boat disappeared and the dark coal smoke from its funnel was converted into a white water spout. Despite this pictorial corruption, when the picture came to Britain, the Tate issued a press release in which it was claimed that: “One of the stars of the show is Turner’s dramatic Rockets and Blue Lights (Close to Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water, 1840, which has recently undergone major conservation and is a loan from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, USA.” In 2003 Eric Shanes, of the Turner Society, wrote (TLS 19 December) that although the painting had long been a physical wreck, “until its recent ‘conservation’ it at least constituted a pictorially coherent image. Now it’s right half has been entirely rubbed away, leaving an incoherent shambles that not only bears no similarity to Turner’s original but looks like nothing else in the artist’s oeuvre…” Shanes later took a more indulgent stance towards the Clark Institute. Writing in the May 2005 Apollo, he held: “…Yet if we adopt a wider perspective it is easy to see that the Clark Institute found itself in a fairly impossible situation in 2003: it was damned if it restored the painted and damned if it didn’t.” This seemed to assume the institution had to send the painting across the Atlantic to Manchester and Glasgow. It did not. On October 28th 2003 the Times had reported the disclosure by Selby Whittingham that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts had refused to lend its Turner Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying – Typhoon coming on to the Clark exhibition because when it had returned from a loan to the Tate, the previously sound picture had been found damaged and “extremely unstable” (see below).