Five Conservation Projects That Safeguarded Art in 2023
From a tiny horse to a 13-foot bronze
Artwork: Albanian Institute of Archaeology, Tirana
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On any given day, you can find Getty’s art conservators wielding tiny brushes to sweep away dust from sculptures or using cotton balls to wipe yellowed varnish from paintings.
It’s all in the name of preserving the artist’s vision and ensuring their works of art can be enjoyed for years to come.
Getty’s conservators are always busy cleaning and repairing paintings, drawings, sculptures, decorative arts, and more, and 2023 was no exception. From a statue crafted in 500 BCE to a 13-foot bronze sculpture built in 1986, the art that passed through conservators’ hands this year got some much-deserved TLC.
Below are five projects we undertook to protect and conserve art in 2023.
A Bright Future for Bronze Form
Steve Roy, an expert in bronze patination, sits on scaffolding beside Henry Moore’s Bronze Form. Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation
It’s rare for a sculpture at the Getty Museum to be refinished. But when Henry Moore’s Bronze Form showed signs of degradation and corrosion, it was time to act. The sculpture, which greets visitors when they arrive at the Getty Center tram station, was recoated with varnish to maintain its appearance in 2012, but by 2021, that coating had started to break down again. Museum conservators partnered with bronze experts to design a treatment plan for the sculpture. Now, it’s more dazzling than ever.
Shining a Light on Neon
Neon fabricator and artist Michael Flechtner tests a transformer, used to deliver the high voltage needed to make neon glow.
Neon started as an exciting new type of advertising in the 1920s. By the 1960s, the eye-popping medium had caught the gaze of artists, who began using this bold new art form to create their own glowing signs and pictures. However, collection stewards find neon art difficult to install, pack, repair, and document, and most conservation professionals don’t have a background in neon. So Ellen Moody, an associate project specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute, set out to help to produce the first-ever published recommendations for neon art conservation.
Learning the Art of Conservation with the Johnson Publishing Company Archive
Nette Davis and another participant rehouse slides and report the condition of the images.
Last summer a group of students from historically Black colleges and universities around the country headed to Chicago for a hands-on conservation workshop with materials from the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) archive—around 5,000 magazines, 200 boxes of business records, 10,000 audio and visual recordings, and 4.5 million prints and negatives from Ebony and Jet magazines. During the five-day workshop, the students got an introduction to the field of conservation, learning some of the techniques and philosophies of conserving historically relevant materials. This experience, many said, will impact how they approach their future careers.
Pulled from a Field in Albania, a 2,500-Year-Old Statuette Comes to Getty
Susanne Gansicke cleans the Statue of a Horse and Rider with ethanol.
During a 2018 excavation campaign of an ancient settlement in Albania, archaeologists observed a local farmer plowing his field near the site. As the farmer plowed the field after the season’s onion harvest, an ancient Greek statuette of a horse and rider emerged from no more than 15 inches below the surface. The Albanian Institute of Archaeology enlisted Getty’s help, entrusting the horseman—still caked in soil—to the Museum’s conservation lab, where conservators and researchers spent months cleaning the bronze and investigating its origins.
Removing Yellowed Varnish from Pepilla and Her Daughters
Kendall Francis, a graduate intern in Getty’s paintings conservation department, spent much of her internship this year researching Pepilla and Her Daughters by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida and also removing a layer of discolored varnish from the surface of the painting. Removing this yellow layer helped the tender scene of a Roma mother and daughter regain its vibrancy and depth, so the painting can be enjoyed as the artist intended. Watch Francis at work removing the varnish in the Instagram Reel video above, and see her re-varnish the painting in part two!
