On August 4, 2020, a vast explosion ripped through Beirut, Lebanon, killing 218 people and creating a shock wave felt as far as Cyprus and Turkey.
The explosion—the largest nonnuclear blast in modern history—was caused by a fire that ignited thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate stored in dangerous conditions at the Port of Beirut.
In addition to the human cost, the city’s artistic center, near the harbor and home to museums, galleries, and heritage buildings, suffered far reaching destruction. Just 20 yards from the port sits the stately Sursock Palace, a private residence constructed in 1870 by the Sursocks, a leading Beirut family that had built a collection of 16th- and 17th-century Italian paintings, antique furniture, and other valuables. As the blast radiated from the docks, shards of glass and shrapnel struck hundreds of palace artworks, including Hercules and Omphale (1630), a monumental painting by famed Italian Baroque artist Artemesia Gentileschi. Getty conservators are currently hard at work on the painting’s repairs. (More on that in a bit.)
“When it happened, I was at home four miles away, but it felt like an asteroid had hit right next to me,” says Kerstin Khalife, a paintings conservator who has lived in Beirut for 20 years.
Trained in conservation at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design in Germany, Khalife is head of conservation at the Beirut Museum of Art (BeMA), which will open in 2026 with a collection of Lebanese and regional art. She also works as a freelance conservator for the Sursock Museum (located near Sursock Palace), a modern and contemporary art institution founded in 1961 by later generations of the Sursock family. The day after the explosion, she went to the area to assess the wreckage and quickly realized that caring for Beirut’s destroyed collections would require all her skills to date—especially tear mending.
“The tear-mending technique, and its delicate reattachment or insertion of threads in a torn canvas painting, is a tremendously important skill and far less risky for saving the painted picture itself than previous methods,” says Antoine Wilmering, senior program officer at the Getty Foundation and the organizer of its Conserving Canvas grantmaking initiative.
Dental Probes, Suture Materials, Free Microscopes
Since 2018, Conserving Canvas has funded 35 projects around the world designed to train conservators in both traditional and cutting-edge techniques. “Our goal has been to bring senior conservators with years of canvas-related experience together with their younger counterparts to share knowledge.”
Shortly after the blast, Khalife was thrilled to learn that the Getty Foundation had funded a tear-mending workshop hosted by Germany’s Cologne University of Applied Sciences. She and another conservator from BeMA, Nayirie Jean Keuteklian, applied. “Tear mending is a critically needed skill in Beirut,” Khalife says. “The explosion was catastrophic, and in addition, many of our artworks have been stored and neglected for 70 years, or else been damaged by the Lebanese Civil War [1975–1990]. I couldn’t wait to learn.”
In June 2021 Khalife attended Fusion 1: mare nostrum, a Getty-funded workshop led by two of the field’s reigning experts, German conservators Petra Demuth and Hannah Flock. Together, Demuth and Flock have pioneered the adoption of tear mending worldwide through in-person training seminars. Named after the Roman term for the Mediterranean Sea and available to Mediterranean-area practitioners, this workshop was different from their others: it was virtual and could therefore offer digital-only instruction of tear-mending methods via close-up microscopic views that could be recorded live and transmitted to and from participants working at their home institutions. The virtual format not only reduced CO₂ emissions due to less air travel by attendees, it also allowed conservators facing pandemic travel restrictions to participate.
Khalife’s experience at the workshop proved transformative. First off, Demuth and Flock mailed high-caliber tools and instruments—dental probes, suture materials, adhesives, and a special heated tip for tear mending—to each participant, some of whom, like Khalife, lived in places where accessing such items is difficult. Best of all, everyone received a microscope equipped with a lens for photographic recording (aka a “trinocular stereo microscope”). So while Khalife looked through the microscope, the video camera simultaneously displayed the conservation work she was doing with her hands. The instructors in Cologne, and eight other participants on Zoom in Italy, Slovenia, Spain, Croatia, Greece, and Portugal, could follow along as she undertook intricate thread manipulations such as reweaving loose, frayed thread ends.
“To be connected with one another over the microscope and to see Petra and Hannah demonstrating
with such close-up magnification—it was better than if I’d been in the same room,” says Khalife. “And incredibly, Getty offered us the microscope to keep afterwards. So now my colleagues and I can raise awareness about tear mending with other conservators and cultural heritage professionals. Everyone wants to learn it.”
Glass-riddled and Torn, but on the Mend
Since the workshop, Khalife has applied her new skills to dozens of glass-riddled paintings, including her current undertaking, the restoration of a modern Lebanese canvas with over 70 tears. In 2022 she helped dust, crate, and ship Gentileschi’s Hercules and Omphale from Sursock Palace to the Getty Center for emergency conservation treatment.
Here in Los Angeles, Ulrich Birkmaier, Getty’s senior conservator of paintings, has been orchestrating the comprehensive repair of Hercules and Omphale, which suffered a 20-inch tear from the blast plus numerous other rips and splices. In addition to tear mending, Birkmaier and a team of Getty conservators will perform chemical analysis of the four-centuries-old paint to learn about Gentileschi’s process, reline the back of the work, and reconstruct various areas of paint loss. The painting will go on view at Getty in 2025 before heading back to Beirut.
Meanwhile, the demand for tear-mending training has gained so much momentum that Demuth
and Flock will lead another Getty-funded workshop this year at the National Museum in Gdańsk, Poland. This time, two midcareer conservators will attend from Ukraine, as that country’s paintings collections face significant threats from the ongoing war with Russia.
“Hannah and I feel compelled to do more trainings, because we live in a place where we are free and
experience relative stability, and this is our way of taking responsibility in the world,” says Demuth. “It’s our job to pass on our experience and skills to our colleagues everywhere, despite the extreme inequalities people face. We are honored to do this work.”
Although tear mending can be performed just as readily on a 200-year-old tear as one from two days ago, its emergence as a go-to technique makes it invaluable to conservators who face catastrophes, wars, or other challenging circumstances. But the most important part of preserving a painting, Khalife believes—beyond tear mending or any other technique—is how a technician performs behind the microscope. “It’s so critical how you, as a conservator, deal in a crisis. You must stay calm. You must stay focused. Fortunately, conservation helps us do that.”
