MORE ARTISTS JOIN RESTORATION PROTEST

The growing ranks of artists protesting the restoration of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling has been joined by a group of noted Californians--including William Brice, Alexis Smith, Chris Burden, Robert Heinecken and a dozen other members of the UCLA art faculty--who call the cleaning the “destruction” of Michelangelo’s hallowed masterpiece.

In a written statement, the group termed the restoration “a hasty and harsh cleaning which is removing all subtlety and balance and leaving a grotesque and uneven residue of underpainting.”

The strongly worded statement, also signed by Laddie Dill and Roger Herman, came in the wake of a similar petition submitted to Pope John Paul II this month by 15 prominent New York artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, George Segal and Robert Motherwell.

According to painter Eliot Elgart, the UCLA protest was launched independently of the New York effort by painter Ray Brown, who became alarmed after reading articles protesting the restoration and by seeing reproductions in a new publication on the chapel restoration published by Harmony books.

“(The publication) aims to prove the cleaning is positive,” says the statement, but “instead demonstrates absolutely that the cleaning is mistaken. Even the very dirty images look better than the clean images. It is sickening to see the tones totally out of balance, details of eyes and hands washed away, and forms no longer moving coherently in space.”

Brown, reached by phone on sabbatical from his position as chairman of the UCLA art department, admitted he had not himself seen the restored original, but said, “I just went through the ceiling when I saw the (Harmony) book. I showed it to everybody, and everybody except the artists said, ‘Well, these people are experts; they must know what they are doing.’ Well, artists are the experts at seeing, and every one I talked to said the book showed that something essential is gone.”

The New York petition, sparked by contemporary art dealer Ronald Feldman, is worded much more mildly--praising the “noble purpose” of the restoration but urging a pause for an analysis of the results. It puts equal emphasis on stopping the ongoing restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” in Milan, which was recently closed to the public.

Feldman, reached at his Manhattan gallery, said that he has seen both restorations and found that “they don’t look right. The colors aren’t right.”

After writing letters to Italian officials in an unsuccessful attempt to effect a reevaluation of the projects, Feldman approached various artists who eventually signed petitions, including Christo, Louise Bourgeois and Eric Fischl.

“I found the artists were already disturbed but just didn’t know how to fight it. Every one of them signed without asking who the others were,” he said.

Both Brown and Feldman said their misgivings were strengthened by reading articles casting doubt on the project, especially those in Harvard magazine by former Time magazine art critic Alexander Elliot and in Arts magazine by James Beck, chairman of the art history department at Columbia University. Beck, formerly a partisan of the Sistine restoration, changed his mind and now believes that the cleaning is removing parts of the Michelangelo original.

“No one is accusing anyone of bad intentions,” Feldman said, “but the project is now reaching such critical points as Michelangelo’s scenes of the Creation and the great Last Judgment wall. If mistakes have been inadvertently made, it is time to stop, even though it might mean we have two different-looking pictures.”