A Renaissance of Ancient Art : Restoration ‘Comedy’ Dramatizes the Conservators’ Craft

It was an ugly and inappropriate nose, a bad Jimmy Durante appendage attached by some well-meaning latter-day restorer to an otherwise graceful Egyptian stone head.

But conservators at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, confronted with the adulterated statue, did not immediately restore the work to its original state. Restore is a dirty word around the conservation lab.

“The rule is: If you didn’t personally see something there, don’t put it in,” said objects conservator Steve Cristin-Poucher. In the case of the Egyptian head, the conservators did not see the original nose, so they would not create one.

Now on display in a freshly installed gallery for Egyptian art, the head is one of many pieces in the museum’s new galleries for ancient art that required the attention of objects conservators.

The state-of-the-art conservation lab, relocated to the ground floor of the Frances and Armand Hammer Wing in 1982, provides a wide range of services for both the museum’s permanent collection and pieces in touring exhibits. The lab works on slightly more than 2,000 pieces a year--sculptures, pottery, jewelry, metal pieces as well as paintings, textiles and other artworks.

Conservators identify and date works of art, test materials to determine safe methods of treatment and develop new techniques to examine and treat artworks. The conservators work closely with the museum’s curatorial staff to decide which pieces should be worked on and the amount of work each requires.

Caution has not always been the watchword for art conservation, according to Cristin-Poucher and other conservators at the county museum. Removing previous restoration work, much of it done in 19th-Century England and Europe, occupies many hours.

Conservators said that some of the older restoration work is removed because it was poorly executed or done with materials such as glues and resins that are beginning to break down and harm the work of art. But sometimes the restorations are removed simply because they are anachronistic overlays.

Cristin-Poucher said, for example, that earlier restorations of some pieces of Greek black- and red-figure pottery obliterated the designs created by the original artist.

Removing previous restorations to these ceramic pieces requires both sophisticated technology and patience, Cristin-Poucher said. Surfaces have to be cleaned of dirt and dust. Paint covering the original design has to be removed. Old glue has to be replaced with an adhesive that won’t shrink over time. And sometimes the conservators have not only to undo previous restorations but also intentional damage to a piece, such as making a new foot for a vase that had been sawed in half.

No attempt is ever made to disguise such work, both conservators and curators emphasized. For example, if a black area on a broken vase is filled in, the patched area is painted a slightly different shade of black so the area is clearly a modern addition.

One of the complicating factors of conservation work is that everything the conservators do has to be reversible, Cristin-Poucher said, to allow for the possibility that later conservators will be able to do a better job.

“If you look at 19th-Century restoration work, well, they did the best that their technology would allow. And we do the same, but with the acknowledgement that it will be better in the future, that people will do better work in the future, and we have to leave the piece in such a condition that later conservators will have the chance to use their technologies,” he said.

However, while conservators in the objects lab are scrupulously careful not to introduce any element not in the original piece of art, Pieter Meyers, the museum’s head of conservation, admits that conservators do not overvalue consistency, that a hands-off attitude toward pottery doesn’t necessarily mean that conservators leave other types of art unretouched.

“Say there was a scene missing on a Greek vase. You could hold a gun to his head and a conservator wouldn’t fill in that scene. But a conservator would rather die than not fill in (a missing part of) a historical painting. But we live happily with these contradictions. Conservators are not different in that aspect than most other professions.”

Constantina Oldknow, associate curator of ancient and Islamic art, summarized the current conservation wisdom for ancient art:

“We don’t want people to look at a work of art and the first thing they see is the cracks,” she said. “That wouldn’t give people an accurate, a fair idea of what the work looked like in its original state. But we’re not trying to hide anything. You can see our cracks.”

So what happened to the Durante nose on the Egyptian statue? David Rasch, a student working in the lab, took it all off.

But once he had removed the nose, Rasch said he was left with a huge, gaping hole in the face where the restorers had bored out a deep cavity in which to anchor the new nose.

Since Rasch didn’t want to commit the same sin as the anonymous restorers and create an entirely new nose, he decided to give the head--which had clearly fallen on its face at some point--a broken nose.

To get an accurately shaped broken nose, he built a whole nose out of clay, modeling it on a contemporary figure. He then cut the nose to mimic the way a nose in that specific type of stone would break--following shear marks on other parts of the face--then created a plaster cast and glued it into place.

Finally, he painted the new nose, taking great care not to match the color too carefully.