Saving Treasures the Getty Way : The Conservation Institute uses a collaborative approach to encourage restoration and preservation, but the real goal is to prevent deterioration of art and historic sites in the first place

On an oasis in the Gobi Desert--halfway around the world from the Getty Conservation Institute’s headquarters in Marina del Rey--cultural leaders of the People’s Republic of China are thinking about their artistic legacy. Having completed a landmark conservation project with GCI, the Chinese are planning an October conference to study the restoration of a fabulous array of artworks in China’s Mogao and Yungang Grottoes and to consider the needs of other cultural monuments along the Silk Road.

Convening near the Mogao Grottoes, the world’s richest treasure trove of ancient Buddhist murals and statuary, an international group of conservators and scientists will share information on such arcane subjects as “Management of Tourism at Buddhist Sites” and “Infrared Spectral Analysis of the Pigments and Binding Media of Polychrome Sculpture From Yungang and Mogao Grottoes.” Beyond the fine points of science and technology is an urgent concern about maintaining a great nation’s heritage.

Thousands of miles away, on the northwest coast of South America, another group of culturally aware citizens are pondering the future of their past. The hopes and dreams of Quito, Ecuador, live on a narrow thoroughfare in the historic hub of the city. A glut of sidewalk vendors and garish signs has long since obscured the elegant old houses that flank Calle Garcia Molina. By day the street is clogged with traffic and the air is foul with fumes; at night it’s deserted and ominous. But public-spirited citizens of Quito look at the blight in their nation’s capital and see a lovelier tomorrow. The source of this vision is an ambitious restoration plan spearheaded by GCI and backed by the Quito mayor’s office.

“We are not just painting facades. We’re looking at how to enhance the quality of life in the historic center of Quito so that it becomes a vibrant element of the city,” GCI Director Miguel Angel Corzo said of the community-based effort. “Instead of using the buildings as storehouses for street vendors, they will become residences, centers for cultural organizations and coffeehouses. It will be a total transformation . . . which we hope to use as a model for other cities.”

*

From rock art in Baja California to Egyptian wall paintings in the tombs of Nefertari and Tutankhamen, from 3.5-million-year-old footprints in Tanzania to the 14th-Century “Last Judgment” mosaic at Prague’s St. Vitus Cathedral, endangered cultural treasures are beneficiaries of the Getty Conservation Institute’s expertise. With 18 field projects in process, GCI ministers to far-flung treasures that suffer from neglect, exposure and human abuse. The institute also responds to emergencies at home, eradicating moths from Edward Kienholz’s sculpture “Back Seat Dodge ‘38” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and aiding the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu with research on such vexing problems as the authenticity of its “Kouros,” a statue of a male youth that was purchased as a Greek antiquity but whose lineage is in question.

Meanwhile, the institute’s scientific program is embroiled in 20 research projects all around the world. Largely unnoticed by the public, Getty scientists and their collaborators work quietly in laboratories, museums and historic sites as they study everything from earthquake-proofing adobe buildings and smog-proofing Los Angeles museums to insect-proofing Egyptian mummies.

At GCI’s laboratory in Marina del Rey, Dusan Stulik, acting director of the scientific program, is busily amassing what will soon be the world’s largest collection of binding media samples. One result of the project is a kit, developed from samples of materials that have been used through the ages to adhere pigment to wood, stone, cloth and paper. The portable kit enables conservators to identify binders and avoid using destructive solvents while restoring artworks.

The long arm of the Getty has reached into the Wieliczka Salt Mines, near Cracow, Poland, where the effect of pollutants on statuary is being studied, using research developed by GCI and Caltech at several museums in Los Angeles. And at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, display cases made of koa wood are being retrofitted with linings to protect ethnographic materials from destructive gases emitted from the wood.

The source of all this activity is an 11-year-old organization established to help preserve cultural heritage worldwide through a combination of research, training, field work and communication. GCI’s staff of 73 full-time employees and 23 part-time and contract associates, representing 22 nationalities, is currently headquartered in an anonymous two-story building in an industrial park near the beach, but the institute will move to the vast new Getty Center, under construction in Brentwood and expected to be completed by 1997.

One of eight programs administered by the J. Paul Getty Trust, GCI operates on an annual budget of about $12 million, a tiny fraction of the income generated by the trust’s $4.1-billion endowment. But GCI is the world’s largest privately funded organization devoted to the preservation of cultural heritage, and its $12-million budget constitutes a major portion of North America’s expenditure on conservation and related research.

The only other U.S. organization roughly comparable to GCI is the federally funded Conservation Analytical Laboratory in Washington, D.C., administered by the Smithsonian Institution. With an annual operating budget of $2.7 million and a staff of 38, plus a rotating group of about 15 interns, fellows and visiting scientists, CAL conducts research on how art materials deteriorate, devises improved methods of storage and conservation, and runs training programs. The laboratory offers a master’s degree in furniture conservation (through Antioch University) and a doctorate in conservation science (in conjunction with Johns Hopkins University).

*

Canada’s powerhouse in the field is the federally funded Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa, which operates on an annual budget of about $5 million. Its 80-member staff provides conservation service and advice to all public museums in Canada, does research, runs a prolific publishing program and conducts training courses and field projects throughout the country.

The Getty Conservation Institute maintains close ties with its counterparts in Washington and Ottawa, sometimes stretching its dollars with cooperative ventures. But even if the Getty trust poured all its wealth into conservation, it could not save all the artistic emblems of national pride and human history that have fallen into disrepair.

Requests for assistance have grown exponentially as the institute has gained recognition and credibility, Corzo said. And in a world that has hundreds of thousands of endangered cultural monuments--many of them desperately needed as moneymaking tourist attractions in poverty-stricken countries--the flood is unlikely to subside.

Indeed, a major question facing GCI since its inception is how to have a significant impact on a field so vast and complex as the entire world’s cultural heritage. The answer, according to Corzo, is to choose projects very carefully and leverage their impact to the hilt through partnerships, training and education.

Fundamental to the entire enterprise, Corzo said, is an unwavering belief in the importance of the world’s cultural heritage at a time when technology and a global population explosion have led to rampant development and environmental pollution, a growing tourist industry and sophisticated warfare.

“In the same way as we look at nature as an essential part of our lives, I think we should look at our cultural heritage,” Corzo said. “It gives us a sense of who we are and where we are and where we are going. . . . Not having churches or synagogues or paintings or sculptures or old photographs or beautiful manuscripts or books is living in a desert. Being without these things is like having the possibility of breathing but not the possibility of living.”

Corzo views the institute’s mission as a deeply satisfying way of life, but his job calls for hard choices. Only sites of major artistic and historic significance are accepted as GCI field projects, and they must fulfill several additional requirements. GCI officials must be persuaded that the proposed conservation work will serve as a model for other projects, advance the institute’s research and offer training opportunities. In addition, local or national organizations in the host country must provide strong support of the project.

“We don’t come to a site and say, ‘We are the Getty and we have money,’ ” Corzo said. “We say, ‘We are the Getty and you are going to contribute half of what this is going to take, in every way.’ We want absolute and total commitment, real sit-down, open discussion, real decision-making with everybody participating.” In making these demands, GCI not only gets the most bang for its buck, he said, it ensures that the host country can and will take care of its restored treasures long after Getty personnel have departed.

One persistent problem in forging international partnerships is balancing economic and conservation needs. Rather than provide a quick fix, the Getty approach is to systematically diagnose problems, design a strategy for treatment, carry out the treatment, evaluate results and plan for long-term management. Everyone involved with a proposed site--including archeologists, ministers of culture, tourism and finance, managers of nearby hotels and restaurants, airline officials and tour operators--must be brought into the process, he said.

“These are difficult things for many people around the world,” Corzo said. Some officials who control the use of cultural monuments are more interested in squeezing tourist dollars out of them than in prolonging their life, he noted. “But we’re not saying, ‘Close your sites to protect the cultural heritage.’ We’re saying, ‘Manage your sites so that while you are protecting them you are turning them into sources of revenue,’ ” he said.

The key to the project in Quito was winning support of the new mayor, Jamil Mahauad Witt, who has cast a symbolic vote by moving his residence to the historic area slated for restoration, Corzo said. Working with three Getty consultants and a project director, 20 local artists have been trained to make precise renderings of buildings along Calle Garcia Molina, which were used to work out low-cost options for restoring the most important edifices.

“The next step is to restore one building as a sample and bring in the community so that everyone will participate,” Corzo said. “We hope this will be like mushrooms, sprouting everywhere . . . and that we can use the street as a teaching tool for people from other cities.” This is the first project of its kind for the Getty and for Latin America, he said. It is barely off the ground, but Corzo said he already has had inquiries about trying the approach in Brazil.

*

Model projects are an effective leveraging device. So are GCI’s efforts in education and communication. The institute’s training program has developed 30 courses on such subjects as “Preventive Care of Historic Photographic Prints and Negatives” and “The Conservation of Excavated Sites: New Approaches and Techniques.” This summer alone, GCI has presented three international conferences--the first in Cairo, on seismic retrofitting of Islamic monuments; the second in St. Petersburg, on preventive conservation, and the third in Sri Lanka, on cultural heritage management.

“We have people standing in line to attend these meetings,” Corzo said. “The reason is that they understand what we are advocating is not some incredibly costly, incredibly complex, incredibly difficult-to-implement technique. What we are advocating is solutions that are technically appropriate to the environment where cultural heritage has a problem.”

GCI gets complaints from conservators who can’t afford to travel to its training courses and want the Getty to provide funding for transportation and lodging. But it wins friends by contracting outside conservators to do research projects at home. Pieter Meyers, director of conservation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said these projects are among GCI’s most important contributions to the field. With Getty help, LACMA conservators have conducted a statistical analysis of art conservation research, and they are currently studying ways of bleaching paper with light in an attempt to work out a safe alternative to chemicals.

The institute’s information and documentation program gets the word out on conservation through a variety of forums. “We have over 100 volunteers in over 100 countries who write abstracts of articles that they read on conservation of art and archeology,” Corzo said. “We compile all this information and twice a year publish the index to Art and Archeology Technical Abstracts . . . which then we distribute through a conservation information network,” he said.

GCI also publishes a newsletter three times a year featuring reports on the institute’s work, profiles of noted conservators and such items as an “Ozone Alert” warning against ozone in museum air-conditioning systems. (The gas is used to combat odors but it can have a disastrous effect on art.)

Another way of maximizing the Getty’s resources is to preach prevention, Corzo said. “It’s obvious that even if we work around the clock, all of us involved with cultural heritage throughout the world are not going to be able to save it as we would want to,” he said. “So one of the things we are pushing very hard is this idea of preventive conservation. The idea is that it’s cheaper, easier and better to prevent damage than to cure damage, and it creates a community-based effort that benefits everyone.

“It’s like the difference between health management and treatment of diseases,” he said. “Is it better to develop a lot of antibiotics against dysentery or is it better to boil the water? Once you convince people that boiling the water is going to save on antibiotics, everybody boils the water. So this is what we’re saying: Boil the water. Close the windows. Pull down the shades. Mop up the floor. Clean the air. Don’t open up your site without thinking about it.”

*

The message is basic, but is it being heard? Corzo fears not. “One of my frustrations is that I think we must learn to improve the way we send our message out,” he said. In the professional sphere, GCI needs to boil down its extensive, highly technical research on environmental hazards into a compact form that is easy for conservators to use, he said.

Citing other frustrations, he said, “We have maybe 20 different ways of doing digital imaging of artworks. How can we make a decision about one and be certain that’s the right way of doing it?” Even more vexing is knowing “that there are lots of people who can be trained in better ways of doing conservation and that we are just beginning to reach them,” he said.

Despite the institute’s daunting agenda, many conservators say GCI already has had a significant impact on the field and give it high marks.

“It has given our efforts nationally and internationally a real shot in the arm to have them on board,” said Arthur Beal, director of research at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who has served on the institute’s Visiting Committee of advisers. GCI’s dissemination of information and basic research on environmental hazards are among its most important services to the field, he said.

Charles Gruchy, director of the Canadian Conservation Institute, believes that GCI’s biggest contribution is in the area of training. Conservation of the world’s treasures has “a profound impact in a limited area,” he said, “but I think the training programs will have a more significant impact on the field in the long run.”

When GCI was founded there was widespread disappointment among conservators who had hoped it would be a grant-making agency that would fund their projects rather than operating its own program, said Terry Weisser, director of conservation and technical research at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. American conservators also were chagrined to learn that GCI would spread its resources over the entire world instead of concentrating on problems at home, she said. But now the institute is justly revered for its international work, particularly for involving local people in the preservation of cultural monuments and raising public awareness of conservation, she said.

According to Lambertus Van Zelst, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Conservation Analytical Laboratory in Washington, GCI has scored by addressing weak spots in the field, such as the conservation of archeological ethnographic material. He also credits GCI with playing a seminal role in developing the Conservation Information Network, a computer network that includes the bibliographic resources of major conservation centers worldwide.

During Corzo’s 2 1/2-year tenure, the institute has broadened its mission and presence. On the home front in Marina del Rey, he takes pride in molding the institute’s formerly separate fiefdoms into a more integrated form. “We are beginning to see scientists understand a little bit more that the larger issue of conservation is cultural heritage and not their (individual) research,” he said. “In a world that has become extraordinarily specialized, my ambition is to bring everybody back to the Renaissance level, which is the way I think one should approach cultural heritage. You cannot approach it with high-tech; you cannot approach it with pure poetry. It has to be a mixture of both,” he said.

And he is certain that the institute is on the right track: “We are working for something that is moral, that is ethical, that is up there among what people value.”*