The original Ocean House, Bluff Ave. view at the turn of the last century
More than half a dozen grand hotels once graced the Watch Hill, peninsula on the western shore of Rhode Island, but a decade ago only one remained, Ocean House, an aging and ailing wooden behemoth whose top floors had been condemned for years. Odds were increasing that this iconic landmark, its era long past, would soon vanish like the rest.
By 2003, bumper stickers around Watch Hill implored “Save Ocean House.” The 1868 renowned, resort, ocean front hotel, where the silent movie “American Aristocracy” starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. was filmed, had just closed for good. Its future was manifestly uncertain. If Ocean House was torn down, could a litter of McMansions be far behind? Fine Art MagazineMore
Christus, Petrus (ca.1410-1475-6). A Goldsmith in His Shop, Possibly St. Eligius (1449), oil on oak panel, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection (1975.1.110)
A visit to New York’s, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Old Masters Collection, provides the interested viewer with an opportunity to look closely at pictures painted on wooden panel, canvas, and occasionally, stone or metal. Here, we will refer to their collection and concentrate on the materials, techniques and physical history of European works from north of the Alps, with an eventual detour to Italy, which will be the subject of Part II of this article. The paintings being considered during the 15th-17th century belong to the genre now classified as “easel paintings” – rectangular in format, enclosed in a frame, and intended to hang or stand upright. Some of the very smallest pictures, especially those with a religious subject, might have been kept in a special box with other treasures. Other small pictures were originally diptychs or triptychs: two or three panels hinged together that could stand open during personal devotion and then be folded for transport or storage. Larger pictures, now all too often framed and presented in museums as separate entities, frequently belonged to multi-part structures – usually three parts or more (the latter referred to as polyptychs) – which functioned as altarpieces placed on or above church altars. Increasingly, as the Renaissance progressed, painters produced paintings with secular themes in single-field format, which also became the preferred form for religious pictures.More
Knoll Associates showroom, Madison Avenue, NY, NY. Florence Knoll, Designer, 1951; Robert Damora, Photographer, 1951
November 10, 2008
In this, the last interview Robert Damora gave before his death in March, 2009, I explore his work as an architectural photographer and learn more about his commitment to his craft. Honed by training at Yale and his unfailing attention to the minutest detail, Damora was once described by architect, Walter Gropius as, “the best photographer of architecture in this country.” Here then, is his very personal story, told by Damora himself and by those who cherished him and his remarkable work.
As the movers and shakers of the handmade rug industry, the interior design trade plays a pivotal role in shaping the end consumers’ purchasing decisions. After focusing on the greenness of the handweaving process from the manufacturers’ standpoint (See “Special Green Report—Handmade Rugs—The Original Green Floor Coverings,” ARTES (Oct. 13, 2009), this article takes a hard look at what the country’s most reputed and green-attuned designers and other members of the design community are thinking. Do they view handmade rugs as an eco-friendly floor covering as compared to machine-made?
Noted New York-based interior designer Darren Henault of Darren Henault Interiors, says, “To me, the fact that handmade oriental and decorative rugs are green seems only logical and obvious.” However, for most members of the design trade, awareness of handmade rugs as being green is limited, if not virtually nonexistent. States Laura Bohn of Laura Bohn Design Associates, New York, NY whose work has been featured on CNN Style and HGTV: “I didn’t know that and never thought of it until now!” Adds Mary Douglas Drysdale of Drysdale Design Associates, Washington, DC: “As a group, the designers’ mission is to make things look good and is focused more on instant gratification which is not born out of long-term thinking.” Echoes designer Annette Stelmack of Stelmack & Associates III, Denver, CO and co-author of Residential Sustainable Interiors:1“ For [most] designers, the greenness of floor coverings is not a major preoccupation.”More
Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, Antoine Pevsner, 1926, cellulite and copper (Yale Univ.)
What might happen to Dorian Gray’s portrait after the story ends? Decayed by age, it has experienced the ultimate restoration, having been returned to a pristine original state by its subject’s effort to destroy it. This is an irony, of course, and one hopes that the murder of the artist and the suicide (if unintended) of the subject are not absolute prerequisites for the kind of resolution being sought by the various curators and conservators whose projects are on view in this necessarily wordy exhibition.
Insert: Russian sculptor and Constructivist, Antoine Pevsner, with one of his sculptures, 1938
But it is impossible not to think of the Oscar Wilde novel when looking at Antoine Pevsner’s assembled portrait of Marcel Duchamp, crumpled in upon itself, with parts of it turned to rust and powder. The composition of cellulose, copper nitrate and iron was a recipe for self-destruction. It’s gone, turned to something not unlike a desiccated corpse on the shelf of a monastic catacomb which, if it were displayed vertically as it was meant to be, would immediately disappear.
The Kahn Wing, Yale University Art Center
But what it has become is extraordinary in its fragile futility. There is nothing to be done. A replica has been fashioned of different materials which current evidence suggest may be more stable than Pevsner’s original choices (the artist was aware of the work’s defects, and made alterations, which only hastened the damage), but is a chill approximation at best. And is there anything but a difference of degree which separates this piece from any other work that is not the “foster-child of Silence and slow Time,” (as Keats’s hidden Grecian urn briefly was) but rather, is held in the abusive care of its actual parent, ruin?
Conservation begins by giving a definition of loss. But to know that there was a loss is not always to know precisely what the loss was. The absence may be in some way diminished, without being accurate. This is the case for a 1st century Roman figure with a right arm from some other sculpture attached to it. The mistake can be removed, but not corrected. No restoration can be absolute.
Conservators sometimes develop ideas of salvation that resemble those of the army officer in Vietnam who reported having destroyed a village in order to save it. A 6th century mosaic removed and embedded in concrete is a hulking fragment, alienated from both past and present. In contrast, repairs made to a Korean tea bowl and Greek drinking cup in their own time were meant simply to preserve them for use, not to guarantee their survival as museum objects. There is also accidental preservation as in the underside of a lid on an Italian wedding chest where the painting of a female figure, nude save for hips bound with a fringe of flowers and pubic leaves, was kept safe for its private audience of forsaken modesty.
Among the mockeries of restoration and restorations as betrayal included here is a restoration as benign fiction. A 16th century painting, Conversion of St. Paul, not a forgery, was later remounted and then had old worm eaten wood applied to its back in order to make it appear consistent with its history.
Thomas Wilfred’s early twentieth century light machines made use of a now obsolete technology which, if operated, would accelerate the complete breakdown of his slapdash electronics. But is the real question here one of reconstructing the effects or the mechanism? What would he have used had it been available, given that there was nothing permanent to what he intended?
Before Restoration (above) and After: The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Saints, from the workshop of Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1305-1310, tempera on panel (restored in 2004) Yale Univ. Art Gallery
A drawing for Edward Hopper’s painting, Sunlight in a Cafeteria, contains what endangers it in its title – its charcoal on acidic paper, already unstable, is slowly erased by light. The painting itself is also on view, with a graph recording the “Fourier transform infrared spectra” of copal varnish used, and now darkening, on its surface. But I came away angry that I had been given this information. There are things that one should refuse to know for the sake of encountering the work itself, damaged as it might be.
The motives for restoration sometimes involve competing strategies, where later choices are a critique of previous ones. A number of early European paintings in Yale’s collection were at one point reduced to only what was verifiably original work. What resulted in some cases resembled an primitive seafarer’s map, with islands and archipelagos of color isolated on a wooden sea. A 14th century Sienese panel of the, Virgin and Child Enthroned, that was subject to this imperious treatment has now been carefully, if only partly, repainted. Before that, according to one curator’s passionate assertion, it had been “too painful” to look at.
But, as I reflected later, perhaps that was the point that actually needed conserving. Losses require our attention, especially when ideal preservation would mean removing every work of art from our sight. This does not require making of the museum some chilled mortuary for dying paintings. Rather, we should stand in front of each and, like Yeats, “for every tatter in its mortal dress,” sing.
EDITOR’S LETTER: Preserving the past for future generations…
In ways that were not entirely planned, this issue of ARTES is about preservation of our cultural resources, in the broadest sense of the word. The green design movement has done much to increase public awareness about the treasures of a planet that seems to grow smaller and more fragile each day. Our Departments(now called Categories) will continue on the theme of discovering and appreciating treasures that are within our reach at museums and galleries and a wide variety of other stories on art and collectables that might just arise from unexpected sources.
But, we did not stop there…
Frederic Church, Autumn in North America, 1856 (Vassar)
For a Features story, I undertook a ‘working vacation’ and headed up the Hudson River to learn more about the community of 19th century painters who lived and worked there in the, capturing the natural beauty of the river and the surrounding Catskill mountains. I discovered that they, too, harbored deep concerns about the impact that industrialization and population expansion would have on the environment, as early as 1825!
Henry David Thoreau, well-known for his part in an active environmental movement during that same period, spoke for an entire group of painters, writers, poets and philosophers of the time, when he famously wrote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world”. His call for a “direct experience of nature” propelled artists like Cole, Church, Cropsey, Bierstadt and others to travel the world and portray the wonders of nature and, through the use of light, color and scale, to illustrate our diminutive place in what they believed to be tangible evidence of God’s hand at work here on earth. As I navigated the rough trails and steep climbs that brought me to some of the very sites pictured in their now-famous works, I recognized the extraordinary physicality they must have brought to their mission—recognizing that they painted miles from home, while relying on portage of all equipment, good weather, basic tools-of-the –trade (paint tubes had not yet been invented!) and the means to carry freshly-painted studies of a scene back to the studio, safely (as a painter, I can attest to the fact that this last step is no easy task). They were rewarded for their sacrifice, however, as their dramatic images have moved many generations to view the gifts of the natural world as both sacred and awe inspiring.
This month, ARTES will present a comprehensive field report on the Hudson River Valley and its inextricable role in the development of the preservation movement, as well as our self-image as Americans. See: River of Dreams- In search of the American Identity in literature, poetry and art
Robert Stern, Dean, Yale School of Architecture
As a unique feature, representing a first-step toward becoming a multi-media resource for our readers, ARTES presents an expanded interview with Robert A.M. Stern, Dean of the School of Architecture at Yale University. In streaming video format, my conversation with him regarding the sources of inspiration and objectives of architecture are explained in his own words. On the preservation theme, he too, points out the importance of learning from the past. Once again, we are pleased and honored to have this eminent architect
as part of our offerings to readers (and now, viewers!).
California-based, Randall Whitehead has now joined the magazine as a feature editor and this month, his story on the conversion of a traditional residential dwelling to a dramatic Transitional beauty once again demonstrates how skillful design and lighting can make all the difference—conservation at its best!.
attrib. to Buoninsegna, Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Saints 1305-10
ARTES also presents Part II of a story by Alix Perrachon on another art form– Oriental rugs– and their ‘green’ features during production. In addition to their environmental sustainability, their beauty, range of styles and versatility make them one of the great treasures of centuries past and a precious addition, worth preserving, for any décor today.
Together with these Feature stories, ARTES continues to build its Department offerings with experts in their respective fields providing insights and information on topics related to fine art and design, where care and stewardship of artifacts from the past become the common thread that runs through their stories. With those themes in mind, we also welcome Stephen Vincent Kobasa, as this month’s contributor to Opinion Poll, with a piece entitled, Showing Time: Can art be saved? Should it be?
Thanks for being part of our growing family of readers,
Richard J. Friswell, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief
Tang Dynasty Camel and Rider is a thousand-year-old treasure within reach of many collectors
This extraordinary early Tang Dynasty (618-907 c.e.) camel and rider (20” tall x 14” wide) is representative of a golden period in Chinese cultural history. After hundreds of years of regional conflict and division, central China was unified under as series of powerful emperors and entered a long period of peace and creativity. Stimulated by contact with India and the Middle East, the arts flourished. Buddhism, originating in India, found its way to China in the time of Confucius and this introspective faith was soon adopted by the royal family to become a permanent part of Chinese culture. Not only painting, but music, opera and poetry also became popularized.
Another piece from the Mandarin Collection features an animated horse's head, a collectable feature
Much of the figurative clay and polychrome figures from this and the earlier Han Dynastry (206 b.c.e.-220 c.e.) were tomb figures, interred with the wealthy to accompany them in the afterlife. Currently very sought-after, these expressive and skillfully crafted figures tell a story of life little-changed over the centuries.
Technically, the structure and design of this camel and rider represent an innovation in the shaping and firing of the clay for that time. Since the long legs of the animal could not be rendered in wet clay without some structural reinforcement for the weight of the body of the animal and figure, internal cast iron supports were used for the extremities. These struts were first coated in wax before being surrounded by clay. In the firing, the melting wax would escape thought a tiny hole in the foot leaving a small space behind. This technique prevented the expanding metal from cracking the clay as the figure baked in the kiln. A delicate, gravity-defying figure was the result.
This rare and expressive sculpture is available through The Mandarin Collection in Westport, CT. It has been authenticated using Oxford University’s carbon dating system. Price: $66,000. Contact C.C. Wong at 203.454.4030 for more information.
Read more about China’s Tang Dynasty at: http://www.bambooweb.com/articles/T/a/Tang_Dynasty_art.html
“Time Will Tell: Ethics and Choices in Conservation” 
