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After watching way too much Baumgartner Restoration, do paintings with such status receive much conservatorship? The varnish on that painting is obnoxiously age
by zamalek 3y ago
After watching way too much Baumgartner Restoration, do paintings with such status receive much conservatorship? The varnish on that painting is obnoxiously aged.
- toyg 3y agoThey do, but I expect it becomes a big political issue - can you imagine how much it must cost in insurance alone, as soon as you mention the painting might have to be touched...? And then you'll need a committee to agree on how much varnish should be stripped, etc etc.
- greggsy 3y agoAn experienced conservationist would know exactly what to do, and scope the work accordingly. It would go on show for a short period to capitalise on the current interest and attract foot traffic to the gallery, before being treated.
- londons_explore 3y agoConservator 'best practice ' changes pretty much every decade, with each generation of conservators dismayed at all the damage done by their predecessors...
- hinkley 3y agoConservators: the dentists of the art world.
- ndiddy 3y agoSounds like software development
- krisoft 3y agoThat is true, but![1] This is well understood by modern conservators, so they use reversible materials as much as possible. For example paints which can be any time cleaned up with a weak solvent specifically selected such that it doesn't attack the base painting at all. The any time is a very important property here. Normal paints "set" after a while. You might clean them off the canvas a day later easily, with some difficulty a year later, and 30 years later it becomes basically impossible. But conservation paints don't do this. They can be cleaned up a day after the work is done, or 200 years after. The other important property is that these materials are often designed to show up visibly under UV light. That way they can perfectly blend in the base paint under normal gallery lights (if desired, this is not always desired) but they will always show up for someone who investigates the painting in the future. 1: All my knowledge about the topic comes from the aforementioned Baumgartner Restoration YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BaumgartnerRestoration https://www.youtube.com/c/BaumgartnerRestoration
- AdamJacobMuller 3y agoIf you watch Baumgartner's channel (as you do) this is a topic he is probably most careful about. He knows his first duty is to do nothing which can not be undone. Conservation paints and isolation layers are critical.
- londons_explore 3y agoTrue... But what when the conservators work itself becomes a historic artifact? In the 25th century, there may be no way to separate and keep both the 15th century artwork and the 21st century conservators work.
- db48x 3y agoOnly if nobody cleans the thing for four centuries, and also we lose all knowledge of how the conservation was done.
- drittich 3y agoThis sounds a lot like software developers, except replace decade with 6 months.
- joshspankit 3y ago“The first order of business is to blame everything on the guy before me.”
- AdamJacobMuller 3y agoAn experienced conservator (such as Baumgartner) would know how little he knows and would proceed with extraordinary caution if faced with the prospect of restoring a Van Gogh. I suspect, if given the job, he would only do it in incredibly small steps with deep collaboration with his peers. I've watched how cautiously he approaches paintings which (while admittedly beautiful) don't have 1% of the historical significance of a Van Gogh.
- ChrisRR 3y agoThey wouldn't know "exactly" what to do. Just like every discipline there's many different ways to skin a cat, pros/cons, aims.
- internet101010 3y agoThey'll just have someone do it for free in exchange for IP rights so that nobody can ever take a photo of it.
- rasz 3y agoSimilar dilemmas in vintage car collecting circles. Some like them fully restored to pristine condition, others leave patina and every imperfection as is. For example this “King Leopold” Bugatti 59 https://youtu.be/MzZIk05pAJ8?feature=shared&t=1017 https://youtu.be/MzZIk05pAJ8?feature=shared&t=1017 sold for $12mil few years back https://luxurylaunches.com/auctions/a-vintage-bugatti-type-59-race-car-once-owned-by-belgiums-king-leopold-iii-set-a-new-auction-record-by-selling-for-12-5-million.php https://luxurylaunches.com/auctions/a-vintage-bugatti-type-5...
- zamalek 3y agoAfter further research, can Gogh might have used paints with ingredients that brown over time. What a pity!
- Aunche 3y agoAs the name implies Baumgartner is a restorer, not a conservator. Conservators tend to consider his methods rather aggressive, though I imagine part of it is being envious of his popularity. If you just want to spend a moderate sum of money to make your family heirloom look nice, you probably don't care about the .01% of original paint that gets lost.
- AdamJacobMuller 3y agoIf you watch his channel, he absolutely considers himself a conservator.
- zamalek 3y agoI'm genuinely interested to read some of these critiques that you are referring to.
- AdamJacobMuller 3y agoI'm not the only technical person who likes his channel! His channel hits this incredible niche between science (his knowledge of how the various cleaning methods, glues, paints and varnishes he uses interact with each other is amazing), the technical (one of the first videos of his I saw was the vacuum table build and the rigs he's built to save some of the wood panel paintings are amazing), and the meditative (as he would say, sometimes there is no better way to clean a painting than sitting there for 12, 24, 72 hours with cotton balls). I'm a bit sad that they don't allow someone like him to work on paintings of this vintage. I know a Van Gogh is extraordinarily perhaps incalculably valuable but I would absolutely love to see paintings as they were when the artist first painted them (or at least closer), especially Van Gogh. The transformations on some the paintings Baumgartner has done are astonishing and can completely change the tone or meaning of a painting.