"Secret Life of Drawings' at the Getty in LA

Not to be outdone by the fine recent drawing shows at the Morgan Library and the Frick Collection in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles has mounted one of its own, drawn exclusively from its extensive collection. There's a difference, though: The Getty show focuses not on the drawings themselves— first-rate as the 30 on display from the 15th through the 18th Centuries are— but on the problems of conservation.

Works of art are artifacts: material entities that in the course of time are subject to damage or decay. Architectural works sometimes wear their ravages as a badge of honor, and an aesthetic of ruin, derived from the recovery of classical antiquity in the Renaissance, runs through our art experience to the present day.

The Parthenon today is a ruin, but as such a heroic emblem of resistance to time. We don't wish it to decay further— the task of conservation— but we'd regard it as something lost as well as gained if it could be miraculously restored to its original condition, and as vulgar if someone were to attempt a replica of it.

(These strictures of taste obviously don't apply to the Barnes Foundation, where a ruin is in the process of being made solely for the purpose of creating an inferior replica.)

Architecture may wear its age nobly, but with paintings and frescoes the issues of conservation become more complex. The recent debate over the "restoration" of The Gross Clinic is a case in point. Patina can add richness and value to an old painting, but dirt, grime, and flaking are another matter. Without periodic conservation, paintings will eventually deteriorate and, in the course of time, disappear.

The most fragile medium

This is all the more urgent a question in the case of drawings. Apart from certain fabrics, nothing is more subject to decay than paper. The very materials that mark them may hasten the process. Many Renaissance masters used iron gall ink in their drawings, whose acid content attacked the paper as soon as it dried, and eventually bled the design itself. Worms bored holes in it; insects deposited their excrement on it; mold attacked it.

Human handling and tinkering add their share of damage. Drawings can be cropped or folded, or torn or defaced in being dismounted and moved. If the paper has been "prepared"— that is, colored— this too will alter the drawing with time, thus changing the tonality of the composition and the effects of various inks, washings and highlighting.

Finally, there is the problem of earlier, clumsier and sometimes destructive conservation efforts. Imagine an aged human face, with its wrinkles and rills, its moles and spots, its pallor or darkening, its features being slowly twisted into a caricature of itself. This, too, is the fate of drawing.

The question in all conservation is where it crosses the line into restoration, and at what point the restorer substitutes his own aesthetic judgment for the artist's.

A beetle's missing feeler

A case in point is Dürer's celebrated drawing of a beetle, one of the iconic works of the German Renaissance. It's on display in the Getty exhibit, and its principal problem was that the upper left edge of the original sheet was torn off, taking with it part of the beetle's left feeler. Restoration has seamlessly replaced the torn edge, and the restorer's hand the missing feeler.

Surely, the damaged original would have been a less pretty composition to look at, and the work has been finely done: It would take a fellow conservator or an exacting connoisseur to tell where Dürer's work left off and another's began. But it's a choice, and a choice not often confessed.

A part of this drawing is, from the purist's point of view, a fake. The strictest purity, carried to its logical conclusion, would preclude conservation of any kind, and leave the task of judgment to the worms. Of course, they will have the last say in any case. It is between the two extremes— willful revision or benign neglect— that the conservator's task lies.

Conservative or aggressive?

If one rejects purism, then some things are reasonably easy to agree on. Small holes can be repaired, excrement removed and the effects of foxing (mold growth) removed or at least reduced. Frayed edges are a knottier problem, and filling in or touching up actual strokes is the hardest one of all. The question is whether the conservator's task is to halt actual decay, smooth folds and erase blemishes that needlessly detract from the viewer's experience of the composition, or to reverse time and accident and attempt to restore the drawing to its original condition as far as possible.

The Getty staff describes its position as conservative, but some of its measures— such as that reattached Dürer feeler— might well be considered aggressive. Without a more detailed description of the conservation of each individual piece, it's difficult to form a judgment.

Still, the Getty show lifts the veil from the backroom trade secrets of the museum world, at least in part. Art is far more regularly spruced up than most casual viewers would suspect, and conservators form a kind of secret guild within the museum world. Given the financial exigencies that drive museums today and the hucksterism with which many of them display their wares, the pressure on conservators to make the product look its best may be no small factor in how your local Michelangelo or Rembrandt actually appears.

Hidden bonuses

Conservation does produce the occasional bonus. Several of the drawings in the Getty exhibit turned out to be double-sided, the verso side having been concealed by backing or mounting. These include Carpaccio's portraits of God the Father and a standing Christ, the latter a masterpiece.

One work, a study by Polidoro da Caravaggio, is actually a composite, with the work of other unknown artists pasted onto Polidoro's own sheet. There's also a counterfeit Dürer, with the master's characteristic signature rather indifferently faked.

Most Renaissance drawings were worksheets or cartoons pricked for transfer to canvas; fully worked presentation copies are rare. Much of their fascination lies precisely in this, for one can see the creative process immediately at work, and many sheets tossed off casually have a freedom and spontaneity that's lacking in more finished works. This impression is also related to the fragility of the materials: inks that bleed, washes that blur, paper that frays.

We want, from conservation, two contradictory things: authenticity— the work itself, as time and chance bequeath it— and the clarity of the original vision, the work as it came fresh from the hand of the artist. But when the artist releases it, it passes inevitably into the keeping of others.

One can only hope that the last hands to touch it are the most sensitive, scrupulous and caring. Conservation, rightly understood and rightly practiced, is not only an exacting craft. It's also an ethical discipline.♦


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