Conserving lives

Last week we had a high treat in Cambridge. The Humanitas Visiting Professor in the History of Art at CRASSH (Centre for Arts in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) was Philippe de Montebello, previously director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for over 30 years. He gave a series of lectures on ‘The Multiple Lives of the Work of Art’, which I attended and tweeted.

Montebello gave us an engaging and wide-ranging tour through the history of art, highlighting overall how works are 3D objects and that they are changed irrevocably over time. Returning a work to its place of origin is therefore not the simple statement it sounds. Some of his examples were unusual and fascinating but overall I admit to being disappointed by these lectures. Similarly with the associated symposium at the end of last week, I came away wondering why we are still excited to find that works of art are not simply 2D images. I in no way claim to be ground breaking, but we based the ‘Things’ seminar on that basic assumption from the beginning. More than this, however, I felt that Montebello could have engaged us more uniquely. Occasionally he gave us glimpses into the life of the director of arguably the most important art museum in the world. I wanted so much more on the decision processes of acquisition, display, negotiation involved in that position.

One area that he did touch on which particularly piqued my interest was questions of conservation and restoration. In discussing the ‘multiple lives’ of works of art, Montebello showed us many examples of historical intervention in works: adding or removing elements, repairing, relocating and reinterpreting. These were the backbone of his whole series, and yet his attitude to how far these works should be conserved or restored seemed to rest solely on aesthetic considerations: the final decision being made on what looked best. Yet, surely the important point is to preserve these incredible multiple lives that make objects tell such wonderful stories? That is what I, at least, think marks out the stellar objects in modern museums. I even began to wonder whether the ‘Yellowism’ scrawl on one of Rothko’s Seagram murals (about which I blogged last month) should be kept, providing it doesn’t compromise the physical condition of the painting? After all, it tells many stories about the multiple lives of the work, which are arguably worth conserving.