The moment I became entranced by paper and
graphic media remains intensely clear. It was late at night
in the art department in the old Allyn building at Southern
Illinois University in Carbondale. I wandered into the
etching studio and it hit me: the smell and tones of fine
paper, the aroma of etching ink. Wow. It’s a feeling I often
re-experience in the morning when I first step into my
conservation studio. That night the course was set.
This is not to say that there was no prelude to incident. I
began to draw before I could speak. There were the grade
school linoleum blocks. Around the age of thirteen or
fourteen, I resorted to my bedroom to teach myself the
rudiments of pen and ink technique by cribbing the styles of
Skip Williamson and Robert Crumb from underground comic
books. However, ceramics was a love and I had chosen to
attend S. I. U. in order to study outdoor monumental
ceramics with Nicholas Vergette. Professor Vergette passed
away three months prior to my arrival to campus and I lost
my polestar. Drawings and prints and their related
materials have provided a steady source of inspiration ever
since that evening in the Allyn building. They also provided
a path to my first great teacher.
A master draftsman and printmaker, Herbert Fink (1921 -
2006) was one of those rare individuals who redirect and
focus. Herb graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design
and received his M .F. A. from Yale, a student of Josef
Albers. I was but one of many who were touched by Herb
between the time that he arrived at S. I. U. in 1961 to the
when he retired Emeritus in 1987. Herb taught me about
silver point drawings, pointed me towards Old Master prints
and set up my first visit to a print room with an
appointment at the Art Institute of Chicago to see works by
Rodolphe Bresdin.
It was extremely fortunate to attend an art program which
stressed the acquisition of skills. Hours were spent drawing
the figure. Traditional methods were honored. Professors
made it clear that there were no short cuts. Since
graduating in 1979 I have not held a job that did not deal
with art on paper.
Returning to my hometown in Indiana upon graduation, my
first job was as a picture framer in the backroom of an art
supply store in a strip mall on the north side of
Indianapolis. I made prints and drawings and entered local
and regional juried shows winning a few prizes. The return
to Indiana would prove fortunate in many regards. The
revival in handmade paper which began in the 1970's was
gaining momentum. Twinrocker paper was an important early
hand paper mill in Brookston, Indiana. Through the local art
league, I attended daylong workshops with Kathryn and Howard
Clark on western handmade
paper and later, one with Timothy Barrett on Japanese paper.
Also in this period I received my first training in paper
conservation by attending a threeday workshop on print
restoration taught by pioneer paper conservator and founder
of the Northeast Document Conservation Center, George Cunha
(1912-1994) at the University of Louisville.
By the time the decision to train as a paper conservator was
made I was already well on the way. My love for paper,
prints and drawings was fostered while an undergraduate art
student. Good fortune had allowed me to study papermaking
and gain exposure to some basic training. Little does one
realize when making a decision the worlds and opportunities
that lay ahead. My goal became acceptance to one of the
three graduate training programs for art conservation to
train as a paper conservator. In order to be considered for
acceptance to a graduate program, further study was
necessary in art history and chemistry and practical
experience in a conservation lab strongly advised.
The course ahead was rigorous. During one period in the
years that followed my decision I found myself working
fulltime, volunteering in the paper conservation lab at the
Indiana Historical Society and going to night school for
chemistry. It was a difficult time. Encouraged to apply to
the programs as early as possible, in order to gain
attention, I was returning from chemistry class one day,
driving in a minor blizzard. My truck gave out along the way
so I walked the final mile home to find my rejection letter
in the mailbox.
However my efforts were rewarded, at times in flukey ways.
Dr. Leon Stodulski, former
conservation scientist at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard
University, turned up as a lab instructor at the local
Purdue University extension campus in Indianapolis. Dr.
Stodulski would write a letter of recommendation when my
second application to graduate school was submitted. An
acquaintance had been made with Martin Krause, Curator of
Prints and Drawings at the Indianapolis Museum of Art while
taking his course on the history of printmaking at the
Herron School of Art. When the position of printroom manager
came open at the museum, it was offered to me. The
opportunity to talk about prints with Marty,
be present when dealers came through and examine the
contents of solander boxes at will was tremendous. The job
mainly entailed prepping print and drawing exhibitions and
maintaining the collection. The printroom was on the same
floor as the library and as long as the work flowed my time
was largely my own. It was in the print department at the
Indianapolis Museum of Art where my education truly took
another step.
By the time my second application to the graduate schools
was submitted, they really couldn’t deny me and they didn’t.
My resume says SUNY-Buffalo but my class was the last to
attend two years at the conservation program in Cooperstown.
The building for the graduate program was perched on the
edge of an upstate New York finger lake with a wildlife
station in the basement, about a mile north of town.
Cooperstown had but one stoplight and very long winters.
There was little to do but study and one normally devoted at
least fourteen hours a day to the endeavor.
Attending the Buffalo Art Conservation Program made
everything which has followed possible. It was there that my
eyes were opened to the rich world of paper and artist’s
materials. In many ways the conservation program was the
best fine arts program I could have attended as it exposed
me to the history of technique and media. A secondary
advantage was having checkout privileges at the New York
State Historical Society where I could take home first
editions by the western explorer Zebulon Pike, artist and
museum founder Charles Wilson Peale and early botanists, the
Michauxs. The two years of class work,
interspersed with summer internships in Oklahoma City and
Kansas City, passed quickly in retrospect but were
interminable at times during those long dark upstate
winters.
The reputation of Marjorie B. Cohn looms large in the field
of paper conservation. Author of an extensive number of
articles and numerous books, one of the most important being
Wash and Gouache: A Study of the Development of the
Materials of Watercolor, she
also revised and expanded the print identification classic
by William M. Ivins, Jr., How Prints Look. Jerry would later
serve as Curator of Prints at the Fogg and as Acting
Director of the museum. Advanced Internships at the Strauss
Center for Conservation and Technical Studies were open to
both third-year and postgraduate conservation students and
highly sought.
The bar was set high for Jerry’s students. An example: on
the first day of the internship I arrived to find a stack of
Old Master prints on my work table to be examined and
treated. They were being deaccessioned to raise funds for
the purchase of the Spencer Albums. One of the prints,
Supper at Emmaus by Rembrandt had a large tear extending
downward from the right upper edge. Three times the tear was
mended before the effort met with satisfaction. When the
catalogue for the auction containing the print came out, the
mended tear went unmentioned. Jerry’s reaction was one of
bemusement and chagrin at the small bit of hoodwinkery that
had been pulled off unintentionally and pride in the
achievement of her student.
Jerry was endlessly encouraging. I requested and received
time to “simply look” Every Friday
afternoon my co-intern and I would go to the print room or
drawing study. There we poured over impressions by
Rembrandt, Durer and Ugo di Carpi. I will long remember the
pleasure of sitting in the drawing study room and holding a
framed William Blake watercolor on my lap. The paper
conservation lab served as a focal point at the Fogg for art
history students and professors alike. Scholars such as
Stuart Cary Welch and Seymour Slive would drop by
unannounced to chat about goings-on in the art and museum
world. Jerry was an active collector and shared this
enthusiasm openly with her interns. She was pleased when she
could loan funds to a student to purchase a desirable find.
I had started collecting art on
paper while in Cooperstown with a plate from Alexander
Wilson’s Ornithology and a 1671 view of Mexico City found in
the drawers of a local frame shop. In Cambridge my Saturdays
were often spent visiting antique and junk shops. It was the
discovery of an unsigned, 19th-century watercolor of a dead
finch, exquisite in detail and rich in color that inspired
the kindest accolade Jerry could have delivered. Upon
showing the work to her, Jerry said in a rather subdued,
matter of fact
tone that I possessed “the eye”. Her only disappointment was
that it wasn’t necessary to extend a loan for the purchase.
During the Fogg internship my investigation began into the
history of the restoration of prints. The point of
transition from my viewing prints (and drawings) as
aesthetic objects to cultural objects is difficult to
establish. It was in the first weeks of arrival at the Fogg
that I began to peruse 19th-century print collector’s
manuals. Many contained directions for restoring prints. I
grew increasingly fascinated with the history of print
collecting. In need of a research project required by the
internship, I mentioned my interest and initial forays to
Jerry who said she thought the subject would make a good
project. Bang! The green
light went on and I was off and running with the subject
which would occupy my fascination and open many wonderful
doors. In the following years I poured through every
historic collector’s manual, artist’s instruction manual and
compendia of popular receipt that could be located looking
for early restoration instructions. I sifted through print
collections and spoke (endlessly, it must have seemed) to
curators, conservators and dealers in the United States,
Canada and in Europe. It has been a wonderful education in
the world of prints and paper.
Marjorie Cohn was my finest teacher. I will always be
touched and impressed her devotion to her students and to
the Fogg. It was at the Fogg that I began to fully grasp the
breadth of the undertaking required to conserve a work of
art.
The next move was to Washington, D.C. where I had been
awarded a post-graduate Mellon
Fellowship in the paper conservation lab at the National
Gallery of Art. In contrast to the cozy and familiar
confines of the Fogg, the National Gallery was a bit cold
and corporate. However the art and facilities were top tier
and the fellowship allowed the time and funds to continue
research into the history of print restoration. As a result
of the generosity of the Mellon Foundation, which included a
stipend for travel the high
points of the fellowship were two research trips to Europe.
The first consisted of three weeks in England where I met
with paper conservators at the British Museum as well as
private restorers Jane McAusland and Philip Stevens.
Research was undertaken at the Bodleian Library in Oxford,
the National Fine Arts Library, the Royal Academy of
Science, the library at the house of Sir John Sloane
and of course, the British Library. It was at the British
Library where the earliest known written instructions for
the restoration of prints were found in the de Mayerne
manuscript.
The second trip was made to Amsterdam where I met with paper
conservators at the Rijksmuseum and the Tylers Museum in
Haarlem. Other meetings were held with Ernst Van Wetering of
the Rembrandt Project and print dealer Theo Laurentius. One
of the sweetest afternoons of my life was spent sipping tea
and eating chocolates and orange sections in the
eighteenth-century orangerie outside Leiden where Mr.
Laurentius lived with his family, discussing prints and
paper while he played the dulcimer and hurdy-gurdy from his
collection of antique musical instruments. While in the
Netherlands trips were made to the Rembrandt House, the
Koenigs-Boymans Museum in Rotterdam and the Plantin-Moretus
Museum
in Antwerp.
The two years spent in D.C. were a rich experience. Living a
mere seven blocks from the
Smithsonian Mall offered a unique opportunity to experience
the Capital and take in our nation’s rich collections.
However my Midwestern heart strings were pulling and I
longed to return to my homeland. So motivated, I did not
renew my Fellowship for its optional third year nor apply
for the entry level positions which opened at the time in
the paper conservation labs of both the Fogg and the
National Gallery. Rather, the sole application for
employment made was for an position open at the
Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.
I would be the third paper conservator at the Nelson within
a span of ten years. The prior two conservators had found
the position untenable as would I. Much is better left
unsaid. It will suffice to say that I was made out to be the
bad guy for taking the ashtray out of print storage. At my
urging the position of paper conservator was closed and the
museum has not had a staff paper conservator since 1993.While
the position was deeply problematic, the collection at the
Nelson is sterling. The
prints in many cases existed largely as they had come off
the market in the 1930's when the formation of the
collection was initiated by Paul Gardner, the museum’s first
director, with the input of John Bender. Gardner had been a
student of Paul Sachs at the Fogg. Sachs is recognized as
the founder of American drawings connoisseurship. Bender was
a prints and drawings dealer based in Kansas City who
purchased internationally and eventually gave both his
collection and his library to the Nelson. Together the two
men put together a core collection rich in desirable
impressions. The neglect that the collection had received in
the ensuing years meant that little had been done to the
prints in terms of their conservation. In the collection
were numerous prints which had received treatments which may
be described as surreptitious. False watermarks were present
in some cases as were examples of duplicitous mends and
inpainting. For an individual with my research interests the
collection was a goldmine.
At this point it is necessary to touch upon the personal as
it was at the Nelson that I met the
woman I would marry. We dated briefly before she left Kansas
City for doctoral studies in Chinese Art history at
Princeton University. For a year the relationship was
maintained before we married and I left the Nelson to follow
her to New Jersey. My first private conservation studio was
set up in the spare bedroom of our Princeton University
graduate student housing. While struggling to set up a
practice, full use was made of my checkout privileges at
Princeton. A personal study of antique Middle Eastern papers
was undertaken. It was during this period that the position
of Visiting Scholar was awarded and a semester was spent
teaching the history of paper and graphic materials at the
art conservation program at The Institute for Fine Arts at
New York University.
However, the marriage did not survive the stresses of the
situation. I returned to Kansas City to continue the private
practice which supports me to this day. After fifteen years
in private practice a tremendous amount of material has
passed over my work table. Some of it has been wonderful,
some mundane. I have treated dog-chewed art, gunshot art,
slashed art and trashed art and much that is inbetween.
There have been moments of great reward when treatments have
gone well and moments, not many fortunately, of utter terror
and dismay when treatments have gone awry. I consider myself
incredibly fortunate to be entrusted with the conservation
of private collectors' and institutions' works on paper and
count my blessings on a daily basis. For a kid who grew up
on his great grandfather’s farm in the sticks of Indiana its
been pretty wonderful. And it all traces back to a single,
serendipitous
moment in the Allyn Building.
^back to top |
