Art + Artists

Conservation

Mia’s collection is held in public trust, for the benefit of all. Through the conservation of works of art in the collection, Mia ensures that it remains accessible for generations to come.

<h1>Art Champions</h1>
The restoration and conservation of artworks in Mia’s collection is an ever-present concern. Art Champions is a program that connects art lovers with artworks that require conservation to be displayed to the public.

Mia&#8217;s curators have worked with conservators to identify these artworks in need of conservation.

https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/15150931/mia_7007045-1200x673.jpg

https://new.artsmia.org/art-artists/conservation/art-champions/artworks-for-adoption/

An untitled painting by George Morrison, made in 1960, spent eighteen years lying on its back in storage—and for good reason. It certainly wasn’t unloved. The striking abstraction of an urban landscape had been hanging in an office at Mia for years, a favorite of one of the museum’s former directors. 
<a href="https://new.artsmia.org/stories/inherent-vice/" class="uppercase button button-link bg-none padding-none bottom-border-hover">Read More</a>

Inherent vice: Saving a beloved George Morrison painting from itself

https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/15151138/MorrisonUntitledFull1-1-1.jpg

An untitled painting by George Morrison, made in 1960, spent eighteen years lying on its back in storage—and for good reason.

It certainly wasn’t unloved. The striking abstraction of an urban landscape had been hanging in an office at Mia for years, a favorite of one of the museum's former directors. But in 1999, curators noticed that its condition was deteriorating. The painting had what is known in the conservation world as inherent vice: because of one or more of its intrinsic characteristics—in this case, Morrison's thick, topographical paint strokes—deterioration and self-destruction of the painting was inevitable.

The paint was actually weighing down the canvas, and as the canvas aged it could no longer support the sheer weight of the paint on the surface. The more years it spent hanging upright, the more slack the painting became. Conserving it was too costly at the time. So into storage it went, lying down in order to prevent further damage, as though it had been laid to rest.

[caption id="attachment_61707" align="alignright" width="350"]<a href="http://live-artsmia.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/MorrisonUntitledDetail.jpg"><img class="wp-image-61707" src="http://live-artsmia.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/MorrisonUntitledDetail.jpg" alt="A detail of George Morrison's untitled painting from 1960." width="350" height="263" /></a> A detail of George Morrison's untitled painting from 1960.[/caption]

But in 2015, when Mia acquired another Morrison painting, the untitled work was suddenly resurrected. Curators decided to have the painting moved to the Midwest Art Conservation Center and they worked together to acquire funding for the necessary restorative work. Heather Everhart, curatorial department assistant for the Paintings Department, brought the project to the attention of previous Adopt-a-Painting sponsor Paula Vesely. Vesely, a long-time Morrison admirer, was delighted to help.

MACC already had the perfect person for the job. David Marquis had been working as a conservator with the Midwest Art Conservation Center for thirty-three years when the Adopt-a-Painting funds to restore Morrison’s work were procured right—before his retirement.

As it happens, Marquis not only admired Morrison's work, he had taken painting classes with Morrison while an undergraduate. And when Marquis was earning his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Minnesota, Morrison served on his thesis committee. "If I had known when I was 25 that when I was 68 I'd be a conservator and working on one of George's pieces, I never could have imagined that," he said.

Morrison would pay graduate students to help move some of the large wood pieces he was working on in his studio, and Marquis was often among the hired help. "You know that wooden collage they've got up there?" Marquis said of Morrison's beloved <a href="https://collections.artsmia.org/art/2175/collage-ix-landscape-george-morrison">Collage IX: Landscape</a>, a staple of Mia's galleries. "I helped move that! Those things were so heavy."

Morrison's painting would finally be restored, but that didn't mean it would be easy. The work’s inherent vice meant that many stages of restoration were necessary. "The paint was stronger than the canvas, so it started making the canvas deform and do what it wanted to do," Marquis said. As a result, many passages of the painting were insecure and lifting, and required consolidation to prevent additional losses. And both consolidation and cleaning were challenging because of the thick texture of the paint. "In conservation, the painting always tells you what it needs," Marquis said. “But before you proceed on any treatment, you test and retest."

Over the course of about sixty treatment hours, Marquis reattached and consolidated areas of lifting and insecurity using a thermoplastic adhesive and controlled heat, filling in voids with pigments and wax. After the paint was secure, the highly textured surface was cleaned using a delicate "dry cleaning" technique normally used in paper conservation. The canvas was reattached to a new, heavier weight stretcher prepared with a "loose lining" for added support. Although the painting had not previously been framed, Marquis recommended it to further maintain the work's structural integrity, and a design was chosen that stylistically matched other framed Morrison pieces.

For Marquis, it was serendipity—this would be his last project as a conservator. "It just felt right that I should be doing that," he said. "I had a big personal as well as professional interest. After it had been in storage for so many years, I never thought I'd see that painting again. The odds of it happening at that particular time are pretty amazing."

The painting is back on view, after eighteen years of rest, and Marquis believes it would have the Morrison stamp of approval: "I think he’d be proud to see it as it is now."

Watch as Mia curators explain George Morrison's unique and sometimes uncomfortable place between two worlds, the New York art scene and his native roots in Minnesota.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3lSNwIkoVs

https://new.artsmia.org/stories/inherent-vice/

What do you notice when you look at a painting? Perhaps the composition strikes you first—the shapes, the colors, the lines. You might notice the depth created by thick or thin brush strokes. Then your field of vision zooms out and you notice the painting’s frame. 
<a href="https://new.artsmia.org/stories/new-frame-of-mind-monets-grainstack-gets-a-fresh-look-in-a-new-frame/" class="uppercase button button-link bg-none padding-none bottom-border-hover">Read More</a>

New frame of mind: Monet’s grainstack gets a fresh look in a new frame

https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/15150933/IMG_5880_edited-e15390182388911-1.jpg

What do you notice when you look at a painting? Perhaps the composition strikes you first—the shapes, the colors, the lines. You might notice the depth created by thick or thin brush strokes. Then your field of vision zooms out and you notice the painting’s frame. Is it simple and unadorned, drawing attention not to itself but rather to the artwork inside? Is it big, gold, and garish? Does it beg as much of your attention as the item it’s framing in a way that feels triumphal, or maybe too obtrusive? You may ask yourself, is this frame the one the painting is supposed to be in? 

Often the answer to that question is “no,” for a variety of reasons. Perhaps a painting’s original frame was removed and sold separately to accompany another artwork or a mirror. Maybe a wealthy patron who acquired a piece didn’t like its frame and commissioned a new one, which remained with the painting as it passed into a museum collection. There are many reasons why paintings you see in galleries may not be displayed in their original frames. If you want to view the painting in a context as close to the original as you can, a historically inappropriate frame could hinder that goal.

[caption id="attachment_67525" align="alignleft" width="450"]<a href="http://live-artsmia.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/mia_6000292.jpg"><img class="wp-image-67525" src="http://live-artsmia.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/mia_6000292.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="305" /></a> Claude Monet’s Grainstack, Sun in the Mist in its old frame.[/caption]

Which is exactly how Patrick Noon, Senior Curator of Paintings at Mia felt when he would look upon <a href="https://collections.artsmia.org/art/10436/grainstack-sun-in-the-mist-claude-monet">Claude Monet’s Grainstack, Sun in the Mist</a> and frown. “It came to us in that frame,” Noon said, speaking of the gold frame that had accompanied the Monet in Mia’s galleries for decades. But it was a modern frame, overly decorative, and the color was totally inappropriate. “It was distracting because you couldn’t see the picture for the frame. You either make the frame aesthetically part of the ensemble or you make it recede so it doesn’t compete with the painting.”

Luckily, thanks to the generosity of Doug and Mary Olson, Grainstack is finding new life. The Douglas and Mary Olson Frame Acquisition Fund, started in 1997, began as an effort by Mia’s previous paintings curator, George Keyes, to replace frames in the collection with historically accurate ones, an idea that piqued the interest of Doug and Mary. “We became aware of how important frames were way back in the eighties and nineties,” Mary said, “We realized the museum had an unmet need: a fund specific for frames!” The acquisition fund was first put to use replacing the frame on <a href="https://collections.artsmia.org/art/1689/the-smoker-edouard-manet">Édouard Manet’s The Smoker.</a>

[caption id="attachment_67526" align="alignright" width="450"]<a href="http://live-artsmia.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/mia_6001185.jpg"><img class="wp-image-67526" src="http://live-artsmia.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/mia_6001185.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="521" /></a> Édouard Manet’s The Smoker, reframed through the Douglas and Mary Olson Frame Acquisition Fund.[/caption]

But what of Monet’s Grainstack? Why was its dramatic frame with a detailed leafy motif inappropriate? According to Noon, nineteenth-century Impressionists like Monet weren’t exhibiting their work in the royally sanctioned Paris Salon to be purchased by wealthy patrons, but rather for art dealers who were catering to a new class of art buyers that was much more middle class. Traditional big art commissions from the church and state were disappearing, replaced by interested art buyers with expendable income looking to decorate their domestic spaces, not grand courtly palaces. French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel recognized the artistic potential of Impressionism early on, and established a market for it in Europe and the United States. To meet the needs of this new class of art buyers, he established a standardized Impressionist framing style. It was uniform for continuity, less expensive, and had much simpler designs. The function of Impressionist frames changed to suit this new paintings market.

But how do you find the right frame? Historically accurate impressionist frames aren’t exactly easy to come by on Amazon or your local craft store, so Mia contacted Paul Mitchell, a London-based frame dealer whose firm specializes in collecting and restoring antique frames. Paul’s son Mark visited the galleries with Noon in search of the next possible reframing project, and the Monet was an ideal candidate—the firm already had the perfect period appropriate frame in their stock. After some restoration and resizing work, the frame was ready to ship to Mia.

[caption id="attachment_67527" align="alignleft" width="450"]<a href="http://live-artsmia.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/IMG_4571.jpg"><img class="wp-image-67527" src="http://live-artsmia.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/IMG_4571.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="338" /></a> Jason Ressler unboxes the new Monet frame.[/caption]

Jason Ressler, Framing Technician at Mia, gave me a sneak peek of Monet’s new frame. The Louis XVI oak and gold leaf frame, made in the 1700s and attributed to François-Charles Butteux, is actually nearly a century older than Monet’s painting. But Noon points out that with its minimal articulation of motifs, the frame is extremely close to what Durand-Ruel was producing for Impressionist paintings a century later.

The delicate process of reframing a priceless work of art is no easy task. “It’s a nervous responsibility,” Ressler said, “You can’t be too careful working on something like that.” As a framing technician, Ressler is handling not one work of art, but two. “It’s pretty nerve-wracking to drill into a board that happens to be on a frame that’s 240 years old. It’s a zen practice, because you have to be mindful and stay present in the moment.”

[caption id="attachment_68860" align="alignright" width="450"]<a href="http://live-artsmia.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/IMG_5747_edited.jpg"><img class="wp-image-68860" src="http://live-artsmia.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/IMG_5747_edited.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="338" /></a> Framing technicians Jason Ressler and Sam Molstad remove the Monet from its original frame for storage.[/caption]

Ressler’s efforts are all in the service of an ideal in which Noon, the Olsons, and Ressler himself strongly believe.

“It’s exciting when I see someone staring deeply at a painting I’ve framed. It’s a quiet moment I can enjoy, knowing they’re really seeing the painting, not some problem with the frame,” Ressler remarked.

Noon notes that these frames are extremely important pieces of furniture. “They served the very important function of making the art within it more accessible. They needed to meld with the environment they were in,” he said, “There are all kinds of reasons why these things were important beyond protecting the painting.”

As for Mary Olson, she’s excited by the subtle but important change the new frame will have on her experience of the painting. 

“Most people look at a picture and they see what they see. But what you see is really affected by the frame. With the Monet, it really looks like a different painting! What I noticed so much more is it seemed there was more to it. More color, more variety. The frame it had been in was kind of a pink-gold, and there’s so much pink and lavender in the painting that that was really all you could see. Now you can see so much more depth, and it presents so much more animatedly. The right frame really makes the painting.”

Claude Monet’s Grainstack, Sun in the Mist is now on view in gallery 355.

Interested in contributing to the conservation of one of your favorite objects at Mia? Become an <a href="https://new.artsmia.org/art-artists/conservation/art-champions/">Art Champion</a> today!

New frame of mind: Monet's grainstack gets a fresh look in a new frame

https://new.artsmia.org/stories/new-frame-of-mind-monets-grainstack-gets-a-fresh-look-in-a-new-frame/

Conservation

Art Champions

Conservation Projects

Midwest Art Conservation Center