In spotless laboratories, well locked and hidden away in the basements of the world's great museums, hundreds of men in white smocks are working feverishly, day in and day out, at "restoring" art masterpieces. They can take a brown, wrinkled, flaking canvas and turn it into a picture that looks like new. They can also turn Rembrandt's Night Watch into a Day Watch, expose an extra pair of ears on the Van Eyck brothers' Adoration of the Lamb, or transform Brueghel's Hunters in the Snow from a haunting evocation of winter dusk into a Grandma Moses-type picture of sparkling noontime cheer. The restorer's results are unquestionably dramatic, but is the drama comedy or tragedy?
Expert opinion on the subject divides down the middle, with surprisingly few fence sitters of importance. The controversy is intense. Every time a masterpiece emerges from the laboratory looking strangely changed, someone objects. But the museums can do as they like, and most of them favor restoration that includes stringent cleaning. Artists, on the whole, oppose it. Art News recently called for a moratorium on it. And last week Manhattan Painter Frank Mason was rounding up artists' signatures for a petition demanding a moratorium on all art restoration work at the Metropolitan Museum. Says Mason bitterly: "The least safe place for your paintings is a museum; they will be skinned alive."
Among the top defenders of modern restoration:
Daniel Catton Rich, director of Massachusetts' Worcester Art Museum: "Most of the attacks on museum cleaning are made by ignorant people who don't know what they're talking about. In the last ten years there has been much more careful restoration than at any time in the history of the world."
Carlo Barbieri, art critic for Naples' // Mattino: "Italy's artistic patrimony has been saved by the work of restorers, especially in the removal of frescoes from damp and crumbling walls and the transferring of paintings to new canvases."
Paul Coremans of the University of Ghent (and a top restorer): "More than half the restoration work now done is good to excellent. A painting, after all, is matter, different layers of matter. Modern science can define each of the layers, can see which one is deteriorating and needs conservation."
Stefan Slabczynski, chief restorer at London's Tate Gallery: "So many people are involved and so many tests are done that it is practically impossible to damage something. A mass of chemical equipment is used, every picture is scrupulously documented, and proof positive is needed for what is done."
Among those not in favor:
Germain Bazin, chief curator of the Louvre: "Our age is in the act of destroying its artistic patrimony. Modern restorers of the Anglo-Saxon school are inspired by the taste for modern painting. They want old masters to shine like contemporary art, which stresses contrasting tones. Old painting was concerned with harmonies, and the passage of one tone into another through half tones. When
Renoir's Boating Party was lent to us by the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington people who knew the canvas 20 years ago didn't recognize it. It had been cleaned, and all the half-tone passages were gone."