Rescuing MoMA’s Submerged “Swimming Pool”

In a previous post, I lamented the long-time disappearance from the Museum of Modern Art’s galleries of Matisse‘s late masterpiece, The Swimming Pool, a nine-panel mural in two parts (each 7 1/2 feet long), consisting of gouache-on-paper cutouts, pasted on white painted paper mounted on burlap.
Yesterday I caught up with my favorite MoMA curator, Matisse expert John Elderfield, at the contemporary-art press preview. Here’s what he told me about the Matisse:
The burlap on which it’s done has darkened very significantly. It’s a complicated issue because when you look at photographs of what it was like in his [Matisse’s] apartment, it’s clear that the burlap which it’s on isn’t the burlap that was on the wall of the apartment. I think what happened is that when the apartment was dismantled, they took the elements off the wall and put them on separate panels of burlap. They gave it a new background from the one it was before….
Since I’ve been looking at it, it’s clear to me it has darkened. [If you lift some of the paper from the burlap], it’s definitely paler underneath. [Now] it’s warmer. It’s redder than it was….
Our conservators have been pondering this for a long time: Are we ethically allowed to change the background?…[There are] two ways: one of them is to get new burlap and the other is to take the [paper] off and try to treat [the existing burlap]….
I feel that since the background is not original, we actually do have the lattitude to change it. It isn’t something that the artist did. I’m sure that one can now get material that looks like burlap but doesn’t degrade, but would we be justified in using some plastic?…
Our conservators have been pondering this for a long time….For them to do this is a huge task….We may have to do it out of the building….We WILL do it. I just feel a little uncomfortable showing it in the form that it is in now….
Sometimes these big things are ones which you tend to keep pushing away a little bit. I’m grateful to you for reminding me that this is something I’ve got to deal with this year.