Carol Vogel‘s NY Times report about what appear to have been do-it-yourself alterations under the auspices a previous owner of the Museum of Modern Art’s newly restored Pollock masterpiece, “One: Number 31, 1950” gave me traumatic flashbacks to the bombshell article by art historian Rosalind Kraus in the September/October 1974 issue of Art in America.
That shocking article had revealed alterations made to the painted surfaces of several David Smith sculptures under the auspices of an executor of the artist’s estate, the famed art critic Clement Greenberg, who “improved” Smith’s sculptures to enhance their appearance and, possibly, their marketability.
Describing the clumsy overpainting (now removed) that had been inflicted on the Pollock some time between 1962 and 1968, Vogel (informed by a conversation with MoMA’s chief conservator, James Coddington) wrote:
Presumably the later painting was an attempt to cover the cracks [in the painting’s surface], perhaps to make the painting more salable.
No responsible professional restorer would gunk up a painting’s original surface in the manner described and illustrated in this post on MoMA’s website. As noted in the same post by MoMA’s conservators, responsible restorers repair areas of damage by a delicate, sparing process of “retouching or inpainting,” not by wantonly painting over the artist’s original work.
In the fifth of their six posts on the progress of “One’s” conservation, MoMA’s conservators wrote on Mar. 14 that they would be “testing solvents that will dissolve the overpaint but not affect Pollock’s paint.”
Apparently they found one that they felt would do the trick. Presumably the previous “restorer” at least tried to follow one bedrock principle of conservation—that anything added to the painting during its treatment should be reversible.
Still, safely removing overpaint that has been added to hide and perhaps “stabilize” a cracked surface is risky at best.
What we don’t know for sure is whether any original Pollock paint has been inadvertently removed in the restoration process. I submitted a series of detailed questions about the just concluded conservation to MoMA and was told that any answers would have to await Coddington’s return to the museum on June 3. I have also requested but not yet received a complete record of its provenance.
The other big question is who owned the Pollock at the time of the botched restoration. As MoMA reported here, the painting was shown in its pre-restoration condition in “a detail photograph dating to 1962 and taken by a scholar (Charles Rhyne, an art historian at Reed College) in Portland, Oregon, when the painting was exhibited as part of the traveling exhibition organized by MoMA, “The Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller.” MoMA acquired the painting in 1968 and says that it never restored “One,” until now.
I’m going to try to scoot over to MoMA later today to view the restored painting, newly returned to the museum’s public galleries.