Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic â A suitable Case for ... - Artwatch

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that has since darkened enough to be used as oneof the justifications for the most recent restorationof the painting last year (- but see photograph andcaption comments at top right). The days whenmuseums could credibly refuse to admit thatpaintings were damaged by past restorations havepassed and it has become increasingly common tosee labels next to paintings admitting suchunfortunate occurrences. At the MetropolitanMuseum’s 2008 exhibition “The Age ofRembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The MetropolitanMuseum of Art”, for example, numerous paintingswere accompanied by specific acknowledgementsof past restoration-induced injuries. ThePhiladelphia Museum of Art’s decision to restorethe Gross Clinic is another example of this newtrend – but one, as will be seen, with a crucialdifference.that publicly released and disseminated images mightfirst be, as an officer of the museum’s press officeconfirms, “colour-corrected”. (For another example of amajor museum hitting the photographic buffers with itscolour corrections, see our post of January 20th 2011. Forthe variations of photographic records that exist withinthe highest levels of the museum world, see our post ofJanuary 10th 2011.) With such apparent difficulties ofdetermining photographic accuracy in mind, it makes onewonder how a painting might be said to have beenaccurately restored when relying heavily on the testimonyof a 96 year-old photo that was taken in unknownlighting conditions. With the withdrawal of the originalmarkedly yellow and warm-toned photographic record ofthe picture’s pre-restoration condition, a relativelynarrow chromatic band is occupied by the before andafter treatment photographic records when thediscoloured state of the varnish had itself been cited asone of the reasons why the picture required treatmentagain after its restoration of 1961.It is almost inevitable that each new generation ofrestorers views itself as superior to itspredecessors. Perhaps restorers today are morecautious than those of a half-century ago and it isencouraging to see that with the benefit ofhindsight many earlier harmful practices havebeen abandoned. With new developments in x-radiographs, infrared reflectography,chromatography and other specialized equipment,restorers certainly have a lot more technical (if notartistic) information at their disposal, but thequestion remains: what does this mean for the artitself?In the case of the 2010 restoration of the GrossClinic, it meant that Mark Tucker, SeniorConservator of Paintings at the PhiladelphiaMuseum of Art, with a team of restorers, includinga Mellon Fellow in Conservation, felt sufficientlyconfident in this new technology to undertake thetask of repainting large portions of ThomasEakins’ masterpiece in an attempt to bring it backto the way Eakins had intended it to be seen. Atbest, however, this could only have been apartially realisable goal. Attempting to return apainting to its original condition is, on its own, anarea of great debate. With age, paintings acquirepatinas and, as with all objects, time takes its toll.What makes this restoration the more troubling isthe fact that the latest restorers in the chain arenot trying to bring it back to its (supposed)original condition, but rather to a specificcondition that is represented in photographs froma period more than thirty years after the paintingwas completed and after the painting had alreadybeen lined with an ironed-on backing canvas – aprocedure now widely acknowledged to riskadversely effecting a painting’s appearance.Above: the (second) released photograph showing thepre-cleaned state of the Gross Clinic.Our concerns about the questionable nature ofthis enterprise have been compounded by thehttp://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/april-6th-2011/ Page 2 / 5
explanations that have been offered to usconcerning its execution. Mr. Tucker informs us,for example, that, in order to maximize theaccuracy of the placement of his own “inpainting”,tracings were made on clear Mylar filmfrom an enlargement of a photograph of thepainting taken in 1917. Some of these tracingswere cut out, “producing something that lookedlike a stencil”, and were used to “place smalltemporary reference marks that were useful inattaining an appearance in the restored damagesthat is as faithful as possible to the early imagesof the painting”. [Emphasis added.] Inferring whatan artist wanted his work to look like decades oreven centuries after it was made is problematicenough, but attempting to recreate one particularhistorical state of the painting based on black andwhite photography is problematic to say the least.Above: the Gross Clinic after cleaning but beforerepainting.In addition to the inherent problems presented byusing photography for this purpose at all, becauseno colour reproductions of the painting exist priorto the 1925 restoration, determining even theproper colours becomes itself a major issue. Whenasked how the freshly added colours weredetermined, Mr. Tucker replied that their colourchoices were:“based on a determination of the pigmentspresent in a preserved area of the original surface,on a direct visual match to the colour of the bestpreserved areas of the passageway, and on closeconsideration of the relationship between thecolours present on the painting and the tonesrecorded in the 1917 photograph”.This attempt itself raises concerns. Becausepigments vary greatly depending on their source,how can one be sure that the pigments used bytoday’s restorers will be the same as those usedby Eakins? Any artist who has bought raw umberfrom different manufacturers will immediatelynotice differences in colour “temperature” andvalue from one brand to another. If the latestrestorers were to say that it does not matter sincethe colours used were matched to the adjacentcolours that had survived on the painting, thequestion would arise: what, then, was the point ofeven “determining” the pigments that the artisthad originally used?Above: the Gross Clinic after cleaning and repainting.Although it is difficult when looking at the above“before”, “during” and “after” treatment images to knowwith any confidence what is Eakins and what might be aby-product of one restoration or another, there aresome areas where clear artistic choices can be seen tohave been made by the restoration team – but nonematch either the 1917 photograph, as mentioned left, orthe ink drawing as shown below. A good example of thisis the apparent lightening of the area to the viewer’sright of Dr. Gross and the “fuzzing” of the line above thecorridor. Perhaps the most dramatic change is the newprominence of the man standing in the corridor with hisarm extended. He is now sharp and clear, but stiff andnearly as dark as anything else in the picture. Had therestorers really been able to use the ink drawing to aid inthe restoration, we would expect to see a man whostands out as being lighter than his surroundings, withgood form and in a vest no darker than even the lightestparts of Dr Gross’s jacket. Instead, we see a bell-shapedman whose arms lack any of the modelling that wasapparent even in the (already many-times restored) pre-2010 restoration state.There would also be a question concerning thereliability of the tones present in the periodphotograph that was chosen as a point ofreference.The restorers have informed us that theyalso used a drawing made of the painting byEakins himself as a source of reference. But, asidefrom questions concerning the level of itsaccuracy to the original painting, the fact remainsthat the drawing is a different work of art from thehttp://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/april-6th-2011/ Page 3 / 5
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