From Paris to Amsterdam, art restoration is becoming a win for museum footfall
Watching paint dry is suddenly en vogue. Paris’s Musée d’Orsay’s surprise hit this season is a look at the ongoing restoration of Gustave Courbet’s “Un Enterrement à Ornans” (A Burial at Ornans). It is the first major restoration of the 19th-century realist painter’s work. The process itself is happening in a side gallery behind plexiglass, where restorers from the Paris-based company Arcanes are put under the spotlight, working from scaffolding to reach the corners of this monumental, almost seven-metre-wide canvas – its sheer size meaning the work must be done on site. The exhibit’s huge success shows the rewards on offer to galleries that provide visitors more than just works on a wall.
Restoration jobs are bringing in the crowds across the continent. Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” is being cleaned up inside a specially designed glass chamber in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. As you read this, a team of eight restorers is removing layers of dirt and yellowing varnish to reveal the canvas’s true colours and dramatic chiaroscuro. Van Dyck’s “Equestrian Portrait of Charles I” was recently restored at the National Gallery in London and a more contemporary example, Rebecca Horn’s installation “Berlin (Room of the Wounded Ape)”, is being worked on in public at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin.
Restoration is not just a case of cleaning. It also involves decisions that reflect the thinking of different eras. The work begins with lengthy scientific tests, including X-rays, reflectography and hyperspectral imaging. Only then are restorers brought on site to work on lifting flakes of dried paint, mending cracks and correcting yellowing varnish. But perfection is a dangerous goal – perhaps viewers also want to witness the wear and tear of ancient art. The visual process of decay has its own sense of melancholic, emotive appeal. That’s why good restoration takes time; the clean-up of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” at the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan took 20 years. Though time-consuming and expensive, restorations can lead to major sales. “Salvator Mundi”, also by Da Vinci, sold for $450.3m (€384.8m) – the most expensive painting ever flogged at Christie’s – after a major fix-up.
As well as being an exacting science, this is artistic work that merits attention. And its allure comes from the feeling that a hallowed institution is letting you in on a secret. Take London’s new V&A East Storehouse – a working backstage storeroom designed to appeal to this new way of discovering art, artefacts and the expertise needed to curate and care for them. Art lovers’ thirst for new experiences and hidden details puts extra pressure on institutions already struggling to make ends meet. But for those who get it right, the potential rewards in terms of increased footfall are great. The attention economy demands eyeballs – many are trained daily on Courbet’s immortal burial.
Francesca Gavin is a London-based journalist and regular Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today. Suffering from museum fatigue? Tom Vanderbilt has the cure.
