Conservation and Museum Studies

This publication brings together prominent art historians, conservators, and scientists to discuss fresh approaches to the study of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern works of bronze. Featuring significant bronzes from the Harvard Art Museums’ holdings as well as other museum collections, the volume’s eight essays present technical and formal analyses in a format that will be useful for both general readers and students of ancient art. The text provides an overview of ancient manufacturing processes as well as modern methods of scientific examination, and it focuses on objects as diverse as large-scale statuary and more utilitarian armor, vessels, and lamps. Filling a current gap in the art historical literature, this book offers a much-needed, accessible introduction to ancient bronzes.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744–1818) was one of the most talented still-life painters of the French school. Her exquisite paintings, today located in some of the world’s finest museums, were admired and collected by many of her contemporaries, including Marie Antoinette, who became the artist’s most important patron.

This book, the first devoted to Vallayer-Coster in over 30 years, presents a stunning array of the artist’s still-life works, many of which have never before been reproduced in color. Recently rediscovered works, including three royal portraits from the collection of Versailles and a hitherto unknown pastel of Marie-Antoinette, are published here for the first time. The authors draw on the most current research to examine Vallayer-Coster’s relationship with landscape painter Joseph Vernet; her response to her immediate predecessor, still-life painter Jean-Siméon Chardin; her role with contemporary collectors of her art; and her place in the larger context of the eighteenth-century art world. The book also includes new archival and conservation findings and an illustrated index of extant paintings by Vallayer-Coster.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*

This important book is the first full-scale exploration of Impressionist technique. Focusing on the easel-painted work of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cézanne, Cassatt, Morisot, Caillebotte, Sisley, and Degas in the period before 1900, it places their methods and materials in a historical perspective and evaluates their origins, novelty, and meanings within the visual formation of urban modernity.

Drawing on scientific studies of pigments and materials, artists’ treatises, colormens’ archives, and contemporary and modern accounts, Anthea Callen demonstrates how raw materials and paintings are profoundly interdependent. She analyzes the material constituents of oil painting and the complex processes of “making” entailed in all aspects of artistic production, discussing in particular oil painting methods for landscapists and the impact of plein air light on figure painting, studio practice, and display. Insisting that the meanings of paintings are constituted by and within the cultural matrices that produced them, Callen argues that the real “modernity” of the Impressionist enterprise lies in the painters’ material practices. Bold brushwork, unpolished, sketchy surfaces, and bright, “primitive” colors were combined with their subject matter—the effects of light, the individual sensation made visible—to establish the modern as visual.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

In the late medieval and Renaissance period, paper transformed society—not only through its role in the invention of print but also in the way it influenced artistic production. The Art of Paper tells the history of this medium in the context of the artist’s workshop from the thirteenth century, when it was imported to Europe from Africa, to the sixteenth century, when European paper was exported to the colonies of New Spain. In this pathbreaking work, Caroline Fowler approaches the topic culturally rather than technically, deftly exploring the way paper shaped concepts of authorship, preservation, and the transmission of ideas during this period. This book both tells a transcultural history of paper from the Cairo Genizah to the Mesoamerican manuscript and examines how paper became “Europeanized” through the various mechanisms of the watermark, colonization, and the philosophy of John Locke. Ultimately, Fowler demonstrates how paper—as refuse and rags transformed into white surface—informed the works for which it was used, as well as artists’ thinking more broadly, across the early modern world.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

This essential guide features individual entries of exceptional frames from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. An essay by Steven Starling charts the development and stylistic history of frames, referencing examples included in the catalogue. Additionally, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset's foundational essay illuminates the large, broader conceptual issues associated with the subject. The book includes a glossary of terms and an extensive, interdisciplinary bibliography.

Barnett Newman (1905–1970), one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, has captivated critics, scholars, and the general public for decades. This definitive catalogue raisonné presents Newman’s entire oeuvre—paintings, drawings, sculpture, graphics, an architectural model, lost and unfinished works, and ephemera. Featured elements include color reproductions; extensive provenance, exhibition, and publication histories; and a listing of the contents of the artist’s library at the time of his death.

In addition to the catalogue raisonné prepared by Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, the book offers revelatory essays on the artist, his career, and his working methods and features fascinating photographs of Newman, his studios, and his installations. Richard Shiff draws on new documentation to explain why Newman chose to create abstract art, how he achieved “fullness” in his paintings, and how his works exemplify the social functions of an artist. Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro reveals extraordinary details about Newman’s studio practice and materials and techniques, information not available to the public before because Newman only allowed his wife to observe him at work. Mancusi-Ungaro also discusses the fate of works that were damaged while traveling to exhibitions or by vandals.

*The eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

This fascinating volume explores how research, craft, and technology are united in the Art Institute of Chicago’s mission to preserve its collection and further art-historical knowledge. Addressing the many challenges conservators face, the publication highlights their work on objects from throughout the museum, including books, furniture, electronic media, paintings, photographs, posters, sculpture, and textiles.

An introductory essay traces the development of the profession and its specific history at the Art Institute. Case studies written by the museum’s conservators and curators examine diverse works ranging from an ancient Egyptian statue of Osiris to Bruce Nauman’s video Clown Torture. The authors explore how they determine appropriate treatment, uncover an artist’s intentions and techniques, and employ pathbreaking new technologies.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

From personal ornamentation to funerary practice, from palace decoration to private devotion, jade has played a major role in Chinese social, cultural, and political life for millennia. Exploring the history of this revered stone through the esteemed Grenville L. Winthrop Collection at the Harvard Art Museums—which includes some of the finest examples of ancient and archaizing jades outside China—this volume explains how and why jade developed its special significance. In-depth entries on over one hundred objects present recent archaeological discoveries and new information garnered from conservation analysis, while Jenny So’s broad and engaging narrative not only elucidates the layered meanings of the objects and their iconography but also delves into the unique qualities of the material and the craftsmanship involved in quarrying and working jade.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

This fascinating and enlightening book presents a rich variety of European tapestries from the Art Institute of Chicago's collection. These exquisite tapestries include medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque examples, manufactured at almost all the major centers of production in many of the foremost workshops. Among the works discussed are The Annunciation, a Renaissance masterpiece designed by an artist in the circle of Mantegna; Autumn and Winter, based on designs by Charles Le Brun; and The Elephant, woven after a design by Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer. An international team of scholars explain the history of this previously unpublished collection and offer new designer and workshop attributions, design and source identifications, and provenance information.

High-resolution images of these magnificent works are provided throughout the text and can easily be enlarged for careful study.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*

With this volume, the National Gallery of Art introduces a journal presenting the latest conservation research on works in its collection. Named for “the manner in which things are made,” Facture addresses aspects of conservation from treatment and technical art history to scientific research.

The inaugural volume focuses on great works of the Renaissance, studying sculpture, painting, and drawing from various points of view. With the publication of this biennial journal, the National Gallery maintains a tradition of fostering dialogue among art historians, scientists, and conservators working in the international museum community.


*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

Facture presents the latest conservation research on masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, spanning the early Renaissance through the present and encompassing a range of media.  Volume 2 examines great art of two very different eras—the Italian Renaissance and the 20th century—and puts in new contexts works such as Giotto’s  Madonna and Child,  bronze sculptures by Auguste Rodin, watercolors by John Marin, early paintings by Andy Warhol, and  Mark Rothko’s multiforms, which mark the birth of his abstraction.  Seven essays are illustrated with outstandingly detailed photography and share a common approach. They each begin with meticulous material and analytical study of the work and then place the findings in a broader historical context, providing new perspectives on well-known works.  A fascinating contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on art, this publication extends a tradition of fostering dialogue among art historians, scientists, and conservators in the international community.


*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

This volume of Facture, a biennial journal that presents the latest conservation research on works of art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, focuses exclusively on conservation treatment, technical art history, and scientific research related to masterpieces by the beloved French artist Edgar Degas (1834–1917).  The National Gallery’s extraordinary collection of sculptures, paintings, and works on paper by Degas, including an incomparable group of his wax sculptures—among them his iconic Little Dancer Aged Fourteen—allows the institution to contribute significantly to understanding the artist’s methods and intentions. This volume features discussions of the notion of “finish” in Degas’s paintings, the complex makeup of his wax sculptures, the casting of posthumous bronzes, his innovative use of multiple layers of pastel and fixative in a late work on paper, and even a sonnet that Degas wrote to his “little dancer.”