In a sprawling, white-on-white lab here that looks like a set from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a British scientist named Thomas Learner recently lifted the top from a small box of slides, the kind that usually contain microscopic samples of bacteria or chemicals.
But this was a different kind of lab, and the slides were coated with dozens of shades of dried acrylic paint, at once as ordinary as house paint and as precious as rare isotopes. This is because the acrylics had been taken from the Santa Monica studio of Sam Francis, the abstract painter, who died in 1994 and who, like many artists of his generation, had largely abandoned the oils that had been the medium of painting for at least five centuries. Instead, he turned to their modern successors: acrylics, enamels, alkyds and many other substances that are more synthetic than organic.
The new paints, which began to emerge in the 1930s and made their way into many studios by the 1950s, allowed artists to do things they couldn't do with oil. Morris Louis used thinned acrylic to stain, rather than coat, canvases, creating an ethereal effect. Jackson Pollock used gloss enamel because it poured and dripped the way he wanted. Bridget Riley and Frank Stella both used ordinary house paints, Stella because they "had the nice dead kind of color" that he wanted, right out of the can.
But while conservators have inherited generations' worth of knowledge about oil paints, they know comparatively little about synthetics and how to protect the masterpieces created by using them, many of which are rapidly approaching the half-century mark.
Acrylics, for example, can leave surfaces softer than oil paints do, and so dust and dirt stick to them more easily. The surfaces can also be breeding grounds for mold. How should they be cleaned? Or transported? What should the temperature and humidity be in the museums where they are displayed? And what can institutions do — besides panic or weep — if real problems arise, if a deep red on a Mark Rothko painting slowly becomes a pale blue, for example, or if cracks appear in a Pollock easily worth tens of millions of US dollars? (These two crises have arisen in recent years.)
In 2002 the Getty Conservation Institute here, working with the Tate in London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, began an ambitious project called Modern Paints to answer such questions. It is only one part of a much larger undertaking for conservators of modern art, who now must deal with painting, sculpture and installation materials as strange and fragile as latex, old cathode ray tubes, whale-bone dust, fluorescent tubes, preserved sheep and at least one shaggy, taxidermied angora goat.
Learner, a conservation scientist who recently moved from the Tate to the Getty, said he began focusing on paints many years ago, partly because he believed that progress could be made relatively quickly and that the results would benefit so many museums, where paintings make up the majority of modern collections.
When he began his research in the early 1990s, he said, "It was quite a lonely time in this field." But now many conservators and scientists are involved. The Getty is in the forefront, not only because it is one of the wealthiest arts institutions in the world, with a mandate to help the entire field of conservation, but also because it does not have its own collection of modern paintings, and so does not need to focus more narrowly on its own problems.
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