Over the last few years, in its labs perched high in the hills of Brentwood, the Getty has brought complex technology costing millions of US dollars to bear on modern paints, building up a database of thousands of kinds of pigments, solvents, chemical binders and other substances. In the process it has helped cast light not only on better ways to clean, care for and transport modern paintings, but also on the ways that artists — some, like Morris Louis, highly reclusive — worked.
On a recent tour of the lab, Learner and Michael Schilling, another Getty conservation scientist, showed off some of its machinery. This includes an infrared spectroscope that has been used to figure out the chemical fingerprints of things as varied as asteroids and illegal drugs; a device called a microfadeometer, which trains an intense beam of light — 8 million lumens per square meter, compared with about 120,000 for a cloudless day with the sun at high noon — on a tiny area of a painting to see how it fades; a hulking Atlas Ci4000 Xenon Weather-Ometer, which simulates the effects of decades of sunlight and heat in just months; and a scanning electron microscope costing more than a million US dollars.
As just one reminder of the kind of lab this was, a cardboard storage box sitting on one table was emblazoned with the hand-lettered warning: "Beware!! Works of Art Below."
That morning, one Getty scientist was at work on a project that demonstrated the residual benefits of the research. A conservator trying to salvage a defaced urban mural by an artist named Peter Quezada in the Highland Park area of the city had asked the Getty to help her identify the paints used in the graffiti, so she could remove them more carefully. A chip of the graffiti no bigger than a bread crumb was examined with a spectrometer, which found that it was, in fact, two kinds of paint, each needing to be treated differently.
"The worst people to try to get information out of are the industrial manufacturers," Learner said. But even companies that specialize in paints for artists, he said, often require scientists to sign secrecy agreements if information is provided about how their paints are made.
"This is a bit of an issue," he said, breaking into a laugh, "because as a scientist you just might want to be able to tell people what you've discovered in your research.
"As far as this project goes, we've just had to accept that and keep plugging away," he added. Gesturing at the busy lab, which looked as if it might be preparing research for a mission to Mars or the cure for cancer, he said, "As you can see, we are."
RSS