AIC's 43rd Annual Meeting

The Museum of Fine Arts ,Houston’s collection of major New York School paintings includes iconic works by Franz Kline (1910-1962), one of the defining artistic personalities of Abstract Expressionism, who worked concurrently with his friend Willem de Kooning, and also Jackson Pollock, both key artists of Abstract Expressionism in New York. These artists rejected traditional materials and embraced modern, inexpensive alternatives (house paint, Ripolin, Proxylin, acrylics), simply because these materials were new, contemporary and free from the historical association of representative art with traditional artist’s oil paints. The challenge to tradition inherent in their images went hand in hand with abandoning concerns about traditional qualities in the materials they employed. The conservation community is uniquely poised at a moment in history when the physical materials that make up iconic Abstract Expressionist works are beginning to show failure. Never before has it been possible to study the physical realities of works of art at such a sophisticated level, and our investigations have identified mechanisms of failure, and informed the parameters of material integrity and treatment possibilities for our paintings by Franz Kline. Our project began with the urgent need to stabilize the badly flaking, fragile paint layers of Wotan, Kline’s watershed piece of 1950, painted originally on canvas, but early in its life mounted onto Masonite (140 x 202 cm). The material history of this work, including early damages and treatments, has been reconstructed, and formed the basis for determining treatment strategy. Although prior work on later Kline paintings suggested that zinc soap formation was a key degradation process, scientific analysis (FTIR, XRF, Raman, optical microscopy, x-radiography, infra-red reflectography, ultraviolet fluorescence) suggests that while zinc pigments are present and contribute to the ageing characteristics of the paint layers in Wotan, other processes are equally, if not more significant. The extreme fragility of Wotan led us to undertake technical examination and assess condition for two other paintings by Franz Kline: Orange and Black Wall, 1959 (170 x 367 cm) and Corinthian II, 1961 (202 x 272 cm). These paintings, both unlined and on canvas, are in very different states of stability. Orange and Black Wall, like Wotan, exhibits persistent cracking, interlayer cleavage and may no longer travel. In contrast, Corinthian II is stable and in very good condition. Analysis indicates that this difference in condition mainly arises from contrasting paint-layering techniques, resulting in subtle but critical structural differences. In combination with the studies on Wotan, we may conclude that Kline’s choice of materials and the method of their application both contribute significantly to the relative stability or fragility of his paintings. This paper provides a timely contribution to the on-going dialogue about technical study, treatment history and current treatment desiderata for modern paintings. Broader issues such as balancing the values of aesthetic and material preservation and re-treatability in the specific territory defined by artists like Kline and his contemporaries are also discussed.