AIC's 43rd Annual Meeting

The raw canvas paintings of Morris Louis and similar color field works, with their extreme vulnerability to staining and structural damage, present a challenge for safe and successful treatment design, often testing the bounds of our abilities as conservators while providing avenues to expand our range of treatment options. These paintings are physically akin to textiles, though their functional value lies almost exclusively in their aesthetic impact. Treatments focus primarily on restoring the work to the appearance intended by the artist, a goal outside the normal parameters of textile conservation, where signs of use and natural degradation are often considered historically important and aesthetically acceptable. Straddling this bridge between specialized textile and painting conservation techniques, and understanding their long-term implications and impact on aesthetic perception, becomes an essential skill for the conservator. A large 1960 Morris Louis, Untitled (Floral), in the study collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston provided an ideal example to explore the intersection minimally-interventive treatments with the need for aesthetic perfection. The moribund painting, coated at some point in the 1970s with poly(vinyl acetate) that became extremely discolored and layered with grime, was deemed irretrievably damaged, and has been held by the museum outside of the permanent collection for research purposes since its 2004 donation. While the chosen treatment, an innovative application of a rigid gel cleaning system, was ultimately successful, many issues were encountered in the shift from theory to practice. This research explores the challenges related to the realistic treatment of large works, scaling up from small cleaning tests to full-scale treatments, and the ethical aspects of treating works that function as "conservation cadavers.” The practical knowledge gained from the treatment including many observations on the mechanics of agarose gel, and new methods of application relevant to paintings, textile, and paper treatments, will also be described.