The Restoration Drama

In spotless laboratories, well locked and hidden away in the basements of the world's great museums, hundreds of men in white smocks are working feverishly, day in and day out, at "restoring" art masterpieces. They can take a brown, wrinkled, flaking canvas and turn it into a picture that looks like new. They can also turn Rembrandt's Night Watch into a Day Watch, expose an extra pair of ears on the Van Eyck brothers' Adoration of the Lamb, or transform Brueghel's Hunters in the Snow from a haunting evocation of winter dusk into a Grandma Moses-type picture of sparkling noontime cheer. The restorer's results are unquestionably dramatic, but is the drama comedy or tragedy?

Expert opinion on the subject divides down the middle, with surprisingly few fence sitters of importance. The controversy is intense. Every time a masterpiece emerges from the laboratory looking strangely changed, someone objects. But the museums can do as they like, and most of them favor restoration that includes stringent cleaning. Artists, on the whole, oppose it. Art News recently called for a moratorium on it. And last week Manhattan Painter Frank Mason was rounding up artists' signatures for a petition demanding a moratorium on all art restoration work at the Metropolitan Museum. Says Mason bitterly: "The least safe place for your paintings is a museum; they will be skinned alive."

Among the top defenders of modern restoration:

Daniel Catton Rich, director of Massachusetts' Worcester Art Museum: "Most of the attacks on museum cleaning are made by ignorant people who don't know what they're talking about. In the last ten years there has been much more careful restoration than at any time in the history of the world."

Carlo Barbieri, art critic for Naples' // Mattino: "Italy's artistic patrimony has been saved by the work of restorers, especially in the removal of frescoes from damp and crumbling walls and the transferring of paintings to new canvases."

Paul Coremans of the University of Ghent (and a top restorer): "More than half the restoration work now done is good to excellent. A painting, after all, is matter, different layers of matter. Modern science can define each of the layers, can see which one is deteriorating and needs conservation."

Stefan Slabczynski, chief restorer at London's Tate Gallery: "So many people are involved and so many tests are done that it is practically impossible to damage something. A mass of chemical equipment is used, every picture is scrupulously documented, and proof positive is needed for what is done."

Among those not in favor:

Germain Bazin, chief curator of the Louvre: "Our age is in the act of destroying its artistic patrimony. Modern restorers of the Anglo-Saxon school are inspired by the taste for modern painting. They want old masters to shine like contemporary art, which stresses contrasting tones. Old painting was concerned with harmonies, and the passage of one tone into another through half tones. When

Renoir's Boating Party was lent to us by the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington people who knew the canvas 20 years ago didn't recognize it. It had been cleaned, and all the half-tone passages were gone."

Mauro Pelliccioli, Milan art professor famed for his restoration of Leonardo's Last Supper: "Today more art is destroyed than is rescued by restoration. There has been no epoch so dangerous, so catastrophic for painting as that through which we are passing. It is the duty of our civilization to prevent the continued perpetration of this crime against art."

Suzanne Sulzberger, art professor at the University of Brussels: "I can only compare restoration to plastic surgery for women. Wrinkles and other signs of age may disappear, but the overall impression is one of artificiality, of untruthfulness."

Count Joseph de Borchgraved'Altena, chief curator of the Belgian Museum of Art and History: "Until the day that the technical specialists have at their disposal infallible methods, unanimously considered as such also outside their own circle, we wish that the best paintings in our museums no longer be used as guinea pigs."

Among the few fence sitters:

John Coolidge, director of Harvard's Fogg Art Museum: "I suppose my prejudice is in favor of doing it rather than against. But the question sometimes is, do you want a lady with red hair or with a bald head? If you make a wrong guess, you make a wrong guess."

Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor, late director of Madrid's Prado: "Restoration is necessary. You have to do it with great care, but you have to do it. We can be proud of the work Spanish restorers do, but in most other European museums the work is not so good. For instance, I have been told of a Velasquez portrait of Philip IV in London's National Gallery which after restoration is a very bad picture. We have another Velasquez portrait of the same king, which originally was not so good as the one in London. Now ours is much better."

John Walker, director of the National Gallery in Washington: "Cleaning is one of the most delicate operations a painting can undergo--very like a difficult and dangerous operation on a human being. At the National it is held to a minimum."

Both sides of the restoration controversy made strong cases. That in itself seemed a good reason for slowing down art restoration in the world's great museums until some general agreement on methods had been reached.

Until that day comes, the art lover never can tell what happy or unhappy surprises await him on each new visit to his favorite museum. Sir Alfred Mun-nings, the late president of London's Royal Academy, once put the point in verse. On returning to a museum, wrote Mun-nings, a man "may discover, too late, alas! that a change has befallen

Some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster Followed fast and followed faster."

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