Restoration drama
Sarah Walden
Recently I received a disobliging letter from a trustee of the National Gallery. The author, a peer of the realm, upbraided me for publishing correspondence between myself and Sir Ernst Gombrich on the restoration of Old Masters, showing that he remained concerned by the Gallery’s treatment of its pictures right up to his death three years ago.
His lordship, a former civil servant schooled in the art of corporate complacency, if in no other, seemed impervious to the notion that the view of the world’s greatest art historian might carry more weight than his own. Nor did he seem aware that international experts have long been aghast at the National Gallery’s conservation policy, or that my own opinion was not uninformed (I have restored Old Masters at the Louvre and privately for many years, taught at Harvard and am conservation consultant to Sotheby’s and Christie’s). The trustee was, in effect, demanding that we should close our eyes to the irreversible damage done by the Gallery to major works over many decades. But no one who knows or cares about painting can do that.
One of Gombrich’s letters (published in the revised edition of my book The Ravished Image) dated 1992 and discussing the National Gallery’s work, acknowledged that ‘... these people are no longer quite as ignorant as they were with Hendy [director of the Gallery at the time of the dispute] and Ruhemann but they are all the more arrogant and cocksure.’ Helmut Ruhemann, under whose long and disastrous reign many masterpieces were over-cleaned, had been chief restorer till the early Sixties. Gombrich went on to speak of ‘that offensive superciliousness that we all know’.
He was not of course against restoration, or the prudent use of scientific advances in treatment and analysis. Other letters speak approvingly of the recent work on the Sistine Chapel — though fresco raises far fewer problems than oil painting, with its many layers.
It was lucky that Sir Ernst was not present at a recent conference on restoration mounted by the Gallery. The key presentation was entitled ‘The Perverse Infatuation with Dirty Pictures’. Gombrich, whom Ruhemann had accused of ‘liking dirty pictures’ when he first attacked the overcleaning of Old Masters some 40 years ago, would have sighed plus Va change...
The last time I saw him was in his house in north London. Though physically frail — he greeted me from his chair with a rug over his knees — his mind was as keen as ever, and he was hard at work on his last book. I had first met him 40 years earlier, when he was head of the Warburg Institute. To a young art history student at the Courtauld, where he lectured, his Viennese seriousness (he was a refugee from Nazi Germany) and formidable knowledge made him intimidating: you did not trouble Professor Gombrich with frivolous questions. Later, when he became a friend, I grew more aware of the gentleness and humour beneath that learned carapace.
It was because of Gombrich that I first took up restoration. He had dared to challenge the National Gallery and, in the epic battle that followed, Ruhemann won not intellectually, but because the National Gallery and its trustees were disinclined to question the judgment of the dogmatic and domineering German, and because of the mood of the times. This was the Sixties, a period of bold new thinking, but also of an overweening arrogance towards the past, when knocking down redundant old places like Covent Garden or Carlton House Terrace was seriously considered.
The equivalent in the restoration of Old Masters was the puritanical removal of all trace of old varnish by increasingly strong chemicals which dessicated the paint, in a misguided attempt to ‘get back to the original’ and generally jolly them up to attract an undiscriminating public. But the originals frequently included subtle glazes to mute the colours (e.g., of bright-blue skies). Their intricate perspectives were easily disrupted by over-zealous cleaning, and they were never coated in the experimental synthetic varnishes used today, which can gradually take on a greyish hue.
The easiest way to see the problem is to compare some of the National Gallery’s Old Masters displayed in major exhibitions alongside those restored on the Continent. The contrast at the Titian exhibition between pictures from the Prado and the National Gallery which had been painted for the same room — Isabella d’Este’s studiolo — was painful. The recent Raphael exhibition included a predella belonging to the Gallery, hung next to parts of the same altarpiece from European collections. The contrast was distressing: the National Gallery’s picture, titivated to the point where no cracks were visible at all, leaped out at you as if it had been painted yesterday, rather than some 400 years ago. Some of the Gallery’s pictures in the Caravaggio exhibition had been similarly treated.
When I first wrote The Ravished Image Gombrich contributed a preface. We fell into the habit of corresponding on restoration, and, when the book was to be translated into French and updated in English, as a courtesy, I asked him whether he had anything to add, sure that at the age of 91 he would say no. Within days I had a reply. ‘It is now clear,’ he wrote into the preface, ‘that the position I took 49 years ago in this matter has been vindicated, both by written sources and by the examination of paintings.’ He went on to cite new research at the Getty Institute in Los Angeles, which has a high reputation in the field.
‘They will never admit that they can be wrong,’ Gombrich wrote, and that remains the policy to this day. The Gallery’s director, who is not a painting specialist, appears unable to see the problem, and it retains what Gombrich called its ‘closed mind’ about the past. The Gallery prides itself on its educational programmes, yet my trustee would prefer these letters not to have been published. Students of art history and of conservation, not to speak of aficionados who bought Gombrich’s The Story of Art in their millions, would surely prefer to be informed about the views of our greatest scholar in the field on the treatment of irreplaceable works in public collections, and of the need for prudence and restraint.
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