Restoration dramas
From Michael Daley
Sir: Sarah Walden gives no indication of why or on what grounds an unnamed trustee of the National Gallery reproached her for recently publishing letters received from the late Sir Ernst Gombrich between 1982 and 1992 (Arts, 17 September). Her comments on the gallery’s notoriously controversial picture-cleaning policies are well enough founded — and Gombrich was indeed scathing about the gallery’s institutional hauteur. (In 1998 he wrote to me, ‘I believe it was Francis Bacon who said that “knowledge is power”. I had to learn the hard way that power can also masquerade as knowledge, and since there are very few people able to judge these issues, they very easily get away with it.’) But Mrs Walden’s swipe at the gallery’s present director, Charles Saumarez Smith, seems unfair. The gallery this year, for the first time, held an open debate on the subject of restoration at which critics like myself (though, curiously, not Sarah Walden, who seems also to have attended) put questions publicly to members of the gallery’s conservation staff.
In similar spirit, Mr Saumarez Smith has given my organisation, ArtWatch UK, permission to examine the conservation dossiers of a number of controversially restored paintings.
Michael Daley East Barnet, Hertfordshire
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