Restoration drama
The National Gallery's El Greco exhibition reveals to Martin Gayford the dangers of overcleaning The great El Greco retrospective at the National Gallery is exceptional in many ways. Never have so many wonderful paintings by the Spanish-Greek master been on show in this country. Seldom has it been possible anywhere apart from Toledo to assess so adequately the work of this cross-cultural genius. But there is another way in which the show stands out — which is far from positive.
I have not seen so many grossly overcleaned pictures gathered together in a major exhibition before, Picture after picture — the 'St Martin' from Washington, the 'Crucifixion' from the Louvre, the 'Immaculate Conception' from Toledo — falls to pieces in front of your eyes. The modelling, coherence and structure of the paintings have been scraped away.
It is suitable in a way that the display should be in the National Gallery, since that has been the focal point — or, at any rate, one of the main battlegrounds — of the cleaning controversy that has flared up intermittently for over half a century. It all goes back to the gloomy days at the start of the war, when the paintings of the National Gallery were sent for safety to Penrhyn Castle, near Bangor in Wales.
There, the then director, Kenneth Clark, contemplated them. As he recalled in his autobiography, 'Penrhyn Castle cannot have been a cheerful setting for ordinary life, and with its dark walls covered by large dark canvases it was exceptionally dismal. The pictures, far from decorating the walls, appeared only as areas of discoloured varnish.' Clark made a bold decision — an affirmation under those circumstances of optimism and life. The pictures should be cleaned.
Now, 70 years later, they virtually all have been. And the results have not cheered everyone up. Many good judges have been driven to fury and despair by the sight of the nice, bright, shiny masterpieces. Painters, especially, are almost unanimous in my experience in their anger about overcleaning.
Even Clark, one gathers from close reading of the same book, had his doubts. He didn't think, he insisted, that a single picture had been damaged, 'much less "ruined"' by his policy. But, he adds, 'I confess that I liked Rubens's "Susanna Fourment" [otherwise known as "Le Chapeau de Paille"] rather better under her thin, golden varnishing.'
And well he might have. Lucian Freud has remarked that only those who saw that picture before it was cleaned can have any idea of how great a painting it was.
And, actually, it is quite likely that in the case of that wonderful Rubens something did go wrong. A couple of years ago the National Gallery lent another of their greatest paintings by that master, the 'Peace and War', to an exhibition at the Prado in Madrid. This gave Spanish restorers a chance to look at it. One reported that there was a certain very fine red glaze — that is a thin, semi-transparent layer of paint — all over the Prado's superb collection of works by Rubens; there was none of it on the National Gallery's picture. It is, apparently, often mistaken for dirt by certain restorers. This, if true, throws a lot of light on what might have happened to the most delicate shadows — the bloom on the skin — of Susanna Fourment. What is true of the Rubens may be true of many great pictures in the gallery — by Rembrandt, Titian, Piero di Cosimo and many others. Of course, not all cleaning is damaging. Dirty, discoloured varnish certainly can be an obstacle to the enjoyment of paintings. But cleaning is a risky procedure — that's the point. There is no danger in not cleaning, or in cleaning less savagely. At the Hermitage in St Petersburg, under the wise directorship of Mikhail Piotrovsky, the restorers are under instructions always to leave a thin layer of the old varnish as a protection to the surface. But this older, cautious policy has been abandoned in one institution after another. And make no mistake, great paintings have been irretrievably altered for the worse. Piero della Francesca's altarpiece in the Brera Gallery, Milan, is an obvious example of a painting, once supreme, that can no longer be looked on without distress.
What is new in the past few years is that the guilty galleries are beginning to admit their mistakes. Here the Americans — often the worst offenders in the postwar years — are leading the way. The Yale University collection of early Italian pictures was drastically cleaned in the early 1950s on the orders of the professor of art history, Charles Seymour Jnr. The intention was to remove every vestige of anything but the original paint, which he believed to he in accordance with 'most recent procedures in Italy'.
One painting from a pair of saints by Taddeo di Batolo had its varnish scrubbed off in this way in 1950, the other was left as what was described in an editorial in the Burlington magazine as 'an object lesson in dirtiness'.
'When the latter was examined at the Getty,' the Burlington continued, this filthy St Jerome 'was found to have an early and extremely well-preserved varnish, which seemed to have bonded with the upper paint layer. Every single stroke of the tempera hatching is intact, and the flesh tones retain an extraordinary depth and subtlety.' The other, virtuously purged picture, 'St John the Baptist', now looks flayed — in the words of a Burlington reviewer, 'as though on a dissecting table'.
Now Yale has admitted that things went terribly wrong, and is trying to put the pictures back to the way they were before (sadly, there's not much that can be done as what is accidentally removed can never be replaced). But it is good — if possibly unique — for such an institution to admit guilt. It is an example that the National Gallery should follow, even if nothing quite so dramatically ghastly has happened there.
Admittedly, almost all the pictures in Trafalgar Square have been cleaned now — and the current director is very sound on the subject. But there are still collections — in Dresden, in Paris, in Vienna. in Naples — where most of the pictures have not been subject to drastic cleaning. And there is mounting pressure for these galleries to correspond to a new international norm of bright, glossy 'conservation'. More prominent admissions of errors would help reduce that nasty tendency.
Restorers are like plumbers. They are always happy to speak ill of each other's work. 'The jealousy that eminent restorers feel for each other goes far beyond that of actors and actresses,' Clark himself noted, 'which strongly suggests they have something to hide.' Mistakes might have happened, we are always told. 60 or 30 years ago. But not now, the restorers proclaim. Now they have graphs, and infrared, and gas chromatography. Disasters are impossible these days. Don't believe them.
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