Repairing Art Damaged By Natural Disasters

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Repairing Art Damaged By Natural Disasters

By JOEL HENNING

August 12, 2008; Page D7

Wall Street Journal*

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121850221489531801.html?

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Chicago

Water from the Iowa River was rapidly creeping up the walls of the

University of Iowa's Museum of Art during June's floods. Ann Kennedy

Haag of the Chicago Conservation Center was masked in a respirator

to protect her from highly toxic black mold. She was holding one of

the works of art that she and her colleagues, along with museum

staff and volunteers, were attempting to rescue. Then the power went

out, as it did repeatedly while they struggled to get the remaining

art out of there. " We had to freeze and just stand there holding the

pieces until the power came back on, which often took several

minutes. "

Chicago Conservation Center

A worker cleaning waterlogged textiles at the National Czech &

Slovak Museum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Each time the power failed, the electronic scrubbers removing black

mold from the air also failed. " Even with our respirators on, "

recalls Ms. Haag, " we would have to go outside from time to time --

because when the scrubbers failed, the mold made us sick. " If

gagging on mold wasn't bad enough, she added, " the place smelled

horrible because the flood waters were full of farm waste, gasoline

and sewage. "

Several days earlier, before the dikes were breached, the Chicago

conservators had worked with museum staffers, volunteers and other

art handlers to remove as much of the collection as possible --

including works by Picasso, Braque, Pollock, Beckmann, Kandinsky,

along with a highly valued African collection.

Working nearly nonstop during the week of June 9, the professional

and volunteer teams evacuated works constituting about 99% of the

value of the museum's collection and representing nearly 80% of many

thousands of works. " We had to inventory and assess every piece to

determine how it should be wrapped and packed for moving, "

Becker, CEO of the Conservation Center, told me. What they couldn't

get out of the museum before the rising flood waters forced their

getaway, they moved to higher levels. The center, which was called

in by the museum's insurance underwriters, Lloyd's of London, is

involved in disaster recovery nationally because it uniquely can

field conservators skilled in virtually all media including

painting, sculpture, prints and photography, as well as furniture.

The daunting work amid the mold occurred two weeks later, when the

rescue crew was readmitted to the building to remove the remaining

art. Often working in the dark with spelunkers' headlamps, taking

essential breaks because of the black mold, the center's team worked

for almost a month to remove the last 3,000 to 4,000 works, wrap and

package them, and load them on refrigerator trucks for shipment to

the mold containment area for evaluation and restoration at the

center's Chicago headquarters.

Bad as the Iowa River flood was for the university's art museum in

Iowa City, the Cedar River made an even more formidable assault on

the museums of Cedar Rapids, including the National Czech & Slovak

Museum. While a 400-pound chandelier of Bohemian crystal remained

above the flood waters, the river rushed through most of the

museum's collection of Czech and Slovak textiles, which includes

leather coats, leather vests, and vividly colored, embroidered and

beaded clothing. When conservators from the center arrived on June

19, 15 feet of flood water had just receded from within the building.

The flood heaved the collection against the downstream walls as if

there had been a tidal wave of mud. " When we began to remove

objects, they were so heavily covered in mud that we didn't know

what they were, " recalls Joe Gott, a senior arts handler for the

center. " We set up a triage system in the museum's parking lot,

consisting first of a series of nine laundry tubs. As textiles were

brought out, they were separated by color. In the first tubs, we

loosened and scraped the mud off. We ran them through several

successive basins of gradually cleaner water, gently brushing the

fabrics. After they had been washed as well as possible, we blotted

them and set them on racks to dry. "

Throughout that flood recovery effort over almost a week, the

center, summoned here by the museum's restoration contractor, found

volunteer help invaluable. Locals brought towels donated by a hotel

and helped man the washtubs and drying racks. " Finally we put the

material in boxes and packed our refrigerator trucks for the trip

back to Chicago for evaluation and restoration. Our final goal will

be to have our conservators clean and repair everything they can, "

Mr. Gott said. " We could simply have loaded the 1,200 pieces from

the Czech and Slovak Museum into the freezer trucks, " Ms. Becker

commented, " but when we can do triage on the scene the results are

better. "

The center worked entirely on site when it was called in by several

private collectors who suffered soot-damage to their works by

Botero, Calder, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Matisse and Picasso in last

year's fires in California's Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego. There,

they set up " clean rooms " in the collectors' homes, totally

encapsulating them by stretching plastic on all the rooms' surfaces -

- ceilings, floors, windows -- and worked in them to remove soot

from the art. " The less moving of valuable pieces, the better, "

counsels Ms. Becker.

That couldn't be done with the flood-damaged art and antiques that

were among the pieces the center recovered after Hurricane Katrina

from the New Orleans Museum of Art and several private collections.

Among the beautifully restored items about to be returned to a New

Orleans home are two Sheraton sideboards with boxwood inlaid veneer

and brass hardware that the center staff recovered from several feet

of water.

Closer to the center's Chicago home, Ms. Becker was instrumental in

recovering the multimillion-dollar LaSalle Bank photography

collection when the bank's Chicago headquarters suffered a fire in

December 2004. " To organize the recovery, inventory and take down a

collection of 4,500 works and then preserve the ones damaged by

smoke, soot and water was an amazing job, " says retired La Salle

Bank CEO Norman R. Bobins. The collection dates back to an 1839

photo by Henry Fox Talbott and includes work by Ansel ,

Eggleston and Weston. Remarkably, only about 50

prints were irretrievably damaged. Ironically, when Ms. Becker and

the collection's curator, Carol Ehlers, were struggling through a

stairway with one of the prints, they were stunned to see that it

depicted the devastating 1871 Chicago Fire. (The bank was recently

acquired by Bank of America, which plans to maintain the collection.)

So what should even those of us with modest art collections do to

minimize risk in the event of floods, fires, hurricanes and the

like? Ms. Becker suggests that we " regularly update inventories and

appraisals and keep insurance coverage up to date. Always keep an

off-site copy; otherwise your access to vital information can be

challenging when a disaster occurs. "

Only 25% of the center's conservation work is disaster response. An

equal percentage comes from museums. The other half involves private

and corporate collectors. Recalling their efforts to save the

remaining artifacts at the University of Iowa's Museum of Art, Ms.

Haag says: " When the lights went out while we were trying to breathe

through the black mold, inventorying and packing pre-Columbian

artifacts with light only from our headlamps . . . awful as it was,

I realized how much I love my job. "

Mr. Henning writes about arts and culture for the Journal.