Invited Paper CS-ThA1
A Conservator’s Perspective of Technical Studies and Scientific Analysis

Thursday, November 13, 2014, 2:20 pm, Room 313

The nature of technical studies is necessarily interdisciplinary as they address various questions about works of art and artifacts: What materials did the artist use ; how did he use his materials; and most importantly, what is the significance of this information for a greater understanding of the artist and his work? What is learned in technical studies often both augments art historical research and informs conservation treatment decisions.Collaboration between conservators, scientists, and art scholars is becoming ever more common in the study of works of art. Results of in-depth studies are now featured in exhibitions and scholarly publications, and their importance is increasingly recognized within larger art historical studies of an artist’s oeuvre.

In this light, this presentation will consider two recent technical studies carried out at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The first, a study of a group of Georges Braque’s mid-career paintings, was conducted in collaboration with conservation scientists from Harvard Art Museums and curators at the Phillips and the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis. The results of the study were featured in the exhibition Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945 and in the related publication. The second study focuses on one painting, The Blue Room (1901), an early Blue Period picture by Pablo Picasso in the collection at the Phillips. Ongoing research of this picture is being conducted in collaboration with independent Picasso scholars and scientists from the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, Cornell University, and the National Gallery of Art.

Both studies began in the conservation studio with the conservator carefully examining each painting in good light and under magnification, considering each artist’s technique and how it may have influenced their material choices. Other examination techniques, such as UV-induced fluorescence, infrared imaging, and x-radiography were also employed.

In both studies, paint samples were taken and analyzed to positively identify the artists' materials and understand them in context. In the Braque study, the increasingly wide-spread use by conservators of portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) spectroscopy allowed for comparative pigment analysis of eight paintings from five different collections. For the Picasso, three non-invasive techniques—reflectance imaging spectroscopy, fiber optic reflectance spectroscopy (FORS), and XRF intensity mapping—were used.

The presentation will consider the collaborative nature of both studies and evaluate what made them successful in addition to discussing the process and outcome of each project from the conservator’s perspective.