Thomas Pool: What can you tell us about your current conservation projects at the National Gallery of Ireland?
Muirne Lydon: One of the things that is really incredible about conservation is how diverse your workload always is. The exhibition programme at the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) this year includes some terrific in-focus shows, such as, ‘Sarah Purser: Private Worlds’ and ‘An Tur Gloine: Artists and the Collective’, to name some of the highlights. In addition, NGI will host two major exhibitions: ‘Turning Heads’and ‘Women Impressionists’.‘Turning Heads’opened on 24 February and features works by Dutch and Flemish artists of the 16th and 17th centuries who were exponents of the tronie – an intriguing painting of a head. Vermeer’s most exquisitely detailed tronie, Girl with the Red Hat (c.1665-7), is an exhibition highlight and I highly recommend a visit! Following that, in late summer, we have ‘Women Impressionists’, which will include some real hero pieces by Berthe Morisot (1841-95), Eva Gonzalès (1849-83), Marie Bracquemond (1860-1914) and Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). As conservators, we are intimately involved with all of these, and this is the majority of our day-to-day thinking.
Aside from our busy exhibition programme, other current studio projects include conservation and research on Head of a White Bull (c.1643-7) by the seventeenth-century Dutch Naturalist artist, Paulus Potter (1625-54), and also on The Crossing of the Red Sea (1521) by Ludovico Mazzolino (c.1480-c.1530). The latter recently received a 2024 TEFAF Museum Restoration Fund. We generally refer to these major research projects in the painting studio as our longitudinal projects, an innovation which builds from the success of other large-scale projects, such as work undertaken on Murillo and Fontana some years back. Basically, these are research driven projects untethered to an exhibition or deadline. They are long-term, slow-burners that can turn out to be really powerful armatures that can assist, support or underpin institutional research programmes, displays and outreach. This work also assists the development of new collaborations on the collections with other institutions and groups.
With the Head of a White Bull research project (for which funding was generously provided through a donation from KBC Bank) we are delighted to be collaborating with our colleagues in the Mauritshuis Museum in The Netherlands, linking their much-loved Paulus Potter painting, De Steir (The Bull), the largest in their collection, with Head of the White Bull from our own collection. Extensive technical and art historical research by both the NGI’s collections team and that of the Mauritshuis has already started. The Dublin painting has just arrived at The Hague, where it was united with De Stier for further study after being separated for 360 years. So, keep an eye out on our website over the coming months for updates on this project – it has some super interesting reveals!
I am sure that the project on Ludovico Mazzolino’s The Crossing of the Red Sea (1521), which has been part of the NGI Collection for over a century, is going to yield some wonderful results, not only in terms of the conservation and care of the work, but also what will be found in regards to Mazzolino’s painting approach. This biblical artwork is remarkable for its size and rarity and because it departs from the conventional rules of perspective. In its current fragile state, the painting cannot be safely displayed. With severe delamination of the paint layer and soiling to the cracked surface, The Crossing of the Red Sea requires extensive conservation efforts. With TEFAF funding, the NGI will collaborate with experts in Mazzolino’s work to better understand his artistic practice so that this rare, large-scale masterpiece can be sensitively restored and made accessible to the visiting public.
What is your background and training? How did you become interested in pursuing a career as a conservator?
I was painting and drawing from an early age. I have vivid memories of spending hours arranging and rearranging my pictures on our kitchen wall, into what I thought were marvellous displays! As a young kid, I used to attend watercolour classes with an artist called Joyce Duff, and these were the highlight of my week. Joyce would prop open books with pictures by artists such as Goya, Monet, Picasso, and Braque. It was always a wide and diverse selection of artists that I was presented with, and I would spend every Saturday morning in her house copying their paintings in watercolours. Perhaps it was this early experience that led me to my current career. I later went to art college and studied painting and printmaking at undergraduate level. I was fortunate to be taught by some brilliant Irish artists, such as Paddy Graham and Partial Hurl. Following my undergrad, I worked as an artist for most of my twenties, but an interest in the materiality of art and everything involved with the making of a painting ultimately led me to undertake a Masters in Painting Conservation at Northumbria University. Upon graduation, I undertook some internships in the UK, France and Belgium, and then a fellowship at the Hamilton Kerr Institute in Cambridge, which is part of the Fitzwilliam Museum. This completed most of my initial training, and from there, I worked in private and public practice until I started at NGI over 16 years ago, which in itself is hard to believe! It is important to mention that continuous learning and staying updated on the latest conservation practices and materials are essential to remain proficient in this ever-evolving field.
Some works in the NGI collection, like the Vaughan bequest of Turner’s watercolours or Frederic William Burton’s Meeting on the Turret Stair (1864), require limited windows for viewing to ensure their preservation. Do you see your work as a conservator in dialogue with artists, curators, and audiences, in how a work is displayed and experienced?
Art is nothing without an understanding of its social and cultural context, and in the museum context, curators and conservators often play a role in shaping the encounter with contemporary artworks. Before, during and after the acquisition of an art object, curators and conservators can engage in dialogue with the artist, if they are still living, about how the object should be exhibited and conserved. The artist may express specifications for the display and conservation of the object, thereby fixing characteristics of the artwork that were previously left open. This can also happen with the terms of a bequest, as is the case with Turner; or indeed may arrive as part of an institutional attitude as to the work’s long-term care, as with the Meeting on the Turret Stair. This process can make a significant difference to the nature of the audience’s experience and how the work might be interpreted, and is a constant part of our conversations in the gallery.
At what point is the decision made that more intensive intervention and restoration are needed to save a piece from decay?
The work of a paintings conservator involves intimate contact with works of art. The work is based upon a deep commitment to aesthetic values and understanding, and proceeding in partnership with the most advanced scientific tools and concepts. So, the vast majority of our work is making sure that works are cared for such that they will not need intensive conversation. However, works, in their lifetime, will age, or indeed might be damaged – and if these processes prove to be a long-term risk to the legibility or the integrity of the work, then more intensive work might be required. This work is predominantly about stabilisation, or removing discoloured varnish, and only very occasionally about restoration. Even then, this is always done so that it is entirely reversable – like by using watercolours over varnish to retouch an oil painting. As you can imagine, the ethical territory is rich, and even at times contested. Few, if any, conservators believe that they are bringing the painting back to its original state, but many, if not all, strive to make it possible for viewers to encounter the work of art as closely as possible to the way in which the artist may have intended it to be seen. The very business of museums and museum professionals is to care for objects that are rare and unique, so each object has to be treated accordingly. In the gallery, all conservation work is approached with a great deal of research and informed discourse amongst highly qualified professionals. The technical and art historical analysis of any work prior to treatment informs the decision on what is most appropriate for the care and presentation of the object, both now and in the future. All of these factors are discussed and debated at length, in order to ensure the most appropriate decision is made in regard to an object conservation, be that minimal or more invasive.
What are the particular conservation challenges of different mediums – from traditional disciplines like painting and sculpture, to new media, including moving image and sound works?
Since their emergence, time-based media such as film, video, and digital media have been used by artists who experimented with the potential of these media as early as the 1920s, when visual artists like Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger tested the aesthetic possibilities of film – a practice that continues into the twenty-first century through the work of artists such as Tacita Dean and Stan Douglas. The resulting artworks, with their basis in rapidly developing technologies that cross over into other domains of culture, such as broadcasting and social media, have greatly challenged the traditional structures for exhibiting, collecting, and preserving art.
Time-based artworks that rely on media technologies for their creation and exhibition (including slide-based installations, film, video, and computer-based artworks) are all prone to rapid obsolescence and thus cause problems for long-term preservation and display. Besides, these works often explore, expose, and explode the conventional use of the medium in question (in mainstream cinema, broadcasting, the internet, or social media), complicating their interpretation once the social and cultural practices to which they refer have disappeared. Because of their position at the crossroads between art, technology, and popular culture, media artworks serve as barometers, or signs of the times, and as such they deserve to be collected, interpreted, and preserved in ways that do justice to their identity and ensure their long-term accessibility.
Contemporary art practices utilise an endlessly broad and diverse area of skills and materials, and conservation is always responding to the preservation needs of contemporary art practices. Notable examples are heritage institution-based projects such as the International Network forth Conservation of Contemporary Art (INCCA), the Variable Media Network, and the project Documentation and Conservation of the Media Arts Heritage (DOCAM). Additionally, many conservation training courses are beginning to address these types of heritage skill gaps by developing educational programmes to include contemporary conservation preservation and care, such as specific expertise for the preservation of time-based media. However, this is a new area and will take time to resource correctly, develop and support. Like art, conservation is a constantly evolving discipline that is always moving with the times.
Muirne Lydon is Paintings Conservator at the National Gallery of Ireland.
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