Week #16 Conservation IV

Untitled (Black, Green and Tan) before and after conservation.

Untitled (Black, Green and Tan), 1960, oil on canvas, 46” x 26” Conserved.

This week we have a painting by Dusti Bongé that shows how sometimes the conservation work needed is more subtle. We have seen examples of paintings with visible paint losses, where small chips of paint literally fall off the canvas, paintings that had lost their luster, and those that had accumulated dirt and abrasions over the years. This week we will look at another issue.

Technically speaking, as soon as a painting is finished, it begins to deteriorate due to various physical, chemical and even biological phenomena. One of the results of those phenomena is craquelure, a pattern of fine cracks in the paint or varnish of a painting. These cracks in turn are loosely categorized as drying craquelure and ageing craquelure. So, some craquelure may occur fairly quickly as part of the process of the paint drying. Ageing cracks develop over the lifetime of a painting as the medium becomes more brittle and consequently the environmental stresses it undergoes can become more impactful.

This lovely, muted, painting by Dusti with its quiet presence is actually rather unique. As you can see, Dusti did not paint it with the broad, bold gestures and heavy areas of impasto like many of her other abstract paintings. Instead, she applied the paint mostly in smooth continuous areas of color with minimal surface detail. Visually, this starts to resemble the color field style, but physically she still prefers to build up multiple layers of rich paint.

Over the years craquelure started to clearly develop in these many layers of paint, reaching a point where it was necessary to stabilize the work to minimize further cracking. This included some very careful in-painting to fill in the cracks and lining the canvas. Thus in the case of this painting at first glance the visual difference between before and after may not be as striking, but don’t let that fool you.