Like people, fine art ages and deteriorates due to time, inattention and day-to-day being. Joseph Mella, director of the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery and entrusted with a growing and valuable collection, previously could care for pieces only when funds were available. However, because of the establishment of the Kathryn and Margaret Millspaugh Fund for Art Conservation two years ago, taking care of Vanderbilt’s fine arts collection is now an ongoing activity that has opened up use of the collection to better serve students and art lovers on campus and beyond.
“[The fund] has enabled us to ramp up our conservation activities in a meaningful way,” says Mella. “As a result, we will always have works being conserved at all times, which is really exciting.”
The first use of funds from the Millspaugh endowment involved conservation of 13 works on paper for the Mark di Suvero: Affinities exhibit in early 2013. The exhibit featured works as diverse as Chinese calligraphy scrolls alongside prints by 20th-century artists like Alexander Calder and Georges Braque—works that previously were too damaged to show.
“[Conservation] brought to life works that were rediscovered in the collection,” Mella says. “We became reacquainted with pieces that had been dismissed due to condition issues, and it gave us the ability from a curatorial perspective to delve into the collection in different ways.”
Not only has the endowment allowed for previously damaged works to be exhibited, but it also enables the collection to be used more extensively for classes and seminars.
“Our number-one goal is to support the academic mission while engaging the students,” Mella says. “There’s a huge benefit to using collections in education. Events like having students in a Renaissance seminar come in and see four Renaissance paintings four feet from them in an interactive, secure and climate-controlled space gives them an experience that cannot be replicated—especially when they’re so used to getting information electronically. There’s no substitute for being with an actual object.”
Aside from works on paper, the fund has supported the conservation of two 19th-century carved wood frames and two Italian Renaissance paintings from the gallery’s Samuel H. Kress Collection, whose conservation treatment received additional support from the Kress Foundation via the esteemed conservation program at New York University’s Institute for Fine Arts. With what totals more than 6,000 works in the collection, a concentrated effort is underway to decide logically which pieces will be prioritized for conservation based on historical importance and whether their current condition will significantly worsen. Sometimes a work’s condition is hastened by previous conservation attempts.
“The mantra of conservation treatment today is that whatever is done [to a work of art] should be able to be undone,” Mella says.
Each piece conserved for Vanderbilt is provided a history by the conservator, documenting the treatment and including pre- and post-conservation images. For older works, particularly from the Italian Renaissance, the Contini–Volterra Photographic Archive in Special Collections—consisting of photos of 50,000 or more works created in Europe from the 13th through 20th centuries—provides clues to previous conservation treatments.
Additionally, when Cohen Memorial Hall was renovated several years ago to house the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery (as well as the art history and classics departments), state-of-the-art climate control was installed in rooms housing the collection, thus mitigating the effects of temperature and relative humidity on the art. When works are repaired or restored, they now return to an environment that will not erode the repairs made.
“It’s almost like getting new works of art,” says Mella. “Some pieces couldn’t be used for teaching purposes before, they couldn’t be in exhibitions. Having funds for conservation through the Millspaugh endowment has strengthened and broadened the depth of our collections in such a way that it has made a huge impact on our program, which, in turn, is increasing its overall utility as a vital teaching and educational resource for the entire university.”