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The Bard Stripped Bare

You look at contemporary art for most of your life, and you think a lot about it, and you find yourself offering up your sequential and accumulated opinions about it, and sometimes you feel the whole thing hasn’t really come to much and that a) you don’t really know anything and b) none of what you do know seems real enough by half.

These were the kind of wintry thoughts hardening within me when a number of small but meaningful events occurred last fall, all at more or less the same time. Small but meaningful events that began to shift the trajectory of my interests.

For one thing, I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario on September 23, the final day—having somehow remained to that point unprovoked by the Globe and Mail’s provocatively phrased journalistic query "Is this the face of genius?" (Friday, May 11, 2001)—of the exhibiting of the infamous Sanders portrait, claimed to be the only extant portrait of William Shakespeare painted while he was alive (the label reads "Shakspere…This Likeness taken 1603, Age at that time 39 y ^s").

Second, there was a certain kind of reading. Weary of currency, I had been perusing, for no reason at all, S. N. Behrman’s charming 1960 memoir of British satirist Max Beerbohm, Portrait of Max. This, in turn, led to my reading the same author’s utterly delightful Duveen (1952), a brilliant compendium of gossip (with Saul Steinberg illustrations!) about the legendary art dealer Lord Joseph ("I can’t possibly sell a Rembrandt to a man who owns no other pictures") Duveen. Which, almost inevitably, led to Ernest Samuels’ Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur (1979). Which resulted in my reading Berenson himself, almost entire.

Added to that were a number of sidebar articles that casually floated up beneath my gaze: "Museums Grateful for ‘Dead’ Painting" (about the problems inherent in the Guggenheim and MOMA’s restoring a painting by Ad Reinhardt and Minimalist paintings generally) in the June 2001 issue of ARTnews, "A Crisis of Fakes" (ostracized Getty curator Nicholas Turner accuses his former museum of harbouring fakes) in the New York Times Magazine for March 18, 2001, and Walter C. McCrone’s "Artful Dodgers: Virtuosos of art forgery meet the masters of scientific detection" in The Sciences (January/February 2001).

All this was further capped by my casual acquisition, from a bookstore remainder table, of Drawn to Trouble: Confessions of a Master Forger (1991), a witty and robustly entertaining memoir by the late British art forger Eric Hebborn:

In the course of over thirty years of activity I have collected a large number of recipes for ink, but have in practice employed no more than twenty. This is because the inks used by the Old Masters mostly fall into these groups: bistre, sepia and gall. Bistre ink comes from soot collected in a chimney where willow logs have been burnt; sepia comes from the cuttle-fish; gall ink is made from oak galls….

In the next few pages, Hebborn gleefully explains how to make all these inks and how, by using oak gall, he was going to produce a nifty little Poussin drawing. Poussin, he assures us, usually drew with bistre, but Hebborn was setting out to draw an atypical Poussin—with the express aim of intriguing his learned friend, Sir Anthony Blunt, for whom a too "perfect" Poussin drawing would have seemed contemptibly unchallenging ("The drawing was not to be, in any way at all, a copy, but an adaptation…."). The point was deliberately to get Blunt to reject the drawing as "not quite right," so that Blunt’s rival, dealer Hans Callmann of Colnaghi’s, upon hearing of Blunt’s rejection of it, would, almost by reflex, snap it up. Which is precisely, of course, what happened.

Well, anyhow, with all this high drama, low comedy and scientific arcana about art and fakery and mysteries of attribution buzzing about within me, I was in no way disposed to turn down an offer by this magazine’s editor to travel to Ottawa and spend a few days at the CCI—the Canadian Conservation Institute. That’s where The Sanders Shakespeare had resided before its grand premiere at the AGO. For months and months previous to its august public unveiling, the little painting had been irradiated and spectraumatized, poked and prodded and palpated, scientifically speaking, by the CCI’s conservators and conservation scientists.

So what was the CCI anyway? And what went on there—beyond the Shakespeare?

The CCI occupies a profoundly undistinguished two-storey, red brick low-rise office building in an unlovely commercial park in the east end of Ottawa. You might be forgiven, when you pull up in front of it, for thinking you were in the wrong place. Except for the fact that on the roof of the building stands a weathered manikin, a grimy old salt known as "the Captain," according to the CCI’s Charles Costain, Director of Conservation and Scientific Services, to whom fell the task of steering me successfully into the labyrinth of the CCI’s complexity.

Bought years ago from an Ottawa junk shop by Ann Howatt Krahn, then with the CCI’s Archaeology and Ethnology division (now a professor at Queen’s University), and her then partner Andrew Todd (Furniture and Wooden Objects), the Captain has become, as Krahn puts it, "a civilizing, humanizing figure on an otherwise featureless building." According to Costain, the sculpture now carries within him a time capsule—which contains, with typical CCI waggishness, a pamphlet on "how to open a time capsule and, for that matter, how to make one."

The CCI is a world of wonders. During those first introductory hours spent with Charles Costain (me a wide-eyed Dante to his mercurial Virgil of a guide), I saw stuffed birds that had survived a fire and were having the smoke removed from their feathers by laser. And an aboriginal basket from UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, wounded and broken and now being invisibly patched, seamlessly rewoven, with dyed, twisted Japanese paper. I saw the most beautiful bicycle I’d ever seen: the Silver Ghost of bicycles, a 1911 CCM motor bicycle, made in Weston, Ontario, which, during its sojourn at the CCI, was having its parts repaired, its missing parts refabricated, its surfaces stripped, cleaned and authentically repainted. I got to gaze reverently upon archive images of Paul Kane’s paintbox, and even more reverently (it’s just personal taste) upon photos of David Milne’s. I stood respectfully before a Metasequoia pine cone that turned out to be 40 million years old. I looked at giant original Audubon prints—who knew they were so lavishly beautiful?—and watched CCI conservators making new/old paper with which to mend them. And gazed in disbelief at a few lush colour photographs of pages from a book by Archimedes (The Archimedes Palimpsest).

The end of the first day was a chat with CCI Director General Bill Peters, a man with his eyes, Janus-like, on both the CCI’s past (it was founded in 1972) and, more urgently, its future. "We are a knowledge-based institution," Peters pointed out, "and our mission is based on the development and active dissemination of information that will support conservation professionals in preserving our cultural heritage." Peters is justifiably proud of the degree to which the CCI, whose staff hovers between 80 and 90, is a catalytic melding of artists, scholars, conservators and conservation scientists (I was strongly advised never to mix up the designations), all working together synergistically to solve problems. "The CCI has developed a reputation," Peters tells me, "for being a practical, real-world organization, providing information that is useful; we are not a bunch of ivory-tower scientists working disinterestedly in labs." Real-world information, for certain. But, as I would find out, real-world information passionately, brilliantly generated and incarnated. No ivory tower, perhaps, but a tower nonetheless.

The next morning begins with The Sanders Shakespeare. It’s a good place to start because of the painting’s notoriety, yes, but also because the CCI’s investigation of it serves handily to underscore the Institute’s approach to artifacts generally, no matter how high-profile.

I’m sitting, clutching my coffee, in the CCI’s Analytical Research Laboratory and talking to Ian N. M. Wainwright, Manager of CCI Analytical Research Services, and Dr. Marie-Claude Corbeil, a Senior Conservation Scientist who has been part of the CCI’s Canadian Artists’ Materials Research Project, which, so far, has exhaustively studied the works of Borduas, Milne, Pellan and Tom Thomson from a technical point of view. We are seated at vast black tables, surrounded by emplacements of what looks to me like very delicately honed machinery.

Wainwright, who seems too young to have been with the CCI since its inception, and whose practice as a conservation scientist goes back to his work at the National Gallery of Canada before the CCI’s founding, writes papers with titles like "Applications of X-ray Spectrometry, Microdiffractometry and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometry to Canadian Art and Archaeological Conservation Studies." Corbeil, as I write this, is in Paris, launching herself upon a remarkably ambitious program involving a comprehensive technical study of the work of Jean-Paul Riopelle, from the pigment up. On this particular late fall morning in Ottawa, both of them are being disarmingly charming and anxious to make as clear as they can what it is they do generally and, in particular, what they did to Shakespeare.

Both of them stress that, as scientists, they were never busy with whether the Sanders portrait was, in fact, a portrait of Shakespeare or not. The owner, a retired Canadian engineer whose family has owned the picture for 12 generations, and who had it hanging on the wall of his dining room, would like to think it is. The small (42-by-33-cm) oil painting on oak, reputedly painted by a certain John Sanders in 1603, when Shakespeare was 39 (he had already penned Hamlet, but had not yet come up with Othello, King Lear or Macbeth), had been examined in London in 1909 by one M. H. Spielmann, an art historian, and roundly pronounced a fake on the basis that the label was only about 50 or 60 years old.

Both Wainwright and Corbeil knew better than that. It was helpful, as Wainwright points out, that the owner had already commissioned a good deal of research. It was clear early on, for example, because of CCI-recommended tests made in Germany using a technique called dendrochronology (tree-ring dating), that the tree from which the boards for the picture’s panels were made was cut down in 1597 at the earliest.

What did Corbeil, who did most of the hands-on investigation, do after that? "We started, as we typically do," says Corbeil, "with non-invasive techniques—meaning techniques where we don’t have to remove a sample." It reminds me of the poet Wordsworth’s plaintive assertion about analysis, "We murder, to dissect." Non-invasive techniques might involve X-radiography, ultraviolet fluorescence, and infra-red and raking-light photography.

"Here," Corbeil continues, "we’d be looking for double paintings, retouchings, changes in composition, that sort of thing. After that, we move into the chemical examination of the work. We use X-ray spectrometry, still a non-invasive technique, to gain useful information about the chemical elements in the paint. We can thus detect the presence of pigments like titanium white, a 20th-century pigment, and, for example, cadmium yellow—which didn’t exist until the mid-19th century. And then, of course, we often want to remove tiny samples of paint to find out more about the pigments and examine the painting’s binding medium…there are a whole range of tests."

I point out that I find astonishing the degree to which conservation scientists like Wainwright and Corbeil can wade so fearlessly into a potentially priceless artifact like this little Shakespeare. Corbeil smiles patiently. "When you look at a painting as a viewer," she explains, "you see it as pristine, perfect. But when you look at it under a microscope, you quickly realize that the work has suffered a lot of events. There is flaking, lifting, cracking. There is often evidence of reworking, repairing. A painting is, after all, a multi-layered system. And you can take a cross-section of it, what is essentially a tiny core sample of the painting, like a geological core sample, and find that a painting can be made up of, say, 15 layers!" Clearly a painting, especially an old one, is an eruptive, maybe chaotic field, a small planetary world of its own, with its own kind of weather.

The CCI’s examination of the portrait eventually showed that it could be a painting of Shakespeare, from a scientific and historical point of view. That is to say, there is no reason, technically speaking, why it could not be. It made me think of old Polonius’s advice: "By indirections, find directions out."

"It is an old piece of wood," Wainwright concedes, "wood used around the beginning of the 17th century. And it has an old label on the back. The pigment employed is consistent with pigment used at that time. But it’s inappropriate, from a scientific standpoint, for us to say whether it is Shakespeare’s portrait, or that it’s any better or worse as a portrait of Shakespeare than any other portrait from the same time period. It’s important to know where to draw the line."

What restraint. Corbeil must be reading my mind: "It’s just professional," she says, smiling. "C’mon though," I ask them, "what do you guys really think? Is it Shakespeare or not?" Enigmatic looks all around. "This is my standard answer now," says Corbeil: "I would like him to be Shakespeare." She smiles a dazzling smile. "I think he looks good!"

It was like getting the main task accomplished—what about this Shakespeare portrait? —and earning, after that, the right to explore the rest of the CCI and the elegantly held passions of its remarkable staff. For the following day and a half, I wandered, with wondering eyes and an accelerating need to know everything the place could provide (fond hope!).

I visited with Dr. Leslie Carlyle, Senior Conservator, Materials Historian, Conservation Processes and Materials Research Division, and listened to her explain her work in, as her papers on the subject put it, "Historically Accurate Reconstructions of Oil Paint." The gamine-like Carlyle, bouncy and brilliant, described, from the far side of a table bearing hundreds of paint samples, all of them varying shades, densities and textures of lead-white, how her current work had grown from her Ph.D. studies at the Courtauld Institute, where she "looked at all the manuals published in Britain between 1750 and 1900 on how to paint in oils." She then followed their recipes, pressing oil from seeds and generally exploring the basic alchemy of pigment-making and the ways in which paint behaves differently depending on how it’s made, what has been added to it (varnishes, resins, this ’n’ that), the temperature at which it was worked and how it has been manipulated (by brush or knife, for example). And maybe, for all I know, the time of day or the phases of the moon.

She shows me what a cross-section of a Vermeer looks like, and how a layer of resin between layers of paint will guiltily announce itself by fluorescing under ultraviolet light. She talks about how the Pre-Raphaelites made their paintings (real rose madder, emerald green with copper arsenic in it, copal resin…). She talks about wrinkling, cracking, about the anthropology of the brush stroke. She makes paint itself more vivacious than paintings.

As of this past February, Carlyle was off to Amsterdam to continue her work there for the next four years—an extended (very extended) secondment from the CCI. Before going, she published a novel under the pen-name Judy Lester, a thriller called Masterpiece of Deception: An Art Mystery (Sumach Press). The book, which is built equally from charming drafts of violence, greed, romance and a lot of info about Vermeer, is an absorbing whodunit. But not the least of the pleasures it provides is its vivid re-creation of what it feels like to know all about paint:

"See this area? [The heroine, who is very Leslie Carlyle–esque, is looking through a scanning electron microscope.] That is mainly lead, probably from the lead white pigment in the ground. Of course that’s typical, but look at this," she continued, pointing to a series of blotches in the bottom layers of paint. "The conservation scientist got a reading here for lead and for tin, which means we almost certainly have a lead-tin yellow pigment…."

My next visit is with the urbane Dr. David Grattan, Manager, Conservation Processes and Materials Research—a man equally at home in a lab in Ottawa or living in a tent near the Arctic Circle. "We [meaning the staff of the CCI] are a very strange collection of people," Grattan assured me moments after we shook hands. "We tried to find out what we had in common, and it is an interest in materials, and especially how materials perform with age."

Just at the moment, Grattan’s department is busy with a dizzying number of projects, ranging from discovering how to measure the deterioration rate of parchment, the parchment in question being that sheet of it bearing the US Constitution (a few samples of which, harvested by syringe, now reside at the CCI), to his involvement with the famous Archimedes Palimpsest, which is in the care of, but not owned by, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland ("The owner is a high-tech millionaire who is not Bill Gates"). The reason for the CCI’s involvement with this ancient object is its knowing perhaps more than any agency in the world about the nature of the adhesives in this kind of object.

The Palimpsest, a collection of parchment leaves bound between wooden boards, is the oldest surviving manuscript containing the writings of Archimedes—his Method of Mechanical Theorems, for example, and his Treatise on Floating Bodies. The actual handwriting in the volume is not by Archimedes but rather by a diligent scribe who copied the treatises out in Constantinople in the 10th century. Somewhere during the 12th century, the pages were cut up and reused for another book (!), the leaves of Archimedes’ texts being taken apart, scraped away, cut in half, written over (in the opposite direction) and reassembled. Poor Archimedes, now thoroughly palimpsested, is mighty hard to get at.

"The Archimedes text," Grattan explains, "is actually in the book’s gutters, in the folds. So, in order to read it, we have to take the book apart. Our responsibility here at the CCI is to decide what kind of solvents to use in order to remove the ancient adhesives, that kind of thing…" These are, mind you, 600-year-old adhesives, holding together the pages of a book worth millions of dollars.

A second, no less remarkable project about which Grattan speaks eloquently and urgently is his concern for the curating, as it were, and the preservation of the 40-million-year-old fossil forest found high above the tree line on Axel Heiberg Island in the Northwest Territories. Spotted for the first time in the mid-1980s by a passing helicopter pilot, this astonishing few acres of vestigial temperate forest—black horizontal deposits protruding from a receding glacier—is made up of stumps and forest litter (Metasequoia cones, needles, fragments of amber), all of it fossilized but not mineralized. It still often looks, in other words, like recent vegetable material.

"In the field," Grattan explains, "this material, despite the low ground temperatures, is soaking wet. When you remove it from the site in order to study it, it rapidly dries out and, because of its lack of cellulose, loses all its elastic properties." So when you touch, say, a 40-million-year-old Metasequoia pine cone in a laboratory, it more or less crumbles into something often resembling cigarette ash.

What to do? The solution, according to Grattan, was something called paralene, described by its manufacturer, Union Carbide, as a "vapour-deposited pinhole-free protective film." "They thought it might be used for preserving delicate museum specimens," says Grattan. "Which it isn’t. But it is very useful for preserving these fossil specimens." What you do is evacuate a chamber, puff paralene into the now airless space in which the fossil resides (it goes directly to the vapour phase without ever passing through the liquid), and the stuff grows, molecule by molecule, onto the fossil’s surface. "It’s rather like shrink-wrapping it," says Grattan, who is a quick man with an analogy.

"We also use it for burnt paper," adds Grattan. Burnt paper as in the essential burnt paper documents surviving in the cockpits of crashed aircraft. "The cockpit of an airplane is full of paper," says Grattan, with an almost lugubrious casualness. "And we do two or three crashes a year." Another of the ten thousand absorbing stories lurking within the CCI.

Who among the CCI’s crack scientists/conservators have I neglected? Michael Harrington (Manager, Treatment and Development), with whom I spent an exacting afternoon in the furniture lab, watching CCI conservators painstakingly rebuilding a cracked rococo dressing-screen ("It’s like dentistry in wood") owned by the historic Fulford Place in Brockville, Ontario. Sherry Guild (Paper Conservator), whose task it is to oversee the repairing and rebuilding of the aforementioned glorious life-size Audubon prints from Birds of America (1826–1838), five complete sets of the original 100 being owned by Canadian institutions. And the eloquent James M. Bourdeau (Conservator, Fine Arts and Architectural Services), who electrified me with his adventures in historic reconstruction projects, including a famous "recovery" of the Chamber of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario at Queen’s Park in Toronto ("The first thing you should do when you have an object in front of you is not to say, ‘Where’s the damage?’ but to ask, rather, ‘What does this object mean?’").

My last hours at the CCI were spent with the rakish Stefan Michalski (Manager, Preventive Conservation Services), and this was an audience I was lucky to get because the guy seems to spend most of his life on airplanes.

Michalski lists among his areas of specialization humidity, temperature and light. He is interested in what happens when a museum’s windows are too big. Or what happens when shippers drop a packing case full of paintings off the back of a truck. Michalski’s lab at the CCI is—or can be—a raucous place, where machines intentionally and repeatedly distress (pound the crap out of) carrying cases, painting stretchers, vitrines, anything that potentially holds and protects the item inside. When I was there, the lab was hung with a series of large white "paintings" which were being made to grow predetermined cracks. It looked like some tepid essay in conceptual art. But it wasn’t.

Michalski was in Spain recently for a conference when he was summoned frantically by the Guggenheim Bilbao, which wanted to borrow Picasso’s Guernica, but was running into opposition from the painting’s home museum in Madrid, whose curators were using a host of sophisticated technical arguments to prove that the painting was too fragile to be moved.

The CCI’s technical arguments were more sophisticated. "We’re the only cultural agency in the world that has the equipment to test modern paintings to see how much shock and vibration they’ll take," notes Michalski, with a hint of justifiable pride. Apparently Michalski had a few paintings constructed right here in Ottawa in a manner similar to Guernica—and then set about to putting them through hell. Hell like figuring out what would happen if you dropped the painting from "the height of a standard truck standing in a loading bay. Most transit accidents take place during the first and last ten metres," says Michalski. "Those are the weak places in the operation." Sort of like an airplane’s landing and taking off.

So how did it work out with Guernica? "Well," says Michalski, grinning broadly, "I gave this talk in Madrid, the painting’s home city, where I said that there was no reason for the Bilbao not to borrow it, that we knew enough about how to travel it safely. And you know what happened? I got catcalls from the audience! However," he says puckishly, "I do keep getting all these warm invitations to attend exhibitions and events in Bilbao!"

Spring 2002

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