Explore the Repair and restoration about the Recovery of the History in this artwork.
Repair and restoration In August of 2019 Miller told the Arizona Daily Star that she could not say when it could be restored to exhibit as it could not be taken from the museum to the conservator's shop until the FBI closed the case.The instrument used during the theft to remove the painting from its frame was sharp enough to cut cleanly through the canvas, but for that same reason it would take a long time to match the threads exactly and reattach them, Miller explained. One of the corners had torn, she added. She and Odegaard both commented on the many small sections of paint that had flaked off the horizontal creases formed across the painting when it was rolled up.At some point after the theft, the painting had been reframed into the one that Van Auker had found so unappealing when he first saw it. Whoever had done that work had done it crudely, using flat screws to attach the canvas to the wood, causing further damage. The lack of temperature and humidity controls at the Alter house also left the paint brittle; Miller said it was fortunate that more paint had not been lost.Nevertheless, the Alters appeared to have taken some measures to protect it while it hung in their bedroom. A reporter from Dallas-based television station WFAA was able to tour the house for a short documentary about the case, and noted that a heavy screw had been partially driven into the baseboard at the floor level below the wall where the painting hung, effectively serving as a doorstop that prevented the door from opening fully and inadvertently damaging the painting. Likewise, the window on the side of the room that faced the setting sun was equipped with a heavy blackout curtain that would have blocked sunlight from the direction when drawn.Shortly after its return the museum took the painting to a conservator's studio for the repair and restoration process. It originally expected to take a year, but near the end of that period, Miller said she was no longer so certain. UAMA started a fundraising drive to raise the $1 million it expected the restoration would cost.In March 2019, the museum announced it had chosen experts at the Getty Conservation Institute, associated with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, to repair Woman-Ochre. Before it went there, the museum put the painting on public display on St. Patrick's Day, an event for which a special fee was charged. Among the 250 people who attended was actor Hal Linden, who was performing in a nearby production of A.R. Gurney's play Love Letters. "I'm really taken by the drama of the story", he told the Republic. "I would love to know the story of the people who lived with it in their home."Experts at the Getty, who were present, said they expected it would take 14 or 15 months to fully repair Woman-Ochre. During the restoration, conservators had to decide to what degree they would leave damage related to the theft intact, since the theft is now part of the painting's history. They would also have to avoid over-restoring the work to the point where it would look too artificial.The institute did the work for free in exchange for the Getty museum being allowed to exhibit the work after it was restored. Originally, UAMA expected to have Woman-Ochre back on its walls where it was stolen from after Thanksgiving 2020, around the 35th anniversary of its theft; those plans were postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of many art museums at that time. At one point the conservators at the Getty could only spend one day a week working on the painting.The conservators' primary task was to stabilize the paint surface. Damage done during the theft had been compounded by the thieves' having rolled it up immediately afterwards, cracking the paint in many places. Since the thieves had not been aware of the secondary canvas attached to the back with a wax resin, they had not cut it completely and had ripped the painting out where they could not cut,in addition to rolling the primary canvas off the secondary one, an action that led to a later patch on the back of the primary canvas put there with common white glue.: 1:20–1:30  "There was a lot of violence to the way the canvas was pulled away from the backing canvas. The word trauma comes to mind", said Tom Learner, the Getty's head of science.One conservator, Laura Rivers, used "gentle heat and tiny dental tools" to reattach paint flakes, "It was ... the most damaged painting that I have ever worked on," she said. She found those flakes with a microscope, scattered across the entire painting like "visual noise". Rivers was often able to work on only an inch (2.5 cm) of the painting a day.Once she had finished that task, Rivers removed two layers of varnish, one added by MoMA in 1974 and the other by the thieves, with solvent mixtures, allowing de Kooning's original colors to return. She noted that one of the two varnishes was slightly fluid at room temperature, which had led to the painting collecting much of the dust in the desert air during the time it was in the Alters' home.After flattening the canvas so that it could be reattached to the portions left behind in the original frame during the theft, a process that the institute's senior conservator, Ulrich Birkmaier, says took two years,: 2:53  he completed the restoration by reattaching all the sliced canvas fibers. Using a very small paintbrush that barely touched the canvas, he painted in gaps left by the cracks, always avoiding any of de Kooning's original work; although he did remove and paint over some areas where the thieves had made "amateurish restoration attempts" of their own. In an interview with the Arizona Republic, he compared the painting to a puzzle, where "you only fill in the pieces that are missing."While modern viewers will know the painting was stolen, recovered and restored, Birkmaier said, viewers later in the century may not. "Hopefully, there's just a painting with some slight scars (that) to the casual viewer won't be visible really", he said of the restoration. Writing in The New York Times, Jori Finkel noted a close observer can discern the impressions left by the staples the thieves used to attach the canvas to a new stretcher bar and some unevenness close to the frame where the reattached fibers did not perfectly match. "And, if you know where to look, you can probably make out a few of the tears that were repaired, like one beneath the artist's signature."Learner was proud that there was not a single remnant of the damage from the theft that would blatantly mar the painting. It would, he told the Times, take a very large one since "There's so much action in the painting, [it] works to our advantage." Finkel agreed, commenting that "maybe in this strange way the violence of the theft and the violence of de Kooning's imagery will now work together, woven into the very fabric of this newly conserved painting."From June to August 2022 Woman-Ochre was on temporary exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
doorstop Arizona WFAA Getty Conservation Institute Love Letters art museum Hal Linden blackout Los Angeles visual noise stretcher bar stolen Dallas varnish COVID-19 pandemic modern Jori Finkel restore A.R. Gurney Thanksgiving conservator Arizona Republic J. Paul Getty Museum Ochre The New York Times Arizona Daily Star left baseboard St. Patrick's Day