Brushing Away Modern Art’s Stains

Spill a cup of coffee on a Jackson Pollock canvas, or leave your Mark Rothko painting in the shower, and you might have to give Carol Mancusi-Ungaro a call.

The founding director of Harvard’s Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art—located in the climate-controlled Straus Center for Conservation on the top floor of the Fogg Art Museum—Mancusi-Ungaro is an artist for modern artists.

Three days a week, Mondays through Wednesdays, she serves as the chief conservator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the location of her permanent residence.

But on Thursday, she flies to Boston to work in her small Fogg office—which used to be part of a library until she took on the position in April 2001. For the two days a week she works in Cambridge, she lives in Kirkland House.

Her job isn’t an easy one—Harvard’s center is at the cutting edge of its field, and Mancusi-Ungaro is just about the only employee.

“Most of the work I do is precedent-setting, because it just hasn’t happened before,” she says. “I’m working all the time.”

Among her varied duties: repair damaged paintings, restore old works, lecture on modern art and its “technical” aspects and—her personal project—create a huge library of documentation on the materials and methods of contemporary artists.

Melancholy Monochrome

Mancusi-Ungaro stands next to a 1980 Brice Marden painting (or rather a part of it, for the piece is in several panels) marked by three solid color fields of orange and blue.

In the middle of the panel, the blue appears slightly washed away and streaked with white—the result of water damage from a storage room flood at the Whitney.

Marden was devastated by the damage, and he—along with the Whitney—immediately called Mancusi-Ungaro, who interviewed him for an hour-and-a-half about how he created the work before she tackled how best to repair it.

She points to a few—almost imperceptible—white specks on the canvas, places where she and her team have removed paint samples for analysis.

The next room shows how scientific methods have greatly aided modern art restoration—advanced equipment enables the Straus staff to perform scanning electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction.

Thanks to Photoshop, the staff can see an enlarged version of a microscopic view of a tiny sample from the removed paint that has been mounted in resin.

Narayan Khandekar, a senior conservation scientist at the Straus Center—he has a Ph.D. in chemistry and is also trained as an artist—points out the layered colors of the paint speck. It turns out that the solid blue is actually many layers of different blues, with a white layer on top—a layer that he guesses is lime from the concrete that the flood water ran through.

“After we do the analysis, the next step is to actually devise a strategy for treatment,” Mancusi-Ungaro explains.

With this painting, microscopic analysis has revealed that the damage may be largely superficial.

Repairs will attempt not to recreate the painting with the same technique Marden originally used, but instead to make the piece look identical to its condition before the accident.

“A conservator tries to use materials in a treatment that are compatible with the original material but also reversible,” she says. “The conservator is trained to match the color as it appears on the surface, including the appearance of dirt.”

Asked what the painting is worth, Mancusi-Ungaro shrugs and refers me to the curator.

“[Conservation] follows the medical model,” she says. “A doctor takes care of a patient no matter the cost.”

According to Harry Cooper, associate curator for modern art for the Fogg, a “major painting” like Marden’s would be worth “certainly over a million dollars.”

Mancusi-Ungaro’s efforts in the Marden restoration have also aided another aspect of her work. She expresses excitement that Marden saved several of the wooden boards that were adjacent to the panels when he painted them in 1980—and that he’s planning on donating them to her collection.

The God of Small Things

She hopes to build the Center for Technical Study into a repository of such materials by collecting “anything of non-commercial value.”

She picks a tube of paint off her desk that’s marked “W.P.A.”—the Works Progress Administration, started by then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904. The paint in the tubes is still remarkably supple over a half-century later.

“These are the start of the center, right here in my hands,” she says.

Tubes of paint, brushes, discarded boards—these are things that only a conservator could love.

“We need to do it now, before the stuff disappears,” she says. “The information is here. We have a responsibility to document this. Why shouldn’t Harvard be the place [conservators] have to come to for this documentation?”

Coupled with a series of interviews Mancusi-Ungaro has been conducting with artists, the Center’s collection will allow those attempting to restore art in the future—as well as art historians curious about the creation of an artist’s work—to understand the production process better.

Her hour-and-a-half long interviews with artists, which are funded by the Mellon Foundation, are “open-form conversations.”

“We don’t know what the important questions are going to be in the future,” she explains. “I let them talk about what they thought was important.”

Her model for interviews was adopted by the International Committee of Museums.

“It is a first, and conservators are really excited about it,” she says.

Growing Pains

Although Harvard’s modern art collections total thousands of objects, very few are visible to the public at the Fogg due to space limitations.

“There isn’t enough gallery space, because modern art is often big!” Mancusi-Ungaro exclaims.

The Fogg’s modern collection is limited to a few rooms of the works owned by Harvard, whose permanent collection, according to Cooper, encompasses over 1,000 paintings, sculptures and decorative arts created since 1900—not even including the modern prints and drawings.

“Of those 1,000 there are about 200 objects of real importance that I, as a curator, would be happy to have displayed on the walls,” Cooper says.

Mancusi-Ungaro says she believes that public displays of modern art are critical to sociological examination of the modern era.

Recently, Harvard has been seeking to build a new art museum—designed by famed architect Renzo Piano and dedicated to modern work—but the plan has been way-laid by concerns of Riverside residents who live near the proposed site.

But Mancusi-Ungaro—who consulted on the museum’s design—says that such a museum would be a “wonderful and beautiful addition” for the community.

“It really must happen if we’re going to be serious about studying the culture of our time,” she says. “If the museum doesn’t happen, it’s going to be difficult to have this [collection] grow.”

She points to past exhibitions done by the University Art Museums—including a study of artist Piet Mondrian that brought in a large sampling of his work as part of an international exhibition.

“If we tried to do the same for an artist with bigger works, we couldn’t,” she complains.

She says she also needs the space for her collection of artist materials.

“We’re limited in sharing the kinds of studies we do in modern [art].”

Finding the Modern

Mancusi-Ungaro took a winding route to Harvard’s modern art collection.

“I didn’t really awaken to the love of what I did until I began to treat modern art,” Mancusi-Ungaro says.

Having spent years working on Old Master paintings at Harvard, among other places, she followed her husband to Texas.

While in Texas, Mancusi-Ungaro was called on for assistance by Dominique De Menil, a wealthy art collector who was starting a museum—the Menil Collection—in Texas.

Among her projects was the 1979 restoration of the Rothko Chapel, which took her to New York for research and eventually to Ray Kelly, Rothko’s former painting assistant for the chapel, for advice.

“The Rothko chapel is really what started my interest in modern,...and working with artists or artists’ assistants.”

And from there her career took off, as she explains, “Whenever a major problem came up, I would be called.”

In 1998, an important Barnett Newman painting was slashed in a museum in Amsterdam—the second Newman painting to be knifed by the same person. Mancusi-Ungaro was called within a few hours.

“I’ll never forget it, the phone rang and the hair just stood up on my arms,” she says.

Mancusi-Ungaro was part of an international committee that oversaw what she calls the “most meticulous restoration,” and a “precedent-setting” three year operation.

She also has been a conservator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in California and the Yale Center for British Art, served as a consultant to museums worldwide and is also known for her writings on Jackson Pollock.

As part of an exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), she and Jim Cottington of MoMA, tried to recreate the drip-and-splatter technique that Pollock invented.

“You get very enticed by the films of Pollock,” she says. “To really understand what he was doing we had to do it for ourselves.”

The results were a testament to Pollock’s genius beyond the mere technical means of creation—while the first few go-rounds looked “really beautiful,” according to Mancusi-Ungaro, by the third layer “it became a total mess.”

Her study became the celebrated article “Response as Dialogue.”

Preserving the Trust

Mancusi-Ungaro says she sees herself as only the latest in a long line of Harvard art experts.

“I do believe that my work is part of a large and important tradition at Harvard,” Mancusi-Ungaro says. “The culture of studying the physicality of a work of art started here, but Harvard hadn’t extended that study to modern art.”

She explains that the first professional art restorers were artists themselves.

Later, when museums increased the value of publicly displaying art, conservators began to gain the trust of artists as the anonymous preservers of their work for posterity.

The work is common on the paintings of Old Masters; most pre-20th century paintings in museums have had some kind of restoration done on them.

“Carol is somebody who is able to take a really informed, sensitive approach to conservation, to be cautious, to do the art historical homework, to talk to the artist and not necessarily to capitulate to the artist...but to be informed by whatever they can tell conservators,” Cooper says. “We’re very lucky to have her. She’s incredibly distinguished.”

Mancusi-Ungaro wants to see Harvard build on its success of conserving Old Masters and make Harvard the primary resource for conservators of modern art.

“That would be a wonderful goal, if the center became something that demonstrated the centrality of arts to our culture.”

—Staff writer J. Hale Russell can be reached at jrussell@fas.harvard.edu.