The art of saving art
In the movies, a rescue mission involves men in body armor rappelling out of a helicopter, machine guns slung. At Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center, the rescuers are men and women in white smocks. Their missions involve rescuing paper objects from decline. They wield scalpels, soft brushes, wheat starch paste, and vinyl erasers. Weissman technicians just finished an interesting conservation-style rescue. They assessed, repaired, and reframed six Le Corbusier lithographs and one proof print from a Joan Miró etching. The artworks, most of them about 50 years old, came from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Sun damage was one issue. For most of those decades, the art had been exposed to daylight streaming through wall-size windows of single-pane glass. “The pink was quite pink,” said Debora D. Mayer, looking at Le Corbusier’s “La Femme Rose,” a 1963 print where the pink had faded to weak beige. “It certainly wasn’t so pale as...