Handle With Care

SEATTLE—Although buying and installing outdoor sculpture may seem straightforward, collectors considering purchases of such works need to steel themselves for overhauls of their insurance policies, security systems, turf contours and maintenance plans. “It’s anything but plop art,” says Nicholas Dorman, chief conservator at the Seattle Art Museum.

Before the acquisition is delivered, “the best approach is to have a cardboard or plywood full-size mockup made,” says Steve Tatti, a Manhattan-based sculpture conservator. Decide where the model interacts best with the landscape and buildings and is most readily viewed from indoors. At the ideal spot, have masons sink a concrete pedestal into the earth, with drainage channels at grass level. Jackie Wilson, co-owner of Wilson Conservation in New York, suggests that the concrete project “high enough so that lawnmowers won’t keep banging into the art.”

Don’t hire just any anyone to move the artwork into place. “Only use specialists, not your gardener or groundskeeper or local rigging company,” says Bob Linley, co-owner of James Bourlet Inc., an arts and antiques moving outfit in New York. Linley tenderly wraps pieces in acid- and sulfate-free fabric before hoisting them onto cranes or tractor trailers and carefully monitors them during road trips to ensure that they aren’t hit by flying flecks of gravel.

During the object’s first few days outside, Wilson warns, “the finish will be immediately compromised. Collectors have to expect that. This isn’t like American furniture, where original finish is everything.” Salt, windblown dirt and pollution eat at paint on steel or at wax and lacquer coatings on bronze. Hurricanes, tornados, floods and earthquakes can mangle or flip sculptures.

Wilson and her husband, Cameron, and Tatti travel widely, on retainer or at day rates in the $1,000-$2,000 range, to treat small and large ailments and to advise grounds-keepers. “We can show the staff the cleaning protocols to follow regularly,” Wilson says. Among her tips: Blot wet surfaces until they’re dry to prevent the formation of spots, which are particularly unflattering on the smooth bronze skins of Boteros or Henry Moores. Never use Brillo on patina (she won’t name the prominent collector who learned that lesson). Off-season, shelter artworks under aluminum-framed canvas tents or move them into outbuildings or climate-controlled storage that is off-site.

Even with the best of care, finishes can fail, sometimes because artists used experimental or misguided techniques. (The good news, Wilson reports, is that coats of new paint or re-created patina rarely affect the sale value of outdoor sculptures.)

At Kentuck Knob, a hexagonal 1954 house near Pittsburgh designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that is now open to the public, a sculpture meadow features 35 works, including a 1989 fieldstone cylinder by Andy Goldsworthy and 960 red silhouettes of human figures that British artist Ray Smith sliced out of steel in 1990. Patricia Coyle, Kentuck Knob’s marketing director, has watched Smith’s red paint peel. “He didn’t prepare the steel properly, so all 960 of them will have to be sandblasted and repainted,” she says with a sigh. The house’s owner and occasional resident, British developer Peter Palumbo, plans to finance the restoration partly with house tours that cost up to $75 per person.

Cover your bases by insuring the works from vandalism and theft. Lord Palumbo originally installed many of the sculptures on the grounds of another historic residence he once owned—Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, in northeast Illinois—where some were vandalized. Coyle prefers not to discuss the extent of the damage.

Outdoor sculpture is vulnerable to theft, even if it weighs a ton or two. In December 2005, a 1970 bronze Reclining Figure by Moore worth £3 million ($5.2 million) was trucked off the grounds of the Henry Moore Foundation, just north of London, and most likely melted down for scrap value, estimated to be a mere £5,000 ($8,600). A year later, thieves struck a public park near Toronto and tore out a 1951 11-foot-tall statue of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko by Makar Vronsky and Oleksa Oliynyk. And in February, sculptor John Waddell lost eight circa 1990 larger-than-life bronze nudes from his Arizona property.