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NEW YORK—No matter how drained you feel this summer when you reach the top of the Guggenheims ramp (and the conclusion of “Louise Bourgeois,” which is without a doubt one of the best exhibitions of the year), be sure to have a good long look at “Imageless,” a small gem of a show up in the museum’s Annex Level 7 through September 28.

The brainchild of Carol Stringari, a conservator at the museum since 1992 and its chief conservator since September, this “Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting” focuses on one of the most deliberately extreme paintings of high modernism. Reinhardt shared many of the same political and aesthetic experiences as his abstract expressionist contemporaries, but, rejecting any vestige of post-Surrealist romanticism, he would perfect an abstraction utterly devoid of expressionism — or anything else, some would say. In the seven years before his death in 1967, Reinhardt painted some 50 examples of what he called the “ultimate painting”: a five-foot-square canvas with a grid of nine even squares, each of which is the darkest possible shade of a different color. Which is to say that the canvases are — even after you’ve spent a good few minutes straining your eyes peering at them — more or less, uniformly black.

Reinhardt’s intention for these paintings has been the subject of much debate — commentators have detected everything from iconoclasm to spirituality to absurd humor in them — but Stringari’s show doesn’t deal with their meaning. In choosing for its title Reinhardt’s own word — "imageless" — she focuses instead on their physicality and the conservation problems this has raised. During Reinhardt’s lifetime, his matte surfaces were so susceptible to marks and scratches, and he was so obsessive about their “imageless” neutrality, that he took to repainting them after every exhibition. Since his death, however, this has clearly not been an option.

In “Imageless,” the Guggenheim presents an irreparably damaged Reinhardt that has been used as the basis for research into conservation methods. ARTINFO caught up with Stringari last week to discuss the fundamental issues at the heart of this fascinating show.

Carol, you worked on this Reinhardt project for six years. How did it begin?

The research project began in 2000; it was initiated and funded by the AXA insurance company, who came to us because they wanted to bequest an Ad Reinhardt painting that had belonged to a private collector and had been irreparably damaged. It had traveled to a show in Europe and something had fallen on it. There were large scratches, an impact crack, three pretty bad abrasions, and loss in the paint. It was declared a total loss, and AXA paid the value of the painting to the collector, then came to ask if we wanted it for research purposes. It was like a cadaver, in a way.

Was there a particular reason for approaching the Guggenheim?

AXA approached both the Guggenheim and MoMA, because MoMA did the Reinhardt retrospective in 1991. I worked at MoMA at that time, and I was the conservator on that show; I traveled with the show and became very engaged with Reinhardt’s work. In addition, we have a large collection of minimalist and monochromatic works from our Panza collection here at the Guggenheim, so we’re well versed in the issues.

What were the starting points for your research?

AXA had sent it to two or three conservators to be restored before determining that it was irreparably damaged. It was tested by more than one of them, but nothing was successful. However in the process of treating it they discovered that the surface itself wasn’t what you would expect from a Reinhardt. They said, “There’s something wrong here,” although it wasn't clear what had happened to it. At the time of the donation we talked to AXA about a grant to do some experimental testing, and they generously gave us the funding.

What were your intentions at that stage?

First, to find out if it had in fact been resurfaced, and how, and what materials were used. (It turned out that it had been spray-painted.) And then to use the surface as a test bed for testing solvents, traditional techniques for cleaning, and in-painting. I wanted to test the whole gamut of techniques that we have for treating monochromatic surfaces, and to experiment with unproven methods.

I gather that the research eventually settled on methods of cleaning the surface with lasers.

It turned into a project that was very focused on laser research, but at the beginning we had no idea whether that would be successful. At the outset that was just one of the many proposals we had set out.

And yet in the end you settled on lasers. Would you say that lasers are the optimal conservation tool?

Well, I don’t think that I’d go that far, because I don’t want to give the impression that we’re going to go out lasering everything! I don’t think that lasers will ever be used routinely. It’s something to be used when all else fails and what you are attempting is so complex that there’s no other way to do it. The laser process is extremely difficult. Demonstrating that fact is part of the point of this didactic exhibition.

I was about to ask you why you decided to stage the exhibition now. The research doesn’t seem to have reached a conclusion.

One of the reasons we decided to do the exhibition now is simply that we can’t take the project any further because our funding is finished, and this is an excellent opportunity to show the public the process of conservation research and experimentation. Although we have advanced the use of lasers in the field dramatically, it still needs a degree of refinement. We’re hoping that the research can be taken from here.

It also seems that the research has reached a point where philosophical decisions need to be made. Is it even possible to conserve Reinhardt’s “imageless” paintings? They were inevitably damaged as soon as they left his studio.

This is the crux of the issue. This is an essential aspect of the whole project, and you’ve hit the nail on the head. We don’t know the answers to these questions. Conservators talk a lot about artists’ intent. Whoever resurfaced that painting probably did it believing that the artist intended a pristine surface. And you could argue that because Reinhardt often repainted his own works when they came back to his studio and he saw all those little fingerprints and marks. But he repainted them according to his own methodology, whereas unfortunately this one was sprayed and didn’t even look like a Reinhardt.

Reinhardt was at heart an ironist — he parodied the pretensions of his contemporaries, and often in a humorous way. Do you sometimes worry that he would think you simply didn’t get the joke?

Yes. I think in some ways he would be very amused by all this. Reinhardt wrote a lot about what he was doing, but he died prematurely, so we don’t know if he would even accept what we’re showing here as a Reinhardt.

And that in turn raises questions about the whole nature of conserving artworks.  

One of the things I’ve learned from this project is how much there is to learn, how complex the whole process is. What is our mandate? What is it that we are supposed to be doing? What is it that we are restoring? Or that we need to restore? How much is this about artists’ intent? How much is it about historical artifacts? Are we fetishists? Do we try to retain these objects at all costs? These are very important questions that we must continue to ask ourselves. In fact I find this the most interesting part of the conservator’s profession.

And has this Reinhardt work helped you start to answer some of those questions?

I have used this particular painting as a test bed because I think it’s important to know what our box of tricks is and what we are capable of, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that this is something that we should go out and do on a regular basis. I’ve actually worked on many monochromatic paintings where I’ve done very little — just enough to make sure that the damage or the abrasion or whatever is not what jumps out at you. Conservators' work is bound to a particular code of ethics. Burying the artist’s hand under a surface that you put on yourself is something that we would avoid at all costs. My philosophy is less is more.