Carol Stringari on Exhibiting a Reinhardt “Cadaver”

Photo by Kristopher McKay, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Carol Stringari with Ad Reinhardt's "Black Painting" (1960–66)

Photos by James Martin, Orion Analytical, LLC

Cross-sections taken from the nine squares of Reinhardt’s "Black Painting" (1960–66), viewed under visible light at 280x printed magnification

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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.