Cut from its frame in brazen theft and lost for 30 years, restored De Kooning painting will take centre stage in Getty show
The J. Paul Getty Museum will this June unveil the effects of an intense conservation of Willem de Kooning’s 1955 Woman-Ochre, which was poorly ruined during a brazen daytime heist at the University of Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA) in 1985. The portray was slash out of its frame, ripped from its backing and remained misplaced for far more than 30 yrs. In 2019 UAMA sent it to the Getty, which requires on a restricted range of professional-bono conservation tasks. The restored get the job done will be highlighted in Conserving de Kooning: Theft and Recovery at the Getty Center (7 June-28 August), which will also document the painstaking approach of rehabilitation.
It has taken 3 years, claims Ulrich Birkmaier, the senior conservator of paintings at the Getty, “both due to the fact of the complexity of the treatment, but also the simple fact that we haven’t been capable to get the job done on it complete-time simply because of the constraints of Covid”.
When the painting arrived, conservators undertook a comprehensive technical assessment by means of infrared and ultraviolet examination and X-ray imaging, as well as a cross-segment evaluation of a very small paint chip from the weakened floor. From that they identified the techniques of the therapy.
The paint initial wanted to be consolidated, as sections ended up flaking from when the canvas was pulled away from its lining during the theft. This action was meticulously accomplished under a microscope by the associate paintings conservator Laura Rivers and took almost two several years. Then arrived the cleaning, which associated eliminating old surface area coatings, which includes a 1974 remedy of the painting at the Museum of Fashionable Art in New York and an amateur varnish application by the thieves.
Speaking to The Artwork Newspaper from the Getty lab through Zoom, Birkmaier reveals off the painting’s new backing, a polyester monofilament fabric. Propped vertically on an easel, it is waiting to be reunited with the four strips at the edges of the canvas—the tacking margins—left guiding immediately after the theft. He will fill in regions of paint reduction prior to the portray is placed around a new wooden stretcher and reinstalled in its original body.
Soon after the Getty exhibition, Lady-Ochre will return to the UAMA and a exhibit there. The curator Olivia Miller was one particular of the museum staff who went to Silver Metropolis, New Mexico, to retrieve the De Kooning from an antique keep that experienced purchased the function in an estate sale in 2017. “We normally had this recognition that the collection was incomplete,” she says. “To have it again, we’re just so pleased and so grateful the Getty took this on.”
In the meantime a new documentary by Allison Otto titled The Thief Collector, which premiered at the South by Southwest Film Competition in Texas last month, explores the continue to-murky motivations behind the painting’s 1985 theft, which has been joined to a New Mexico few, Jerry and Rita Adler.
