In light of recent discussions about displaying gigantic posters - and the
never-ending debate about the pros and cons of restoring fragile movie paper -
the WSJ article below from last November offers an interesting perspective. It
involves the 200-year-old, 12 foot by 17 foot monster ("The Passage of the
Delaware") now hanging at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. - d.
==========================
20 NOVEMBER 2010
A Plus-Size Painting Finds a Home
Back Story: Hanging 'The
Passage of the Delaware'
BY KATHERINE BINDLEY
How
does a museum hang a 12-by-17-foot Thomas Sully painting that has a 16-inch
gilded frame, was painted in 1819 and required 4,000 hours of restoration?
Answer: very carefully, and over about two weeks.
That's how long it took the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts to set up "The Passage of the Delaware," one of
the centerpieces of its new 120,000-square-foot Art of the Americas wing, which
opened Saturday (20 November 2010).
The wintry scene shows George
Washington on a horse before he and his troops crossed the Delaware River on
Christmas night of 1776 to surprise the British forces.
Discolored varnish and dirt had
built up on the painting.
Conservators cleaned the canvas a
few inches at a time using instruments the size of Q-tips.
For the installation, it took days to reattach the canvas to its
original wooden stretcher.
The stiff edges of the canvas had
to be pulled over the stretcher evenly — and without damaging the work — before
they could be stapled.
Finally, museum workers reassembled
the gilded frame and placed the canvas inside. That took a day to get right.
This latest installation wasn't the
first time the painting's size has created challenges.
The original commission was for the
statehouse of North Carolina, but the work proved too large for the space.
The Philadelphia-based Sully, a
British immigrant and a leading portrait artist of the time, eventually sold
the work to Boston frame maker John Doggett for $600.
The work came into the museum's
hands in 1903, but there wasn't a space large enough to display the original
frame and canvas together. The painting went into storage in 1998.
The new Americas wing is also home
to paintings by Mary Cassatt, Jackson Pollock, Edward Hopper and Georgia
O'Keeffe, among many others.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art is
another major museum that's struggled with recent plus-size installations —
among them, a 1,870-pound Matisse ceramic panel in September, lifted out of a
donor's home with a crane, and a 32-foot-wide painting by the Chilean artist
Matta, which last year took about a week to prepare and hang.
"It's not something we plan to
do frequently," said Deputy Director Nancy Thomas.
Source: http://on.wsj.com/htqm1J
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