Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
Raina Chao spent the last day of 2017 crawling around inside a massive sculpture, checking its structure before a crane inched it into place outside the Saint Louis Art Museum. She started 2018 working with museum engineers to drop the humidity by 2 degrees because the condensation forming on a gallery skylight might affect the art. Now she’s leading me through a security door and down a hallway, past the textile, painting, and paper conservation labs.
We step into the objects lab, where Chao is a conservator. She gleefully explains the new 3-D digital microscope, how it will “take a bunch of images and give us a cross-section so we can see the layers of paint in order.” She’s about to begin cleaning a seated arhat—a figure of one who’s attained enlightenment but not yet full Buddhahood.
“Yeah, he looks disappointed,” I say.
“He’s meditating,” Chao corrects me. “He’s very calm”—especially seeing as how he’s lost the top of his skull, where the wood’s been expanding and contracting for centuries. “The split on his head was far more disturbing to the curator than this split at the base,” Chao says, pointing. “I’ll probably use a very strong Japanese tissue paper. You can layer it, tacking it into place with a little bit of moisture, and you can stretch and tease out the fiber so it has a little more bulk.” Once she’s filled in the crack, she’ll paint the new surface and blend the paint—without extending into the area around the fix, which would be easier but would affect the original material. Conservation’s a little like backpacking: You want to be able to retrace your steps—and leave as little of yourself as possible.
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Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
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Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
In the new Egyptian gallery, Chao restored the flared paper-thin rim of a flask with ibex-head flanges, mixing acrylic spackling, adhesive, and a powder of glass micro-balloons. She then coated the restored rim with a new acrylic paint that stays water soluble even when dry. Another project Chao’s eager to begin is a marble high relief of the adoration of the Christ child. “One of the trumpets has been lost,” she says sadly, “and one of the poor donkey’s ears, and the tip of the other one. The curator’s going to find comparable images to tell us how pointy the tips should be and how high.” Her challenge will be to mimic the translucence of the “white” marble and match its veining and color variations.
Upstairs, in Sculpture Hall, Chao shows me yesterday’s work: wicking dilute adhesive beneath “individual paint flakes that have been holding on for dear life” to the window frame that’s part of Louise Bourgeois’ Cell (Three White Marble Spheres). The work is about to travel, and that’s when any piece is most vulnerable. She’s stabilizing as much as she can while leaving the intended dirt, the artist’s fingerprints smudging the glass, the window pane Bourgeois broke deliberately.
The goal here isn’t to pretty up a piece of art but instead to erase the damage of time—which is an art, and a science, all its own.
