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The twentieth century has brought considerable development to the idea and to the operational means of the preservation of material cultural heritage. The different natural sciences became increasingly more implicated into the field fostering thus their incredible development during the last century. This was assisted by a more systematic, thus a more scientific approach to heritage preservation, in particular in the field of the humanities. Professions concerned with preservation, and most specifically conservator-restorers were brought to thoroughly investigate and analyse the reasons behind their activity, to analyse their responsibility and legal obligations, to define the aims of their activity and their profession and to ask and propose educational programs as well as training institutions for preservation professionals, conservator-restorers and conservation scientists. It also resulted in the foundation of national and international GOs and NGOs, associations of conservation professionals (like IIC, PACT, ICOM-CC, ICOMOS, ICCROM) and national institutes for preservation of material, i.e. tangible and more recently intangible cultural heritage. These exist now in many countries. Within this framework, congresses and regular international meetings are organised by the beforehand mentioned international bodies and also by national Conservator-Restorers’ organisations.
How do conservator-restorers train, get educated and work
Conservators use refined means to thoroughly investigate the condition and fabrication of the object, research its production technology, and take into consideration its history as well as the physical and social environment. On the basis of this knowledge they conceive their approach, action and treatments and document all findings, approaches and interventions, always applying scientific methodology. Looking at preservation in this manner, it is understandable why all conservation professionals take their task very seriously1, sometimes even too seriously and seem often to consider themselves as charged with a mission, even as missionaries. This may be one reason why conservation ethics constitute such a broad field of interest and discussion and why the emerging field of the history of conservation is of such importance. With this perception in mind of the origins of the conservation-restoration profession and its importance, it might be an advantage to outline how training and education was conducted in this profession some 40 years back before conservator-restorers' education entered the academic curriculum. In 1959, when I ventured into this profession, the field was simply called restoration, and the way that most restorers became professionals was by a not officially recognised apprenticeship. Entering the profession prior to 1970, most people interested in becoming restorers (the common term at the time) took similar ways to approach professional education: having obtained a maturity degree (grade thirteen school level) and in love with the arts, archaeology, textiles or paper and books, they contacted the restorer of a major museum to enquire about the restoration profession. Usually this contact was followed by one or more intensive encounters and interrogations of both parties. Upon acceptance there was generally an agreement on a term of three years (unpaid), with a three-month trial period at the beginning. This direct training on the object and in the studio would be followed by a period of about three years of further education in the form of different internships with other restorers in other museums or private studios, arranged through personal networking and hopefully followed up closely by the initial educating conservator. This was not an apprenticeship with an official recognition, nor was it accompanied - as is legally obligatory for the recognised apprenticeships - by typical apprentice instruction like theory of materials, bookkeeping and legal matters. Instead, conservation apprentices were encouraged to sign up for art history courses, history and related fields at the closest university, and to follow lectures in natural science and related subjects, at least at the status of an auditor (registered lerner). The success of this part of the professional education depended for one part on the student’s motivation and personal input and for the other on the educator’s quality in professional as much as in educational, pedagogical terms. Conservation-restoration is not only rather particular as a profession, it is also a certain state of mind, one the teacher has to achieve in each of his or her students, which makes it a highly demanding job. The fact that most conservators are bench and easel people, doers rather than talkers, does not make their education easier. In 1965, having accomplished an apprenticeship of 6 years under the terms described above I was employed by the Swiss National Museum in Zürich as head of the not yet existing paintings and sculpture studio, at the level of a 'technical collaborator' at a salary level slightly above that of the Museum’s carpenter. Soon after having started my professional career, I too provided apprenticeship training. All this happened a year after the very first code of ethics for the conservation of movable cultural property, called "the Murray Pease Report", was published by the IIC in its well known journal "Studies in Conservation"2, a document which every IIC member by signing on recognised as binding. "Cleaned pictures" and the beginning of modern conservation The developments that lead to the emerging of modern conservation started in 1930. It was then that the first "International Conference for the Study of Scientific Methods for the Examination and Preservation of Works of Art" took place, organised by the International Museum Office, a body from the Leagues of Nations. There it was decided to edit the still excellent "Manual on the conservation of paintings", which was printed in French in 1939, in English in 1940 and reprinted in 19973. After WWII the United Nations (UN) took the banner from the League of Nations, established UNESCO, which helped to found ICOM in 1946 and ICOMOS 1965 in Rome, both as NGOs. In 1967, the Executive of ICOM approved the constitution of its International Committee for Conservation (ICOM-CC). This was achieved by fusing ICOM’s International Commission for the Care of Paintings, later renamed Subcommittee for the Care of Paintings, and the Committee for Scientific Laboratories, later renamed Committee for Laboratories. The Paintings Commission had been established already in 1948 in London, and the Subcommittee in 1951 in Brussels. Interestingly enough it weren't the restorers who founded these committees but the assembled director generals of the world largest art museums, the Metropolitan Museum (New York), the Louvre (Paris), the National Gallery (London), the Doerner Institute (Munich), the Hermitage (then Leningrad) and a few others. What kicked it all off? In 1947, just after WWII, following the unpacking and reinstallation of museum holdings everywhere, the National Gallery in London mounted a revolutionary exhibition entitled "Cleaned pictures", i.e. pictures from which old varnishes and repaints had been removed, and the full freshness of the painting, often hidden for centuries, appeared. This exhibition was the public appearance of science and scientific conservation as major contributors to enhanced and better connoisseurship of paintings. This exhibition was created as a collaborative effort by Helmuth Ruhemann, the then restorer at the National Gallery in London, and Sir Phillip Hendy, its director. It resulted in a huge and highly polemic discussion in European professional journals and even in newspapers and became an extremely important international controversy about the cleaning of paintings, patina and the perception of what is original. Among the contributors were the most important art historians and conservation professionals of the time, including Cesare Brandi, Ernst Gombrich, Otto Kurz, Stephen Rees Jones and Joyce Plesters - the main public stage being the Burlington Magazine, still now a preeminent art historical periodical. Alessandro Conti assembled all the contributions on this topic and published them translated into Italian4. This discussion caused many museum directors to investigate what took place behind the usually closed doors of their museums’ own restoration studios. It was the museum directors who wanted access to the working methods and considerations of their restorers, who wanted to know the details, the recipes and the methodologies of their restorers. The directors started to put their restorers and their work into the limelight of public awareness, and to engage them in discussions with art historians, scientists and the public. It was at that moment, in the 1950s, that modern conservation was conceived and shortly after also born. Resulting were discussions about appropriate training and education of this rather unknown species – the conservator-restorer. Only few countries had started early to care and think about the education of restorers; so in the 40s and 50s only few institutions offered academic education for conservator-restorers - L’Istituto Centrale del Restauro in Rome (1939/1947), the University of London (1948), the Art Academy in Stuttgart (~1950) and the National Academy of Arts in Prague (~1948). At that time conservator-restorers' qualifications were neither acknowledged economically nor in status. The period was characterised by a nearly complete lack of the conservator’s profession and its formal and legal recognition. Consequently during the second half of the twentieth century, the energy of the profession went into formulating education guidelines, creating conservation facilities, conceiving programs and setting up educational institutions for preservation. This situation persists in many places and has still not been resolved everywhere. To create a profession and win its acceptance is always a slow process. But, as the political and economic situation of state budgets worsens, it becomes increasingly difficult for this profession to get recognition in places where this has not yet been achieved. Despite the high standards required and requested for the education of conservator-restorers, at places they continue to be classified as artisans and craftsmen, poorly paid and with no say. This was very unsatisfactory, not only in terms of economics, but still more so in terms of the lack of recognition of the responsibility they bear. In order to exercise a responsibility a person has to be accorded the right to decide and intervene. As responsibility is one major criterion at all levels for the classification of employment positions, the term has to be defined and definable - the more responsibility, the higher the level of classification, the better the salary - a scale used to appreciate every function everywhere, be it public or private. Another very important criterion for classification is the type of education. Curators and scientists have long been educated at least to the MA level (lic. in Switzerland and France, mag[ister] in Germany and Austria) and more often to the PhD level, i.e. at university. If in their dialog with curators and scientists, conservator-restorers were to hold an equal level of responsibility and decision making power, their education had to be an academic one as well. As early as the 1950s, ICOM itself had requested this trinity partnership. And since then, the topic has always been of interest5. So the aim of the conservation profession became to earn academic credentials, i.e. to be educated at university with the academic title ladder attached to it. This happened quite quickly in North America where, with few exceptions, formal conservation education since 1967 (Cooperstown - NY) was always provided by universities. In Western Europe it took much longer to achieve the same as its universities are brain centred on the intellectual type of knowledge, places that provide education for white-collar jobs. In opposition to this, countries like the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary have academic systems with a tradition of incorporating blue-collar professions and artistic disciplines into higher education. These countries had no trouble to establish conservation education at an academic level. The definition of the profession As this development set in, the need arose to define the activity and the responsibility of what then was called restoration, of the professional conservator-restorer and to establish precise qualifications for trainees, students and teachers. The first document in which some criteria were formulated – the Athens charter - was written in 1931, followed by the Venice charter (1965) and the Declaration of Amsterdam (1975) but all of them were concerned predominantly with the theory and conservation of monuments. In the early 1960s, the American group of the International Institute for Conservation of Artistic and Historic Works (IIC-AG) under the lead of Murray Pease wrote the very first professional code concerned with conservation of movable cultural heritage. It was published in 1965 as "Report of the Murray Pease Committee: IIC American Group Standards of Practice and Professional Relations for Conservators" in "Studies in Conservation". In the introduction, the aim and reason for this document is spelled out very precisely: "These are objective procedural requirements for the proper conduct of professional work by members of IIC-AG. The purpose is not to create a handbook nor define the basic moral obligations that apply to most professional activities, but to list and describe actual steps that should normally be taken under the appropriate circumstances. In adoption of this statement of standards of practice and professional relationship the I.I.C.-A.G. appreciates that all the details enumerated in each procedure may not be required in every case. The primary purpose of the document is to provide accepted criteria against which a specific procedure or operation can be measured when a question as to its adequacy is raised". As of 1965, joining the IIC meant signing and adhering to the Murray Peace report. In 1974, IIC-AG became the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) and continued its pragmatic approach to the verbalisation of the profession's activity. In 1979, AIC started to rewrite The Murray Pease Report, which was more pragmatic than the rather philosophical and moralistic continental European documents. The code revision was discussed by the entire AIC membership over a period of several years, and the revised code, which includes detailed commentaries for each paragraph, is still a work in progress today. The AIC directory carries, in each of the yearly issues, the entire document and the updates, the advances made in the very elaborate commentaries. What now is called the AIC Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Practice is a straight continuation of the Murray Pease report.
"The conservator-restorer – a definition of the profession", ICOM-CC, Copenhagen 1984, and related documents
Most European countries took a different approach. In 1978 the ICOM-CC held its 5th Triennial meeting in Zagreb. Its international working group "Training in Restoration” elected a new coordinator, in the particular circumstances, it was me who was to take on this group. The working group immediately set up a task force to start writing a definition of the profession "conservator-restorer". It took six years, one special working group meeting, two interim publications of the text, the collaboration of members of ICOM, UNESCO, IIC and ICCROM, and many discussions with restorers, curators and members of related professions, until the ICOM-CC Board of directors considered the definition ready to be voted on. This vote took place in 1984 in Copenhagen during the ICOM-CC’s 7th Triennial meeting; the "Definition" was adopted by the entire membership present. Officially entitled "The conservator-restorer – a definition of the profession" (internally called "The Definition" or "The document of Copenhagen 84"), this document was acknowledged by the Executive Council of ICOM in 1985 and was communicated and published in both the English and the French reference versions by UNESCO, ICOM6 and ICCROM in their regular information publications. The Conservator-Restorer denomination was then adopted. ICOM included “The Definition” in its general Code of Ethics (1986) as a footnote in Chapter 6. It was also adopted quite rapidly as the Code of the Czech Association of Conservators and served as the basis for the article in the Greek constitution regarding preservation of cultural heritage and the education of its professionals7. I still haven’t found out the number of languages into which this document has been translated. It is this document that introduced the term conservator-restorer to describe a professional who practices conservation and restoration of cultural heritage. The reason for the use of this etymologically correct double denomination not only reflects a more differentiated perception of the professional activity, but also stems from the fact that in North America and the UK the conservation professional is called a conservator, and what is called restorer is more perceived as a charlatan who prepares paintings in illicit ways for backroom sales. In most European countries the denomination 'restorer' (Restaurator, retaurateur, restaurador, restauratore) is an old one and still widely in use. Until recently, the 'conservateur' (Der Konservator) was the very exquisite title for a museum director - particularly in France and Switzerland -in professional terms close to what is a director in the Anglo-Saxon museum context. The double term conservator-restorer never entered the national usage in the UK or the USA, probably because there the term 'conservator' is completely unambiguous. However, it was and still is consequently used by all the relevant international organisations like ICOM, ICCROM, UNESCO, ECCO. The Swiss National Museum – Musée Swiss seems to have been the first European national institution in recent years to apply this new terminology consequently to all levels of their museum staff8, thereby introducing the as yet unused denomination Kurator (curator). As the professional designation 'curator' has no inherent double meaning, I would guess that after half a century of hesitation, the term 'conservator-restorer' will slowly be replaced by the term 'conservator', hopefully by then also having lost its past ambiguous connotations. It was in the early 1980s, that most countries started to establish conservation training at institutions of higher education like universities, technical high schools and academies. This brought about an interest in creating formal curricula, exchange agreements between institutions, accreditation procedures, and more. Unfortunately the history of this development has not been written as yet; this should be done soon as the detailed historic information easily gets forgotten or lost and the players at the time active in these ventures start to disappear. E.C.C.O. It was ten years later, that a European development was started in France by the English conservator Carol Milner then President of the main French conservation association. She achieved the joining of the different national associations of conservator-restorers in Europe to form a European professional body – the "European Confederation of Conservator-restorers' Organisations" (ECCO)9. As of its inception ECCO has developed a range of documents. First version appeared in 1993 consisting of three parts (Part I: The profession; Part II, Code of ethics; Part III, Basic requirements for education in conservation-restoration) and a completely revised edition in 2002/2003. A collaboration between ECCO and the Secco Suardo Foundation produced the Document of Pavia, elaborated and signed by 45 invited conservation and related specialists, attending as private individuals during a meeting in Pavia, Italy (October 1997)10. This document’s main concern is to foster the establishment of the profession at university level, to balance its curriculum, to define the role of the conservator-restorer in the decision making process, to be in accordance with European development of training and research, to promote a regulatory framework to guarantee quality, to build a multilingual glossary and to provide the resources to do so. All of it is a well received counselling. The document has a great weakness though: it has been written neither by national nor international institutions, nor by associations nor other official bodies concerned with conservation, nor by official representatives of such institutions, but by prominent people mainly from professions neighbouring conservation, many of whom are employed by these same prominent bodies, but who acted - as clearly spelled out in the document - as individuals and, remarkable, by only very few conservators. So unfortunately the document represents the personal opinion of just 45 specialists, chosen by the meeting’s initiators. One would have wanted also more care applied to the fine graining of the texts of both official versions, English and French. There were follow-ups to "Pavia", the FULCO project "Framework for competence of conservator-restorers in Europe", which established the "Vienna document" that received the support of the EU and several national ministries. Of considerable importance was the founding of ENCoRE, "European Network for Conservation-Restoration Education". Its aim is the specification of detailed educational requirements for the profession, the establishment of standards for this education, and the development of models for formal student and teacher exchange between conservation education training institutions in Europe. This happened parallel to and in response to the 1999 Declaration of Bologna of the EU ministers of culture and education, regarding university education and the introduction of bachelor and master degrees into the European university system. University education and the inherent dangers in the case of this profession It is obvious that in the past few years the profession has made enormous efforts to develop its systems of education and training, its standing, and its codes of ethics and practice. Nevertheless I am somewhat worried: it is a profession in which the professional works with her/ his hands and eyes in excellent coordination with her/his highly trained brain. I have seen young conservator-restorers, trained by recognized institutions, who wrote brilliant diploma works, but after having passed their final exams were not able to stretch a painted canvas on a stretcher or do other delicate but routine conservation procedures appropriately, evidently due to lack of well trained manual experience and know-how. No abstracting description of a manual action nor any written instruction can substitute hands-on, well guided physical experience and extensive training. There is a danger at present that this profession, while gaining in great speed a lot more historical, scientific and highly refined knowledge about materials, procedures and also better source information, might be losing a lot of the physical know-how it had accumulated earlier passing a far less perfected curriculum which was not academic. Older conservation methods are not necessarily bad in themselves, but their application often caused damage when they used by inexperienced or incompetent persons who lacked the necessary understanding and the experience of how to use them correctly. This applies to the different classical relining techniques, hot or suction table treatments, varnish removal and much more, and to a lesser extend also to modern methods of conservation. Those trained yesterday will be tomorrow’s educators. What they did not learn and experience, their students might never experience either. This problem most often derives from and becomes enhanced by the present university system: in order to find time and energy to produce all the 'measurable' work to obtain the obligatory university credits, university has developed high experience in measuring the quality of written work. On the other hand practical work in the context of conservation and restoration of delicate objects, such as paintings, is more difficult to 'measure' in objective terms. As a consequence, practical work on objects becomes of secondary importance, and at times and at places much neglected and this, when the time attribution to practice in the training schedule is already rarely sufficient. More intensive studies of earlier restoration practice and their publication might help to tackle this problem to some extend. Fresh conservation graduates from most institutions today thus have a lot to train until being capable to manually perform successfully what may be called 'routine' operations in conservation. I say this from repeated personal experience and observation, talking to collegues, to teachers and also according to students themselves. They need to appreciate and to be training their own imagination and capacity to develop applications of their knowledge, develop new approaches and methods and perform difficult work on a high professional not routine level, not only when cleaning paintings. Thus, we are back to 1947 and to the "cleaned pictures" exhibition. I also worry about the present trend to create huge sets of rules and regulations, controls and counter checks, national and EU legislation for conservation, accreditation of university conservation teaching and teachers, which has quite some, but not only positive aspects. In a field as sensitive and changing as culture and its preservation, which continuously redefines itself, anything like the establishment of potentially too constringent and restraining control mechanisms, the writing of charters and laws should be done with enormous precaution and care. Otherwise we may devaluate what has been already achieved; so watch verbal inflation, watch ideological and stereotype approaches to the field as they may petrify the profession as it has happened in former times and places, and thus put in danger our material cultural heritage – I like soft conservation with a fine, differentiated, educated and sensitive approach.
This paper is a reduced and updated version from a lecture I gave in 2003 during a symposium for lawyers and other professionals in the Art field organised by the Institute of Law of the Amsterdam University. It was internally e-published in the 'Theory and History News' No. 11 (2004) of the ICOM-CC working group 'Theory and History of Conservation-Restoration'; to my recent surprise it is available online in full length on the ICOM-CC website. Some of the issues elaborated there will be if at all, just touched in this paper, such as communication, terminology and thesauri in conservation-restoration, legal issues in conservation, the intangibles in dealing with art in conservation, the role of science in heritage preservation, as well as considerations as to what may anthropologically be the origins of conservation. Different short versions of the lecture were presented at the ICOR2006 conference in Ludbreg (Croatia) and at EITEC 2008 conference in Oporto (Portugal), but have not been published. Here I concentrated on what is promised in the title: the aspects and development of conservator-restorer's profession since WWII.
Notes
1. H. Jedrzejewska, Ethics in conservation, Kungl. Konsthögskolan, Stockholm 1976, pp. 12, recommendation 7: "consider the object more important than your own person". 2. Report of the Murray Pease Committee: IIC-American Group, "Standards of practice and professional relations for conservators", Studies in Conservation, Vol. 9, N° 3, pp. 116 3. Michael von der Goltz, Françoise Hanssen-Bauer (editors), Manual on the conservation of paintings, ICOM re-edition, Archetype, London, 1997; ISBN 1-87332-41-7 4. Alessandro Conti (Editore), Sul Restauro, Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, Torino, 1988, ISBN 88-06-59926-7 5. B.Ramsay-Jolicoeur, N.M.Wainright (Editors) Shared Responsibility / Responsabilité partagée, Proceeding of a seminar for curators and conservators, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 1990 6. The text has been published in several professional organisations newletters and journals, amongst others in: MUSEUM, UNESCO (Ed.), N°. 156/1987, p. 231-233; ICOM News / Nouvelles de l'ICOM, Vol 39, N° 1, 1986, pp. 5 7. Greek Law N° 255711997, published in the Official Gazette of the Hellenistic Republic, N° 271, art. 9, special provisions (cited from ENCoRE, the Document of Vienna 1-12-1998, pp. 3, footnote 4.
http://www.encore-edu.org/encore/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=1&tabid=186
8. Musée Swiss, Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum (The Swiss National Museum), has elaborated denominations, job titles, job descriptions, organigrams and function descriptions, which regulate denomination, language and duties in a very clear way – all formulated in "Einreihungskonzept, Funktionsgruppe Konservatorin-Restauratorin, Musée Swiss, Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, August 2002, a submission to the Swiss federal personnel authorities". This regulation and linguistic adoption has recently been accepted and adopted by the Swiss Association for Conservation and Restoration, SKR/SCR. 9. http://www.ecco-eu.org
About the author
Hans-Christoph von Imhoff
Contact: xoph.von.imhoff@tele2.ch Hans-Christoph von Imhoff is conservator-restorer of paintings, polychromes and contemporary art. As chief conservator he founded the painting and sculpture conservation departments of the Swiss National Museum, the Fine Art Laboratory of the Canadian National Historic Sites and Parks and extensively restructured the Fribourg Museum of Art and History and the Basle Historic Museum conservation sections. One of the earliest members of the ICOM Conservation Committee and founder of several of its working groups, namely Non-destructive methods of investigation of works of art, Easel paintings on rigid support and Legal issues in conservation, he is at present member of IIC council and Professional Associate of AIC. He has long years been active as a teacher and lecturer in Switzerland, Canada, France, Mexico, the US and the Czech Republic. Independent editorial staff at the German professional journal RESTAURO he is writing columns and papers on conservation matters. As a conservator he is researching the technology of the Swiss artist Varlin (alias Willy Guggenheim, 1900–1977) and has a fundamental interest in the conservation of this painter’s great work.
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