Art and Tech

For once, let us be positive about how technology can help us understand and appreciate art. For decades, we have seen underpaintings revealed by X-rays. More recently, infrared reflectography and Raman Spectroscopy with laser beams have been used to supplement the microscope in restoration and authentication studies, identifying ingredients of paints and other materials and clarifying period practices. Now we have ultra-high-resolution digital photography.

In honor of the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi, a new digital platform has been launched dedicated to the preservation of the 13th-century Basilica in Assisi, Italy. Jo Lawson-Tancred has written an article for Artnet about the new website, called Preserving Assisi, that allows viewers to zoom in on its centuries-old frescoes. These important works of art on the walls and ceiling by Cimabue and Giotto have been recorded with the latest technology. On the website you can find details of the individual frescos.

Before you start, I know it is not the same as being in the Basilica itself and having the entire experience, but as we also know, art fades and deteriorates over time and through neglect. Treasured locations can be destroyed by fire, natural disasters, and worst of all, war. The Basilica is a case in point, as an earthquake in 1997 destroyed part of the frescoes on its upper walls. Photographs taken only hours before the quake served in the restoration process.

Years ago, you had images in color, but before that, only black-and-white photography, and before that, other people’s drawings or copies that are mere shadows of the original. Digital documentation can include 36-degree panoramas and 3D models recording spatial context as well as close-up details that even reveal brushwork.

This documentation does not have to exist in just a single location, as it can be replicated and saved in different places. It gives us possibilities on different levels, from an introductory visit to a scholarly study, even if the original work no longer exists. This new Assisi web platform exists in Italian, Spanish, German, and English for all to learn from and enjoy. 

https://preserving-assisi.haltadefinizione.com/

Let’s turn to the case of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, where there was a fire in 2019.

Notre Dame was started in 1163 and finished in 1345. Two medieval stained-glass rose windows survived the 2019 fire, along with those designed in the 19th century by Viollet-le-Duc; six of these are to be replaced by windows of contemporary design. With its cleaned stone walls and brightened interior, Notre Dame will not be what we remember, but that too represents modifications over the centuries.

Tag Christof for N.Y. Times

Times and tastes change, but how wonderful it is when technological advances can bring us close to knowing what originally existed. It changes history from a collection of documents into something that can sometimes be visually and spatially reconstructed.

The Della Robbia Family

From the social media posting by Judith Dobrzynski, a journalist and art critic whom I met when she was working at the New York Times, I learned of the exhibition, “Rediscovering Della Robbia”, taking place at the Metropolitan Museum. Since it had not received the usual hoopla that covers their major exhibitions, I had missed the announcement. It opened on August 10 of this year and will stay on view until January 17, 2028. You could almost call it a semi-permanent installation. The reason the show can be up for so long is that none of the works have to be returned to a lending institution, as all the works come from the Met’s collection.

The Met has assembled what they refer to as “the largest, most important della Robbia collection in the United States”. It covers three generations of the family: Luca, Andrea and Giovanni. Pater familias, Luca (1400-1482), invented a glazed terracotta technique which was so unique that products would be immediately associated with the family. Of course, the process was copied, but everyone knew who started and mastered it.

What the Met is additionally offering this time around is a deeper look into the scientific aspect of the technical advances. The installation gives pride of place to “The Assumption of the Virgin” by Andrea della Robbia, a massive piece, 10 by 7 feet. It was donated in 1882 by one of the founders of the museum, Henry G. Marquand, and is known as the Marquand Altarpiece. It consists of 66 individual panels. After that description, you might ask why, the Met admits, it has not been on view for the past 70 years. Who knows, maybe I saw it, but I would have been 12 at the time! The reason is that only half of the altarpiece is in the show, seen against a graphic rendering of the whole. It seems that while they have the entire object, due to damage caused over the years before the piece came to the Met, the conservation department has not been able to restore all the panels.

*The white ceramic is the original

If you like Renaissance sculpture, this seems a great opportunity to learn about a lesser-known aspect in a presentation one would think you could only see in Italy.

On a personal note, a photo I love of my son, Danny, shows him some 50 years ago at the Met. He was with my wife, Penelope, who was curator there at the time. He is peeking through the mock-up of the installation of the Lehman della Robbia, where it was going to be installed off the Great Hall.

The show also gives me an excuse to tell a story I told 16 years ago about the daughter of Henry Clay Frick, Helen, always referred to as “Miss Frick.” She lived for many years in an apartment over the Frick Art Reference Library. In fact, until her death, she insisted that in the library all women wear skirts and all men wear jackets, no matter the stifling heat in summer. In our time studying, there was no air conditioning! At the entrance to the Library there was a lunette by Andrea della Robbia.

Miss Frick came to the gallery one day and asked me to find another just like it. She wanted one that she could put in her museum, the Pittsburgh Frick. As luck would have it, I found the perfect piece almost immediately, very close in size and exemplary in provenance. It had belonged to the Vanderbilts in their house at the Breakers in Newport. I was really excited to have found just what she wanted so quickly. I was mystified when she turned it down. The religious subject was similar; it was the right format; it was just perfect! Finally, in frustration, I phoned her long-time secretary, Mrs. Egan, and said that I did not know where to look if she turned down the one I had found, so could she possibly enlighten me? “Well, Mr. Stiebel,” she said. “Frankly, Miss Frick is not going to buy anything that comes from the Vanderbilts”! I am sure therein lies another wonderful story. Eventually, I found Miss Frick another della Robbia which had been deaccessioned from the Met.

As they say, what goes around comes around!

"The Guys"

“The Guys” is a play telling the true story of a New York City Fire Captain who sought out a journalist to help him write eulogies for four of his command lost in their efforts to save lives in the attack on the World Trade Center. 9/11 is how we, in the U.S., refer to the 2001 event when the twin towers in New York were hit by the suicide mission of al-Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden. That journalist was Anne Nelson, who wrote the play, first produced shortly after the event off-off-Broadway. In 2002, she adapted it as a movie, starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia. Subsequently, it has been produced in all 50 States as well as abroad.

The impetus for the play is not to recount the action but rather the reaction to the events of 9/11. Everything depends on the two actors. In the Ironweed production we just saw, local actors Karen Leigh as Joan and Scott Harrison as Nick were superb in their roles. The play was directed by Emily Rankin. Unfortunately, it ended its very short run yesterday. Here are the actors in Santa Fe as Nick remembers one of his men.

Photo by Carrie McCarthy

It is the epitome of the “slice of life”, a literary genre I remember learning about in high school, --two people bonding over a tragedy felt by both from different vantage points.

It is a universal story of compassion. Like the playwright, the lady sitting next to me in the Santa Fe theater had volunteered to help in the aftermath of 9/11. In fact, she was murmuring under her breath about how she related to the time and what she had done living near the firehouse that the play refers to. After the performance, we learned several others in the audience were in New York at the time, as were we.

That day in 2001 my wife was working on an exhibition for the Portland Art Museum titled “Stuff of Dreams” drawn from the collections of the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris. They were going to have a national press event in New York at the LVMH building on 57th Street. She was pouring over galleys for the catalog with the publisher in the garden at our house on 68th Street when the building crescendo of sirens indicated something was seriously wrong. The designer for the show, who was working on the venue for the press event, came breathlessly through our door to say the event was off. We looked at him as if he were mad. Then he explained that a plane had hit one of the Trade Towers. We did not yet know about the second one. Just as in the play, we assumed it was probably a small plane and was undoubtedly an accident. We soon learned otherwise.

The Director and curator of the Paris museum and the chairwoman of their board, as well as the Director of the Portland Museum and his wife, had come to New York for the event. The French insisted they would drive to Canada immediately, and my wife had to persuade them not to give up their hotel rooms, explaining the border would be closed.

We obviously had to do something for these people who travelled so far. Penelope told them all to come to our house for dinner, but when she went marketing, she found store shelves were already bare. All that she could find was a turkey, so my brilliant wife made a typical Thanksgiving Day dinner! It was at least a symbol of hope on such a tragic day.

Scott Harrison, who was one of the duo in the show, is the artistic director and founder of Ironweed Productions, which produced “The Guys” in Santa Fe. I asked him why he decided to do this play now. Referring to 9/11, he replied, “Although that time was a very difficult time, I miss the connection I felt with other people and the softer, kinder hearts toward others that I feel like the experience engendered for many of us.” What could be more appropriate than to refer to that connection that seems to be missing today?

Labor Day

There is always something new to learn. I did not realize how far back the celebration of Labor Day went. Oregon was the first state to pass a law recognizing Labor Day in February of 1887. That same year, four more states passed laws creating Labor Day a holiday. 

By 1894, 23 more states adopted the holiday, and by June of that year Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September a legal holiday. Like everything else in politics, there were contradictions. Right after President Grover Cleveland used Federal Troops to crush the violent Pullman railway strike, he signed the 1894 act!

Already in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists began to pay attention to hard work in their creations, and art contributes to changes in society’s thinking. As factories proliferated and the union movement progressed, American Realist painters began to depict grueling and dangerous work conditions.

Even though painters abroad had been depicting peasants for quite some time, in the United States artists were painting pictures of the wealthy elites, tradesmen, and military events since that was the market. Members of the servant class might be included to show the wealth or civic standing of the sitter, but scenes of active toil only came to the fore in the 19th century.

Here we have Thomas Mifflin. He is a successful merchant and starting out as a politician. His wife Sarah is demonstrating her domestic industriousness by weaving a decorative fringe. The portrait is by John Singleton Copley, painted in 1773.

With the First Industrial Revolution (1760-1840), work was increasingly done in factories with machines, like the mechanical power loom. Artists were paying more attention to workers who could not afford the benefits and conveniences offered by progress. Still seen as a proud individual in this painting by John B. Neagle in 1829. It is still a true portrait, and the subject’s name is known: Pat Lyon. He and his work are presented as noble.

With the second industrial revolution (1870-1914), mass production became possible. American artists focused on how grueling work had become, as in the workman’s short break illustrated in The Ironworker's Noontime by Thomas Pollock Anschutz (1880) in the De Young Museum.

In 1920, famed photographer Lewis Hine took this photo, Power House Mechanic Working on a Steam Pump. It is obviously carefully posed to convey the nobility of hard work.

Unemployment rose to an unprecedented 20% during the continuing Depression that followed the crash of 1929. President Franklyn D. Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935 to create jobs where there were none to be had. One of many artists who were looking for work, Martha Levy, received a WPA commission for a mural in a public building. She did one called Men Working in Slate Quarry (1939). Granville was a major slate-producing region along the New York/Vermont border. The mural was created for the local High School and is now displayed at the Slate Valley Museum in Granville, New York.

People at work fell out of fashion as a subject with the art movements of the late 20th and 21st centuries, but earlier depictions remind us of the reason for today’s national holiday.