Saving Grace

Stephen Foote, dean of St. Luke's Cathedral in Portland, noticed the
discoloring on Jesus's stomach two years ago. The dean likes to wait for
appointed visitors in the cathedral's chapel, where John La Farge's painting
of a robust Christ child and his monumental, robed mother hangs. Sitting in
the chapel's dark hush, he would gaze at the painting, which, he says, has a
mysterious way of transporting your meditations.

"When I see that painting, I like to think of the million of eyes that have
been moved by it," Foote says.

But the stains on the toddler Jesus's stomach had begun to distract him. The
yellowish-green splotches spread, got darker. Foote worried that the
painting was rotting.

"It looked like something was growing," Foote says.

So when the church embarked on a major restoration, Foote sent the
century-old painting out for its first proper cleaning. Last November, the
canvas was taken to the Williamstown Conservation Center in northwestern
Massachusetts.

To conserve a painting, you risk altering history, erasing genius. Cleaning
a work of art, as this painting demonstrated, is no simple, straightforward
task. It involves sleuthing, psychological profiling, historical research,
ethical deliberations, artistic talent, chemical analysis and, at times,
highly educated guesswork. All these skills were needed to solve the mystery
of the spotted stomach, which in the end had an unexpected twist.

The large painting, measuring over 9 feet tall and set on a Gothic-style
frame, is the centerpiece of the church's Emanuel Chapel. It hangs over the
altar, and is framed by smaller painted and carved angels. The architect
situated the painting so that someone walking back down the nave of the
cathedral walks toward the child, who points to his father in heaven.

In "Madonna and Child," completed between 1902 and 1904, La Farge
reinterpreted a classic Biblical image and created a 20th-century American
icon -- thus its nickname, "American Madonna." The scene depicts The
Presentation, when the Virgin offered her son to the world. The Christ
child, usually portrayed as a baby in the Virgin's arm, is 4 or 5 and stands
on his own two feet. The Virgin leans over her son, her arms spread as if to
say, "Here he is." Both figures are ruddy faced and robust, unlike the wan
Virgin and child of medieval paintings.

However, the spots on the Christ's child stomach undercut the image of
vigor. They vaguely resemble the early stages of leprosy, maybe a spreading
case of gangrene. At the very least, young Jesus looks like he needs a good
scrubbing.


ON A FALL MORNING, conservators Tom Branchick and Alex Carlisle remove the
painting from the altar while Foote and other church staff members look on.
To anyone's knowledge, the painting has never been removed since it was
installed in 1907. Consequently, no one knows what is behind the canvas.
Maybe a plaster wall. As the canvas pops out of its frame, the brick and
mortar of a chimney appear.

"Lordy, lordy, you should see the back of this picture," Branchick says.
"It's mold and soot like you wouldn't believe."

The back of the painting is coal black, the outlines of the two figures
showing through the soot. The chimney and soot coming up from the basement
seem likely culprits. Branchick looks over the painting and says he thinks
the painting can be restored. However, he warns, La Farge's paintings often
prove problematic because of the materials the artist used. Branchick won't
know for sure until he gets the painting to the lab.


THE WILLIAMSTOWN Conservation Center is in a low-slung, industrial-looking
building behind the Clark Art Institute. It is the largest, full-service
conservation center in the Northeast. The center, founded in 1977, is one of
13 regional centers started with funds from the National Endowment for the
Arts.

Most museums, libraries and historical societies cannot afford to have a
conservator on staff. By pooling their resources through the regional
centers, their conservation needs can be met. The Williamstown center has
50-member institutions, including four Maine museums. The center also does
conservation work for non-members, such as St. Luke's, and for individuals.

You have to buzz to get in the building. Once you're through the doors, it's
obvious why. At any one time, hundreds of artworks are being worked on.
Paintings lean against the wall. Racks full of artworks line hallways.

On a February day, three conservators clean 18th-century trade signs for an
upcoming show at the Connecticut Historical Society in a large central room.
The backgrounds of the signs are coated with black paint with ground blue
glass mixed in to add a small sparkle. The glass, however, means that only
light cleaners can be used. One conservator is sucking on Q-tips, which he
then rubs on the signs. Human saliva is a pH-balanced, mild enzyme.

In another room, the print conservator works on a watercolor painting from
the Hancock Shaker Museum. Down the hall in the furniture room, two young
conservators lean over lengths of gilt molding damaged by a burst radiator
in a Middlebury College building. A white plaster buffalo head from the
Buffalo Historical Society looks on; one horn has been broken off. In
another room, Cynthia Luk dabs paint on to a canvas from the Farnsworth Art
Museum by Boston painter Will Davis (1879-1944). Sometimes, Luk says, the
damage to an artwork just "breaks your heart."

Accidents, carelessness, violence and age take their tolls on art. A
painting arrived at the center after someone scoured it with Ajax. A woman
arranged to have her painting cleaned at the center. She wrapped it in foam,
tied it to the top of her station wagon and drove -- through the pouring
rain -- to the center.

Fires and vandals cause the worse damage. Branchick recalls a vandal who
ripped an 8-foot gash in a Helen Frankenthaler painting. At first, the
painting was deemed irreparable, but it was restored at the center.

"The whole process is to make it look like we weren't here." Branchick says.


BRANCHICK IS A TALL, bespectacled man with a nimbus of dark blond hair. He
has a casual, can-do manner and a healthy irreverence for art; he refers to
"art hysterical posterity." He joined the center in 1981 and became director
in 1997.

This is Branchick's second time working on a La Farge canvas. The other
painting came from the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass.
That painting has been folded over and put on a smaller stretcher to hide an
inscription.

"His paintings can be very straightforward, but when he is experimenting it
becomes complicated," Branchick says.

Complicated because La Farge, an endless experimenter, liked to used lots of
different materials, often pairing ones that shouldn't be paired, creating
what conservators call "inherent vice." St. Luke's La Farge falls in this
category.

"I think this was make-it-up-as-you-go," Branchick says.

"American Madonna" leans against a stack of standing paintings in the
center's airy, central room, where the conservators work on the signs.
Branchick has opened a couple of "windows," meaning he had cleaned a few
spots on the paintings to get a feel for the materials. He has also examined
it through a microscope.

This is what he knows so far: The painting is largely done in oils, but in
various thicknesses. The soot was absorbed unevenly. The painting originally
had a bronze-colored background, which is very soluble. Also, on areas of
the figure, there is a "glare" of beaten egg white, which is also very
soluble. The egg white is reflective, and helps shape the muscular structure
of the Madonna and Child. There is no varnish on the painting.

"Once you work on an artist's painting, you get a feel for how they paint a
picture," Branchick says. "La Farge liked building up images. He liked
reflections too."

As for the stains on the stomach, Branchick now doubts that soot is the
cause. The soot does not appear to bleed through the painting. All the
ambient dirt from dust and lit candles is coming through the canvas from the
front. Branchick has cleaned some of that off on the stomach, and the blobs
of greenish-yellow are still there.

"I think it was always there," he says. "This kind of stuff, I don't think
it will go away. If you look at it under a microscope, it's paint."


JOHN LA FARGE (1835-1910) is one of those artists who was famed in his day,
disappeared into obscurity not long after his death in the wake of
abstraction and then was restored to his position as an important American
artist starting in the 1960s. His oeuvre has been difficult to appraise
critically, because he worked in numerous media -- watercolors, easel
painting, murals and stained glass -- and there were wide vacillations in
the quality and originality of his work.

Curator Henry Adams writes in the huge, 1987 monograph that accompanied a
major exhibit that La Farge was "neither a minor artist, nor a major one,"
and that his works "alternate between the stale and the novel."

La Farge was an anomaly in his time, creating a hybrid art that adopted the
free style of the Impressionists with the traditions of American art. His
paintings were far sparer and more delicate than the dominant style of the
day, the epic landscapes by the Hudson River School. Adams hypothesizes that
because La Farge never finished a formal art program, he had problems with
his techniques, but it also freed him from formulas taught by the academy on
either shore.

That led to great innovations, especially in stained glass and mural
painting. He made his name in 1877 with his stained glass windows and murals
in Boston's Trinity Church. The free forms, vivid colors and use of
opalescent glass was new, and the naturalism of his murals were
unprecedented in American art.

When Bishop Robert Codman commissioned La Farge in 1902 to create a painting
for the chapel to be built at the western end of St. Luke's Cathedral, he
set his sights high. La Farge had long been an internationally known artist.

Early studies for the painting in the Toledo Museum of Art show the child in
the Virgin's arms. Eventually, La Farge placed the child on the ground and
made Christ "a sturdy, manly little child" at Codman's behest, according to
the bishop's obituary. The canvas was largely completed by the end of 1902.
Both La Farge's Japanese valet, Awoki, and his secretary, a Miss Barnes,
worked on the background. Jeanie Frost, the younger sister of poet Robert
Frost, posed for the Madonna.

The painting remained in La Farge's possession for at least three years
while the chapel was completed. It was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy
in 1905 and the Architectural League in New York in 1906 before its
installation at the chapel in late 1907.

That La Farge had the painting around his studio for so long explains a lot
to Branchick. It explains the different materials, the change in background
from bronze to a sea of green, red, blue, umber and black. It explains the
different thickness of oil paint.

"Because he had it for two to three years, he farted around with it,"
Branchick says. "La Farge was working on this until the day it left his
studio."


BRANCHICK called Dean Foote this spring to tell him some surprising news. The
conservator was convinced that the odd coloring on the stomach was the
original paint. It was aging differently than what La Farge had expected.
There were two possible courses of action: The stomach could be left as is,
or he could over paint it. Foote decided he needed to see the painting.

On a sunny, June day, Foote drives the four long hours to Williamstown with
his two dogs and an assistant. He has promised himself to go with an open
mind.

Branchick leads him into a small room, where the painting is brightly lit.
Foote exclaims at the vivid colors, the ruby red of the Virgin's robes, the
sweep of her pink dress. The flesh of both figures glows, and the murky
background has been transformed into a velvety spray of color.

"It cleaned the way I thought it would, except for La Farge being La Farge,"
Branchick says.

The Christ child's stomach, however, actually looks worse. As the colors
were brightened, the greens and yellows on his belly have grown more garish.
Branchick points out a vertical line that runs through the blue cloth
wrapped around his hips and then down a thigh. La Farge probably painted
over that line on the child's stomach, which would explain why the paint is
thicker there and why it is aging differently.

"If you find this disturbing . . . you can over-paint it in materials that
can be taken off," Branchick tells Foote. "Is it imprudent of you to make
that decision? Naah. It's funky. In a museum, you could explain it in a
label. Will you have that label next to the altar? Hell, no."

"Let's role-play," Foote says. "Say La Farge came down and walked through
the door."

"I can't do that. I'm biased," Branchick says. "Knowing La Farge, he'd have
to look at a number of paintings."

"My hunch is that he would fix it," Foote says.

"Of course, he's already fixed it hundreds of times," Branchick says.

Foote worries aloud that if the painting goes back in its current state,
people will think it hasn't been cleaned. More importantly, the painting is
meant to inspire religious devotion, spiritual transcendence. Foote doesn't
want people staring at the painting and thinking, "What's wrong with that
kid's stomach?"

He opts to over-paint.


OVER-PAINTING is a touchy subject in the conservation world. It was once a
standard, expedient approach to restoring a painting. It's a lot easier to
repaint the entire background than to "in-paint" and match the existing
colors. Consequently, a lot of paintings were damaged as a result. This
generation of conservators often finds themselves undoing the work of the
previous generation. The center regularly sees portraits in which the
hairstyle has been updated or the subject has been repainted to look older.

Over-painting is still a tool of the trade, only now it is done much more
discriminately and in reversible paint. Over-painting has been used in
Hudson River School paintings where materials aging differently create
striations in the sky.

The center would draw the line at compositional changes to please someone's
taste. For example, when the center was asked to move the position of a
subject's arm on a chair, Branchick said no. The ideal is to stay true to
the artist's original intent.

"This parallels what you're comfortable with?" Foote asks Branchick when the
conversation turns to over-painting the La Farge.

"If I wasn't comfortable doing it, we wouldn't be here talking about it,"
Branchick answers.

"When I told people I was coming here to talk about this, people in the
congregation, like (glass conservator) Robin Neely, were like, 'You're doing
what?'" Foote says.

"Madonna and Child" is due to return to the chapel in mid-September.
Branchick, however, is so bogged down in work that he has yet to start
painting the stomach.

Foote eagerly awaits it. He had a red curtain hung where the painting
usually is. Church staff has taken to referring to it as "the puppet show."
Not an image to inspire awe.

"It's such a big blank space that people have missed it," Foote says.

When the painting is re-installed, there will be insulation between it and
the chimney. It will also have a state-of-the-art liner and much better
lighting. Branchick guesses the painting may not need another cleaning for
50 years. By then, conservators may regularly be using lasers.