In 1943, Jackson Pollock painted
this extraordinary painting behind me, Mural. The painting was commissioned
by Peggy Guggenheim for her apartment in
New York at the time. It was supposed to be an
actual mural on the wall, but Pollock was
persuaded instead to paint a conventional
canvas painting and install it up
against the wall. When Peggy Guggenheim
moved back to Venice after the Second World
War, the painting was donated to the
University of Iowa. In 2009, the University of Iowa
Museum of Art approached us. They knew about the GCI's
modern painting projects, and knew about the Getty
Museum sometimes taking on conservation projects. And we jointly
developed a project by which this extraordinary
painting could be examined, researched, and restored. I find I have to
keep reminding myself that this work was
painted over 70 years ago and yet it still has
this incredible power. The colors are
vivid, they're bold, brushstrokes are
energetic, it's quite an extraordinary painting. It's also enormous. One of the very famous
myths about this painting is that it was completed
in one night, right before the deadline
for its installation. But the paint is largely
oil, which usually takes days, if not weeks, to dry. And once you look
closely at the painting and see all the layers
applied wet or dry, it becomes pretty clear
that this couldn't be true. One of the discoveries
we did make was that there were four
colors used very dilute. We think these first four
colors were applied directly to the prime canvas. One thing I would like
to note, particularly at the very early stages, is
how the first sort of gestures were created and with what? The starting point
for the paint analysis is preparing cross-sections. Taking this particular sample
we have a zinc white ground, followed by lead white ground. So this is a double
priming that was part of the initial commercial
preparation of the canvas. On top of that is a
lemon-yellow paint that is intermingled with
a thick brown paint layer. The way the brown paint
swirls into the lemon-yellow indicates the brown was
applied while the underlying lemon-yellow was still wet. So this is wet and wet working. And these three paints, the
lemon yellow, the blue-green or teal, and the brown,
are part of the very early laying in of the composition
by Pollock, done, we think, in a very vigorous,
rapid, broad execution. We were able to
work with colleagues using a number of
scanning techniques. One of those called
hyperspectral imaging was able to look over the
entire surface of mural and detect certain pigments. The other scanning technique
we used was X-ray fluorescence. This instrument picks
up many more pigments as it scans for
individual elements. And we were able, in a
small area of the painting, to get into very high detail
about where each element was present in each brush stroke. So in the map for mercury,
we see this broad splatter that corresponds
to the red pigment, vermilion mercuric sulfide. And here, Pollock is
using this red paint based on the vermilion,
thinned down probably with solvent, to flick
and splatter the red paint across the surface. One of the surprising
findings was that one particular paint
was not bound in oil, but bound in casein. This casein paint would
have originally have been water based. And we think this is an economy
house paint of the type that would have been available
for painting walls around the mid-century. As part of our research into
looking at the materials and techniques of
paints on Mural, we were very intrigued
by this pink paint that has an appearance of
a house paint, a sort of glossy enamel
paint, and perhaps had been applied horizontally, which
we know Pollock was doing later on in his career. So what we're
doing at the moment is just seeing if we can use the
materials that we think Pollock had access to in 1943, and
keeping the canvas vertically, whether we can achieve
some the same effects we see on the painting. We've found certain
mixes of oil paints mixed in with mediums
such as stand oil and a certain amount
of turpentine that give the paint
fluidity that can then be applied in this
way and the paint is landing in a
very similar way, actually to the paint
we're seeing on the mural, not only the sort of
gloss and the texture and sort of fine
beading of this paint, but also those squiggles,
which I would never have guessed you could apply
with a vertical splash. The weight of the canvas
and all the paint on it really would have caused
a considerable sag to the overall structure
very early on in its history. We know that the
painting started to sag as soon as the
canvas was stretched. We can see in the early
photographs, both of Pollock in front of the unpainted
canvas as well as Pollock in front of the
finished painting, that you can see that
sag very clearly. There were two main challenges
in the conservation treatment that directly related
to the treatment of the picture in 1973. First of all, the painting
was varnished at that time and Pollock didn't
varnish Mural, so we knew we needed to
take that varnish off, as well as the grime
that had accumulated on the surface over the years. The second challenge related
to a structural treatment that had been done at that time. When the painting arrived,
parts of the tacking edges were now visible on the
front of the painting. In the early 1970s
the painting was lined where a
secondary canvas was adhered to the back of
the original canvas. That lining was
successful in addressing the structural issues,
but the distortion in the original canvas became
effectively locked into place. And that meant that when the
painting was restretched, there were areas of exposed,
unpainted prime canvas visible at the front,
most noticeable long the top edge and at
the two lower corners. So we felt that there
were three main choices that we could have considered. So the first choice would
be to replace the 1973 crack stretcher with a new
stretcher, still rectangular, and perhaps framing them out. That was one choice. But the painting of course,
was not framed originally. This was something we
learned over the course of the treatment. So then we were left
with two options, putting the painting back
on a rectangular stretcher and accepting those
bits that were never meant to be seen on the
face of the painting, or building a stretcher
that echoed the contours of the original paint surface. To test how this might look
on the actual painting, we produced a full scale
photographic mockup of Mural, putting it up on the wall
and cutting the photograph to the shape of
the painted edge. The idea is to try and get
back the original painted edge. The worry is it looked like
a smiling face on the wall. But we're hoping the scale
of this and your eye looking in the center, it won't pick up
on that non-horizontal top edge and maybe even the
bottom edge too. And ultimately, that was
the option that we chose. Although I have to say,
when you do something like this with an
actual painting, it's a very different process
from working on a photograph. We always work really
closely with the GCI. We wanted Tom and Alan
to comment and have input on the conservation treatments. And we wanted to have input
on to the interpretation of the analytical findings. And so we worked very closely
together, back and forth, on all of the aspects
of the project, and I think that is
what made it such a successful collaboration. One of the pieces
of satisfaction that's come from
the project is being able to unravel this
very complex interplay of different paints and to
link that scientific finding to the observational evidence
we get from simply examining the paint surface
closely and comparing those insights to
build a picture of how he went about making this
huge, spectacular piece of art. We have asked many questions
about this painting still. We've been studying it
for almost two years now and there are actually many
things that we don't know and probably if we
had 10 more years, we still wouldn't know them. And I like that. I like the fact that
this painting holds on to some mystery, some
of its magical qualities, and I'm perfectly happy
to let go and just leave it on the wall. [MUSIC PLAYING]
