MICHAEL BRYANT / Inquirer Staff Photographer
Before and after: In their old quarters, above, paper conservator Nancy Ash (left) and assistant Scott Homolka have had to crawl under each other to get from one table to another. In the new space, below, that is a thing of the past. The spacious quarters will accommodate the museum's ever-greater collection of large contemporary works on paper, which would not even fit in the old lab.
- Perelman building's new conservation lab
RELATED VIDEO
When Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic leaves the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and heads for the Philadelphia Museum of Art in June, museum conservators plan to give it a very close look.
After all, the 1875 oil is widely considered one of the greatest American paintings, and it hasn't received a serious conservation treatment in almost half a century.
But when the monumental 8-by-61/2-foot canvas arrives at the museum, it will not be taken to the low-slung, small-windowed conservation lab on the museum's first floor, where painting conservation has taken place for three decades despite the inadequate light and low ceilings.
No more.
With Saturday's official opening of the new Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building across Kelly Drive, the art museum now offers something grand that the public will see only indirectly - through the benefits conferred on thousands of works of art.
The Fairmount Avenue wing of the refurbished and expanded building has been given over in part to vastly enlarged conservation facilities for paintings, works on paper, photographs, and costumes and textiles. For the museum's paper and textile conservators, who have previously labored in quarters that charitably could be called cramped, the opening means they will finally have space to work on quilts and screens, large drawings and gowns, throws and scrolls.
Paintings will enter a space most conservators only dream about: a studio on the building's top floor, with an 18-foot ceiling, soaring north-facing windows, and a room-length skylight.
It is, in the words of Mark S. Tucker, vice chairman of conservation and senior conservator of paintings, "what a museum conservation studio should be."
In the case of The Gross Clinic, now jointly owned by the museum and the academy, Tucker and other conservators will be able to look at the painting and see it as Eakins did. They will be able to replicate the way it will look to visitors to a gallery. And they will not have to cart the painting around to do so.
The Perelman will make it possible to control light, and the high ceilings mean The Gross Clinic can be examined standing up - in its frame.
That may not seem like much in the record-breaking, headline-grabbing, 21st-century art world. But to conservators, these are luxuries to die for: They will allow the painting to be examined in a way it virtually never has been before.
"You have these dark and very reflective surfaces," Tucker said, "and unless you can control the light and eliminate the glare, you have a very hard time knowing exactly how to balance the parts of the picture. So it's absolutely critical that you have that control over the light.
"It's not maximizing the light - it's absolute control over the source of the light, the direction of it, and the intensity of it."
For Sara Reiter, the museum's conservator of costumes and textiles, the move to the Perelman building is akin to moving from a shared trinity rowhouse to a spacious Main Line estate.
For several years, Reiter has worked in a textile lab about the size of an office cubicle. This year - only because the textile curatorial staff moved to Perelman ahead of the conservation staff - she's had a bit more room to spread out for a few months.
That has meant that she and Bernice Morris, a postgraduate fellow, were able to prepare Grace Kelly's wedding dress, sweat stains and all, to travel earlier this summer to Monaco for an exhibition. At the same time, they've also been able to work on pieces for the Perelman's inaugural fashion design shows, including repairing a sheer 1960s James Galanos gown with elaborate beaded peacocks so heavy their weight tore the gown's fragile netting.
In the future, such simultaneous projects - each constituting hundreds of hours of work - no longer will be an exception. No longer will Reiter have to wait for the museum to close in order to rush to the costume gallery with a project too large to spread out anywhere else.
"I'm going to be in heaven," Reiter said not long ago, as she moved boxes and more boxes out of the way to get at the Galanos gown. "I just can't wait. I'm chomping at the bit."
The new textile-conservation digs, on the second floor of the Perelman wing that fronts on Fairmount Avenue, feature an entire room that can be used solely for wet treatments. A vacuum table will be available, allowing for controlled use of solvents and suppression of toxic fumes. There will even be ceilings high enough, in at least one area, to hang a large quilt - something heretofore undreamed of, Reiter said.
"Five years we've been preparing for this move," said Reiter, who cares for a collection of 30,000 objects. "We started five years ago with a grant . . . to survey the collection to help us design the storage."
Nancy Ash, the museum's paper conservator, who has 170,000 works under her care, says the move to the Fairmount wing's first floor will offer both space and technical improvements.
No longer will paper conservators crawl under each other to get from one table to another. No longer will paper works that need flattening have to wait for treatment because there is no room.
Ash's lab in the main art museum building features a beautiful view down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to City Hall. But it was constructed in the 1970s to house one book conservator. Now the staff includes Ash, associate conservator Scott Homolka, and postgraduate fellows - crowds, she said.
The new lab is another country. Not only does it boast interlocking tables that can be arranged to accommodate varying works of art (works on paper, unlike paintings, usually are laid out flat for treatment), but it also contains a technical darkroom where conservators can employ beta radiography and work with polarized microscopes, ultraviolet light, and other highly complex tools.
It's not that that technology has been unavailable for use in the old museum building, Ash said; rather, using it required all manner of creative space-shifting.
