Thereby hangs a Tale

I said this earlier in reference to a picture of one of the galleries in the Carnegie Museum of Art

A Gallery of Sculptures Around a balcony modeled on the Parthenon

The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania little resembles the image here generated by Substack’s Image Generator, but it’ll do for now. I was commenting on an image of the real thing posted earlier this evening that I had held a position as the Secretary to the Chief Conservator between 1998 to 2000. I’m grateful for the experience, but it was, for me, unsustainable. I needed to earn more and, thanks to one of my graduate student connections, I was able to make an opportunity materialize in Copenhagen, Denmark and moved there to take up a position with a small web software development company called Web500 A/S. That was an adventure.

First though, I should describe the journey with the Carnegie Museum system which actually consists of four museums, one of which, the Science Museum, I have never visited. The other three are the Carnegie Museum of Natural History which has some of the most important dinosaur skeletons to its credit as well as a fascinating menagerie of stuffed mammals in dioramas as well as birds and insects. It also boasts a good polar exhibit and an Egyptian collection. This one is contiguous with the Carnegie Museum of Art and it’s sometimes hard to see where one ends and the other begins. I should also mention their exceptional gem exhibit. Not contiguous with these is the Andy Warhol Museum whose collection our conservators also cared for.

I arrived there as a volunteer to work on the conservation of “The Chariot of Aurora” - a bas-relief plaster sculpture which was covered in lacquer and gilding when it graced one end of the Grand Salon of the S.S. Normandie. An art deco masterpiece, it had been removed from the Normandie as that great ship was being converted to become a troop ship only to catch fire and then capsize in New York harbor. The sculpture had been moved to the Isle d’France liner before being stored and covered in bronze radiator paint which it was our job to remove along with restoring the gilding, rediscovering the techniques by which it had originally been decorated in the process.

During that time, I was offered a paid internship to assist with a project involving the rematting of all works of art on paper. I accepted and soon the secretary for the chief conservator found another opportunity and I was given that full-time gig. Among the many events during my brief tenure in that job was a treatment of one of the Warhol’s collection, a large early painting of a ball and claw bathtub. This was tricky because, as was the habit of the Warhol, they had held a party trying to recapture the atmosphere of “The Silver Factory” in New York City and on one particular evening, had had the bright idea to distribute lipsticks as party favors. Naturally, one of the party goers had donned the lipstick and kissed the bathtub right on the raw canvas.

Treating such a mark with solvents would invariably have left a pink smear well down into the weave of the canvas, however, it had recently been found that a device developed by NASA to test space shuttle tiles could be used to restore works of art that had been damaged by soot and the like. Why not lipstick. It worked this way. The device produced a tube of helium gas through which mono-atomic oxygen could be streamed. The helium prevented the mono-atomic O molecules from reacting with the atmosphere to become O2 and, just like the O in peroxide, could bleach off soot and, in the case of lipstick, the organic molecules comprising that blot on the bathtub.

So, I come into work one morning and the Chief Conservator greets me with a tube in his hand saying, “Hal, this is lipstick. I want you to send it to NASA!” Off it went. An intern there donned it and kissed a piece of raw canvas, half of which was then removed as a proof-of-concept. Shortly thereafter, the whole contraption was in our labs and the stain was successfully removed. It left a spot a bit cleaner than the rest of the painting, so the paintings conservator made up a little dirty clear acrylic to inpaint the cleaned area. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to see the area she treated. The whole project made Discover Magazine’s top stories of the year 2000 and you can read it here:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/rocket-science-and-art-restoration

Around the same time, I had the opportunity to see the installation of the Carnegie International 99/00, a quadrennial exhibition of modern art that dated back into the 19th century. I had the chance to meet many famous artists and see their works up close and personal. At the same time, I was teaching German as adjunct faculty at Pitt and, for one packed semester, at Carnegie-Mellon University. I’d generally get my lunch from a coffee shop across from the museum called Kiva Han and pick up a book or two from Caliban’s used bookstore or Andrews Alcove, part of the Carnegie Library. I have great memories of those days, but simply could not afford to stay with the wages being so low for such work. I believe I was making less than 10 dollars an hour at the museum and the most I’d make annually was under 30K a year even with the teaching gigs. Still, the life was good for a bachelor such as myself.

I’ll be going back to Pittsburgh at the end of the month for a little vacation ahead of my wife’s high school reunion in Latrobe, PA. Her father was a fork-lift driver at Rolling Rock brewery before his heriditary macular degeneration forced him into early retirement. More tales from this period of time are bound to emerge, but I hope you all enjoyed reading this one.

Onward!