Museum puts art restoration on display

Associated Press

CINCINNATI

One of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s most famous works, Vincent van Gogh’s 1890 masterpiece “Undergrowth with Two Figures” appears to most visitors to be a beautiful, well-preserved, post-Impressionist painting.

After 121 years, the broad, vigorous brushstrokes of green, yellow and white on the forest floor and the imposing gray-blue tree trunks still pop from the canvas, providing a stark contrast to the two shadowy figures walking through them.

The painting is a visitor favorite, voted the No. 1 piece of art in the Museum’s 60,000-piece collection in its 2006 People’s Art Poll. While the museum does not release the values of works in its collection, van Goghs have fetched tens of millions of dollars at auction.

But most visitors don’t see what the museum’s chief conservator, Per Knutas, sees in this van Gogh, one of the great artist’s last masterpieces: extensive damage done by well-intended conservation efforts in the mid-1970s.

But now, they can.

Knutas himself is on view in the Cincinnati Wing of the Museum as he carefully restores the painting to lengthen its lifespan and prepare it for loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art next year.

The Cincinnati Art Museum has displayed conservation work before. But this is the first time that, at Knutas’ suggestion, the museum has connected the powerful microscope he uses — the same kind that’s used for surgical procedures — to a 42-inch flat screen TV hanging on the wall behind him. Visitors can see the painstaking conservation work like never before.

“For me, it’s really important to heighten the awareness of conservation,” Knutas said. “Most of the time, conservators are tucked in the back vaults of museums. People just expect the paintings to look great. But there’s actually a profession behind the painting.”

Born in Sweden, Knutas was trained in Denmark and previously worked at the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art before coming to Cincinnati two years ago.

It likely will take him through July to finish restoring the van Gogh.