While veering occasionally into specific examples, I will largely use the term “collections workers” to refer to those whose work focuses on the storage, care, and documentation of cultural artifacts. I use this capacious term partly to acknowledge the fact that tasks that in other fields might be considered menial—handling objects, retrieving them, putting them back into storage, numbering and labeling them in a way that firmly associates object and record—are in fact incredibly high-stakes collections work. Accidentally transpose the shelf and bay number when returning an object to storage, for instance, and the object will become impossible to retrieve. Choose the wrong housing for an object, and a colleague ten or twenty or fifty years later may suffer the consequences. While what follows focuses primarily on preventative conservation and the management of the museum environment, the collections workers who contribute to this mission are not only conservators, curators, and registrars, but also art handlers, security staff, docents, building managers, and—of course—innumerable poorly paid interns.
Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 257.
Domínguez Rubio, Still Life, 232-4.
For use of the term in context see Paul N. Banks, “What Makes Records Deteriorate,” ASHRAE Journal 41, no. 4 (1999): 71; David Erhardt, Marion F. Mecklenburg, Charles S. Tumosa, and Mark McCormick-Goodhart, “The Determination of Allowable RH Fluctuations,” Western Association of Art Conservators Newsletter 17, no. 1 (January 1995): 19-23.
Caitlin Shamberg and Annelisa Stephan, “Why the Getty Center Is the Safest Place for Art During a Fire,” Getty Center News and Stories, October 29, 2019, ➝.
Alex Marshall, “As Energy Costs Bite, Museums Rethink a Conservation Credo,” New York Times, February 1, 2023, C2.
See Sarah Staniforth, “Preface” and “Slow Conservation,” in Historical Perspectives on Preventative Conservation, ed. Sarah Staniforth (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2013), xii-xiv and 388-397. Staniforth’s edited volume anthologizes many of the essays I cite below.
Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970), 282-3.
The paintings were initially kept in two large castles in North Wales, which had been selected because they were the only buildings whose doors were large enough to accommodate the largest of the collection’s works. After France fell to the Nazis, the National Gallery staff worried that even these locations—though remote, they were overground—could fall to bombardment. Quarries and mines were attractive because of their position deep under the ground, though it took a few false starts before the curators found Manod Quarry. Martin Davies and Ian Rawlins, “The War-Time Storage in Wales of Pictures from the National Gallery, London (1946),” in Staniforth, ed., Historical Perspectives on Preventative Conservation, 141-2
Davies and Rawlins, “The War-Time Storage in Wales of Pictures from the National Gallery,” 142.
Another advantage of the quarry was that even its deepest underground recesses were linked to the North Wales power grid—though the National Gallery made sure to have a generator for periodic blackouts. The chief problem, Davies explains, was dust. “Mr. Rawlins,” Davies recalls, “kept on reassuring me that the dust was very good dust, and could do no harm settling on the pictures except to render them temporarily invisible.” Davies and Rawlins, “The War-Time Storage in Wales of Pictures from the National Gallery,” 144, 148-9.
The report was published a few years later as Weaver et al., “Cleaning of Pictures I,” Museum 3, no. 2 (1950). See also J. P. Brown and William B. Rose, “Humidity and Moisture in Historic Buildings: The Origins of Building and Object Conservation,” APT Bulletin 27, no. 3 (1996): 15.
Brown and Rose, “Humidity and Moisture in Historic Buildings,” 15.
Paul Philippot and Harold James Plenderleith, “Climatology and Conservation in Museums,” Museum 8, no. 4 (1960): 249.
Philippot and Plenderleith, “Climatology and Conservation in Museums,” 243.
T.R. Keely and Ian Rawlins, “Air Conditioning at the National Gallery, London: Its influence upon the preservation and presentation of pictures (1951),” in Staniforth, ed., Historical Perspectives on Preventative Conservation, 163.
Philippot and Plenderleith, “Climatology and Conservation in Museums,” 243. My emphasis.
Keeley and Rawlins, “Air Conditioning at the National Gallery,” 163.
Dorothy Dudley, ed., Museum Registration Methods (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 1979), 68.
David Erdhardt, Charles Tumosa, and Marion Meklenburg, “Applying Science to the Question of the Museum Climate (2007),” in Staniforth, ed., Historical Perspectives Preventative Conservation, 169-179.
Gail Cooper, Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment 1900-1960 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). For my own further thoughts on the relationship between AC, mass production, and art conservation, see Mal Ahern, “Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production,” Discourse 45, no. 1 (2023): 1-31.
John M. McCabe, “Air Humidification and Purification in Museums (1931),” in Staniforth, ed., Historical Perspectives on Preventative Conservation. See also “Museum of Modern Art Will Have Glass Walls,” MoMA Press Release, December 20, 1938, ➝.
Brown and Rose, “Humidity and Moisture in Historic Buildings,” 15.
In Staniforth’s words, it was “the performance of the methods of control” rather than “the requirements of artifacts” that established guidelines for the museum environment. Staniforth, “Slow Conservation,” in Staniforth, ed., Historical Perspectives on Preventative Conservation, 394-5. Garry Thompson confirms this in Museum Environment (London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1978), 119.
Stefan Michalski, “Relative Humidity: A Discussion of Correct/Incorrect Values (1993),” in Staniforth, ed., Historical Perspectives on Preventative Conservation, 165.
Erdhardt, Tumosa, and Meklenburg, “Applying Science to the Question of the Museum Climate,” 173. Thompson confirms this was still the case in 1978. “We have a very uneven knowledge of how fast things in the museum change and what causes these changes. And yet we have to erect this framework of preventative conservation before rather than after our research has reached a dignified level of completion.” Thompson, Museum Environment, 16.
Rees Jones could have scarcely chosen a more futile aim than to persuade his colleagues to treat the objects in their care as inanimate. In 1948, Martin Davies recalled moving hundreds of paintings from London’s National Gallery to a castle in North Wales at the start of the war: he was surprised to find that the artworks “behaved themselves quite well in their new surroundings” after the disruption. Davies and Rawlins, “The War-Time Storage in Wales of Pictures from the National Gallery,”141. While Rees Jones hoped to eradicate such anthropomorphism, nearly a half-century after his 1960 complaint my own initiation into collections work involved the adoption of a certain form of animism, apparent both in the field’s terms of art (an object is packaged and stored in its “housing”) and verbal habits (at my place of work an object was not simply placed or found but rather “lived” in its permanent storage location). “It doesn’t like being opened all the way;” “it really wants to bend left, but we’ll try to encourage it a bit to the right;” “it’s been so sad since we took it out of the vitrine;” “when you lift it, know it wants to be held—no, not there—here and here”: these are the sorts of things my colleagues and I said daily when I was a collections worker. Such talk further invests individual objects with unique personalities, and, depending on our roles, we develop idiosyncratic relationships with them.
Stephen Rees Jones, “Climatology and Consrvation in Museums,” Nature 191, no. 4793 S(September 9, 1961), 1050.
Stefan Michalski, “Agent of Deterioration: Incorrect Relative Humidity,” Government of Canada/Gouvernement du Canada, ➝.
Rees Jones, “Climatology and Consrvation in Museums,” 1051.
Domínguez Rubio, Still Life, 248.
Marion Mecklenburg, “Microclimates and Moisture Induced Damage to Paintings,” Museum Microclimates: Contributions to the Copenhagen Conference (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 2007), 19-26.
Mark Jarzombeck, “Haacke’s Condensation Cube,” Thresholds 30 (2005), 101.