Celebrated Treasures

Editorial #35

Article

No. 35 • September 2024

Fig 1. Nicole Ex in De Proeftuin van Anke Riesenkamp. foto: Anke Riesenkamp

text: Nicole Ex

In museums, we find what a society holds dear. On display and in storage, a collection is preserved that we deem worthy of being passed on to our children and grandchildren: our collectively cherished favorites and celebrated treasures. In everyday life, those storage depots may be a blind spot—feeling static, dull, and musty—but when push comes to shove, when the absolute freezing point is near and a cluster bomb hits Museumplein—as the heart of culture is so often torn out somewhere in the world—you suddenly realize the consequences: the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, and the Stedelijk reduced to rubble, The Night Watch burned, The Sunflowers pulverized, twentieth-century masterpieces destroyed: Malevich, Dumas, De Kooning, Judd, and Kusama.

It would strike a blow to our soul and leave behind a vast emptiness, a sense of being lost, because culture is the ground beneath our feet—art is as physical as it is mystical and mental. In this autumn issue, we explore conservation and restoration—the shielding and safeguarding of that physical aspect. The question is how to best do that. How do we treat the physical core and surface while preserving that mystical aura? It’s a question I pondered in the early 1990s (p. 21), during the period when Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III (1967–1968) returned to the Netherlands after five years. The electrifying red color field, which had been slashed in 1986, had been repainted with alkyd paint and a roller. The controversy that followed was widely covered in the press. Before the “Barnett Newman affair,” people would stare blankly when I talked about restoration ethics; after that, everyone had something to say about it. It’s time for an update.