The divorce was painful. Then it turned savage.
Wielding a butcher knife, the husband took out after one of his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s most beloved possessions. He plunged the blade in. It met with no resistance. He yanked hard with an upward stroke and smiled as he heard the sad rip of old canvas and watched the oil-painted face of a man split down its middle.
When the wife discovered the damage, she sobbed. The painting-the fading image of a stern-looking, bearded ancestor, resplendent in military uniform-was of little monetary value, but it had been in her family four generations.
“She was crying when she called,” says Barry Bauman, 45, founder of the Chicago Conservation Center, the largest private art-conservation center in Chicago and one of the largest in the country. “She didn’t know if there was anything that could be done. We had the painting delivered, took a look and fixed it. The woman was amazed. The painting was not a good work, but to her it was a Rembrandt.”
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There are, at any given moment at the center, about 250 paintings, textiles or sculptures in need of aid. Not all their stories are as dramatic as that of the Painting Damaged in Divorce. Most of the works are suffering such relatively prosaic ailments as discolored varnish, which turns once-vivid paint dull; smoke or soot, the result of fires; bulges and ripples in the canvas, the result of warped framing; small tears, flecked paint and other signs of aging.
“But we’ve had paintings damaged by gunshots, by floods,” Bauman says. “We have had a few paintings that were so badly damaged that there was nothing we could do. We are not magicians.”
But in a way they are.
Paintings have come into the center so covered in grime that it was virtually impossible to tell what was once underneath. After thorough cleaning, the canvases came alive in blazing colors.
Even paintings that may have looked lovely to an untrained eye have been in need of rescue.
“Look, look here,” Bauman says, pointing out a section of a sheep in Eugene Verboeckhoven’s 1864 “Animal Still Life,” which he had just cleaned with a cotton swab, unveiling a brilliant white amid sickly yellow. “This, this white, is the way the painter painted it.”
In the center’s 6,000-square-foot space on the top floor of a River North building, Bauman and his staff have repaired, retouched, cleaned and otherwise ministered to artworks that belong to museums, corporations and private collectors.
They have worked on Renoirs, Picassos, Warhols, Lichtensteins, Dubuffets, Pollocks, Manets and Monets. They have worked on worthless but dear family heirlooms and museum paintings worth millions.
“People realize that when they send a painting or work of art here, it’s not like getting your car repainted for $29.95,” Bauman says. He adds that fees range from about $100 for a small tear to thousands of dollars for large museum pieces.
Founded 10 years ago by Bauman, the center benefited from a decade in which art prices soared and people realized it behooved them to take care of what they owned and also to see what might be under that dull gray painting that had been sitting around the attic.
A laboratory of the arts
On any day given day, the center’s airy and well-lit space resembles a quiet laboratory.
Near one wall sit textile conservator Ruth Jongsma and her associate, Iola Gardner, carefully restitching small threads into an 18th Century Belgian tapestry.
Conservation assistant Paulette Olson and marketing director Heather Becker are on the phone with clients, and Tim Fox, a conservation assistant, is busy stretching a canvas across a frame.
“I do the work,” he says, pausing for effect, “behind the scenes.”
Min Lee, another conservation assistant, is retouching a 16th Century Florentine panel.
Cornelia Iclozan, associate painting conservator, stands in front of a massive (97 by 79 inches) 1890 painting, “In the Conservatory,” by Julius Stewart. The painting has been sent to the center by the Phoenix Art Museum, and it is one of the museum’s most valuable pieces. It had already spent several weeks being cleaned by Bauman, and Iclozan is busy touching matching white paint to a woman’s billowy dress.
Asked by a visitor if they are nervous working on such expensive works, Lee and Iclozan both smile the kindly exasperated smiles of those who’ve heard such a question before.
“No, not a bit,” Lee says.
“Would you ask a doctor is he was nervous about doing an operation?” Bauman says. “We are professionals. This is not the first time we’ve done this.”
But sometimes there are emergencies.
One of the most notable took place in 1986, when Bauman received a call from the Chicago Historical Society.
A pipe had burst in an excavation site nearby, flooding the Historical Society’s basement and storage facilities that were filled with art.
Bauman was called in to work on 174 of the society’s oldest and most valuable paintings.
“It was an intimidating, awesome responsibility,” he says. “I felt as if I was holding Chicago’s very history in my hands.”
The restoration took three years, and Bauman’s work on one of the damaged paintings, Theodore Robinson’s “View of the Columbian Exposition,” was documented in a special on WTTW-Ch. 11.
Sullivan and Columbus
There is much at the center that sings of Chicago.
Original Louis Sullivan stencils from the old Stock Exchange are being conserved for a private dealer. And near the back of the open room, standing 10 feet tall, is a statue of Christopher Columbus that no one has seen in 30 years.
The statue was once an adornment on the Cold Storage Building, one of the most impressive structures at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the site of a ferocious blaze that killed 17 firefighters. After the fair closed, the statue was dedicated to those firemen and was exhibited at various places in the city before being placed in storage in 1964.
“It’s a unique piece,” says Bauman, adding that it will be rededicated Tuesday morning at City Hall. “There is a story that comes with each piece. In each piece is the history of its care.”
And abuse.
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The work taking place in the center is an interesting mix of art and science, incorporating such techniques as ultraviolet and infrared examination, chemical analysis and precise color matching.
“Certainly the responsibilities of working on a $3 million Renoir are different than working on a portrait of someone’s Uncle Billy,” Bauman says. “But that vanishes when I sit down to work. The work varies not at all.”
To listen to Bauman is to feel his passion for his work. He even defends an obviously amateurish portrait of John Wayne that rests against a wall.
“To someone, it’s a Renoir,” he says.
A change of course
To see him peer into a microscope, setting it millimeters above the surface of a painting so a visitor might see the astounding detail of the brush strokes in a rooster’s head, it is difficult to believe Bauman was not always in love with art.
Born in Syracuse, N.Y., he grew up in a house in which there was “zero art” and never imagined an interest until enrolling, because a political science class was filled, in art history at Beloit College in Wisconsin.
“It was amazing. I had a visceral response,” he says.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Beloit in 1969 and a master’s from the University of Chicago in 1971, Bauman joined the conservation department at the Art Institute of Chicago and spent the next 11 years there as associate conservator of paintings.
“The work at the Art Institute was tremendously exciting,” he says. “But after 11 years in any position, one might look for new challenges.
“Many people, private collectors who I had met through my work at the Art Institute, were coming to me for conservation work. It got to the point at which I had enough of these clients I thought I might use this base as a springboard into a private enterprise.”
But he needed a loan to open his own operation. That money, an amount that Bauman will not specify, came from Marshall Field V, then and now the Art Institute’s president.
“I sat down with Marshall, for whom I had done a lot of work, and presented him with a one-page business proposal and a very impassioned speech,” he says.
Setting up shop by himself in the then-less-than-trendy warehouse area, he was able to pay Field back in 18 months.
“I was glad to help Barry, and I thought a place like the Conservation Center would be good for the city,” Field says. “I think it has been. And I think he’s succeeded beyond anyone’s hopes. I’m happy for him. He’s a good fellow.”
Private praise
Echoing those sentiments is Lorraine Pritzker, widow of tycoon A.N. Pritzker. Bauman works on her vast private collection.
“He’s a wonderful guy,” she says. “And the work he does. . . . It’s amazing. One picture he was sent came back looking just like new. And it was over 100 years old.”
This sort of praise is often a private matter. The center does what is inherently anonymous work. When was the last time you heard a gallery-goer exclaim, “My what a wonderful job someone did cleaning this painting,” or, “I wonder if this painting ever had a rip or a tear?”
Even the way Bauman puts it-“Our task is to mimimize the aesthetic interference”-is not the snappiest of job descriptions.
“There are fine conservators all over the country,” he says. “But there are few places that have our breadth of capabilities under one roof. There is excitement and reward here every day.” Hanging on the wall behind him is a painting of him. It is the work of his wife, painter Mary Bauman. They have 9-year-old twins, Ian and Jeffrey, and live in a house in River Forest. It must be crammed with art.
“I don’t collect at all,” Bauman says, sweeping his arms toward the dozens of paintings that fill the center. “I consider all of these to be mine for a time, all the works that have passed through here and gone back to their owners. The way I look at it, I’ve got the greatest art collection in the world, and it’s out on loan.”