For the 74 years that a painting of ballet dancers by French postimpressionist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec has hung in the Art Institute of Chicago, historians regarded it as merely a piece from his art student years.
At 21, Toulouse-Lautrec had just begun to explore the bawdy underside of Parisian nightlife when he painted “Scene de Ballet” in 1885. Normally hanging near Georges Seurat’s masterpiece, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte–1884,” it was easy to overlook.
But thanks to some fancy forensic work done by the institute’s resident analytical chemist–an unusual job title in a fine arts museum–Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting is getting new respect. Beginning Saturday it will proudly take its place in the traveling exhibition “Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre” at the museum.
Well before it got to Chicago, the painting had been crudely cut from its original plaster wall, ineptly restored and obscured by a dark varnish. Decades later, Francesca Casadio used high-tech tools such as a laser microscope to peer beneath the surface of the painting and reveal its hidden potential.
Using Casadio’s findings as a guide, restorers began working on the piece, uncovering a vibrancy not noticed before and putting a new perspective on its place in Toulouse-Lautrec’s career, said curator Gloria Groom.
“We never realized the importance of this painting before. It had been relatively uninteresting and boring considering other works by him,” Groom said. “We truly believe now that it’s an early, mature work, his first fully fledged painting of the entertainment milieu, the theme by which everyone now knows him.”
Casadio, 31, with a doctorate in analytical chemistry from her native Italy, came to the Art Institute in 2003 as a conservation scientist, a new position created through a $2.75 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Having stocked up with tools costing six figures each–an infrared microspectrophotometer, a Raman laser microscope, an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer–the museum is beginning to pluck the first fruits of her investigative labors.
“I’ve always been passionate about art and curious about how things are made,” Casadio said of the unusual application of her scientific training. “As a graduate student I always aimed my work in chemistry at studying art.”
Now it is aimed at helping museum scholars map restoration plans for damaged works of art and to trace the creative process of individual artists.
Her work also is used to determine authenticity and origins of artworks–including a portrait of St. Francis of Assisi that had been thought for four decades to be a mere copy of a work by the Spanish master El Greco.
The pious 16th Century painter had a big workshop in Toledo, Spain, where many assistants helped him turn out religiously themed paintings. More than 100 versions of the St. Francis portrait came out of the workshop. El Greco personally painted some, but many were slavishly copied from his originals by his assistants.
The museum’s version, received as a gift in the 1930s, was labeled an authentic El Greco until 1962, when the world’s foremost authority, Harold Wethey, declared it was a copy. Never convinced he was right, the museum continued to label it as El Greco’s while noting its authenticity was in dispute.
Preparing a catalog of the museum’s pre-1600 European paintings, curators last year called on Casadio to help re-investigate the painting.
“There aren’t too many objective ways to tell us that this was done by him and not by his son or an assistant,” said Martha Wolff, museum curator of pre-1750 European paintings.
Casadio began by studying four versions of the painting: an authenticated El Greco at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, two suspected copies in other museums and the Art Institute’s version.
She put the Chicago painting under X-ray and infrared reflectographs that can see through surface paint to lower layers, revealing if the artist thought through problems by experimenting and making changes as he painted.
Few subsurface changes make a strong case that the painting is a rote copy. But Casadio saw a lot of subsurface changes in the Art Institute’s portrait.
Casadio also obtained tiny, almost microscopic flecks of green paint from leaves painted in the upper left-hand corner of the four St. Francis portraits.
She cut a cross section from each fleck and examined the paint layers.
The Art Institute sample was a near-perfect match with the verified El Greco, but different from the other two paintings.
El Greco authority Richard Mann of San Francisco State University recently authenticated the Chicago version as the real thing.
The Toulouse-Lautrec painting came to Casadio as curators began to prepare for the arrival of the traveling “Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre” exhibition.
Deciding to restore “Scene de Ballet” for the show while it is in Chicago, museum officials asked Casadio to assist them.
“A lot of what we do is forensics,” said Casadio. “How do objects change with aging, and how can we bring them back as close to the original as we can without altering anything of the artist’s intent?”
From letters to his mother in 1885, historians know Toulouse-Lautrec, still an art student, escaped from a rainy spell in Paris by visiting friends in Villiers-sur-Morin, a village outside the city. He wrote to his mother he was painting ballet scene murals in the public rooms of his inn.
Just 16 years later, Toulouse-Lautrec had died of alcoholism and syphilis, the legacy of partaking too cheerfully in the pleasures of Montmartre’s dance halls and bordellos.
Little more than a decade after Toulouse-Lautrec’s death, he was a recognized master and the owner of the village inn realized the plaster walls were probably worth a great deal. He had them cut out of the walls and transferred to canvas backing to be sold separately.
Casadio’s high-tech analytical tools showed that paint in the center foreground of the work was badly cracked or missing.
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An earlier restoration ineptly painted over the destroyed areas and covered details painted by Toulouse-Lautrec. Varnish applied early in the last century had darkened with age, obscuring many colors and details.
Her findings were bad news but helpful to Art Institute conservator Faye Wrubel.
“You can see through X-ray that the painting had been cut in half during the removal,” said Wrubel. “I think they must have hired the local butcher to do the work.”
Yet the information allowed the museum to map out stabilization and restoration plans aimed at bringing the work back to a condition that conforms as closely as possible to the artist’s original vision.
Using synthetic paints matching the original oil paint palette, Wrubel filled in the blank areas with brush work studiously mimicking the artist’s. The results can be seen as part of the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition, which runs at the museum through Oct. 10.
Chief curator for Asian art Jay Xu also is working with Casadio, looking at an enigmatic stone object carved by an unknown artist 3,600 years ago that many believe is the museum’s most important Asian art piece.
It is a dark, glossy, carved jade figure, 7 3/4 inches high by 3 1/2inches wide.
Dated to 1600 B.C., it depicts a man kneeling, his head bowed and his hair neatly parted down the middle. He has nearly blank facial features, and his arms are tightly bound behind his back.
“Was he a prisoner or a slave? From his meticulous hairstyle we can probably conclude the man was … from a higher class status,” said Xu. “Why are his arms bound up? We just simply don’t know.”
Probably excavated for the illegal antiquities trade from an undocumented ruin in the 1920s, the piece was part of a jade collection donated in 1950 to the Art Institute.
In 1997 one author called it “the most sensitive representation of the human body from Bronze Age China.”
“It is priceless,” said Xu. “We have always treasured it.”
The figurine was unique to the world until 2001, when construction workers in China’s Sichuan province unearthed a dozen nearly identical figures–but lighter in color and with pigment traces indicating they had once been painted.
“There’s no doubt in my mind now that our figure came from this place,” said Xu.
Casadio is trying to help unravel more of its mysteries. Putting it under a laser microscope, Casadio found that the museum’s figurine had never been painted.
But to find out what makes its surface so dark and shiny she needed more powerful equipment.
“We want to see if ours was polished … or if it had been heated up deliberately to change its color,” she said.
Canvassing research labs in the Chicago area, she found the environmental electron microscope she needed at Northwestern University’s Materials Science and Engineering Department.
This spring, Casadio and Northwestern professor Katherine T. Faber ran tests on the figurine, discovering it was made of a stone called clinochlore. They also were able to pinpoint the kinds of tools used to carve it, but are still baffled by what made the surface of the stone so dark and are planning more tests.
“Francesca can’t reasonably equip her lab with all the instruments she needs, but there is no need to because of proximity to Northwestern and the shared interests that we are developing,” Faber said.
“It’s rather exciting to work with precious pieces of art in connection with types of problems that are new to us but relate to our knowledge,” she said.
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Shedding new light on Toulouse-Lautrec
Conservators at the Art Institute of Chicago have restored Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Scene de Ballet” for a show opening July 16. In the process, they helped elevate a piece that was seen as a lesser work to one of great significance in the artist’s early career.
Some of the improvements:
– Detail of figure in the balcony (right) is more visible.
– Division of light and dark areas is more apparent.
– Color from the original palette has been restored.
Source: Art Institute of Chicago
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Revealing the painting’s secrets
As part of her forensic investigation of Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Scene de Ballet,” conservation scientist Francesca Casadio uses several pieces of equipment that give transparent and microscopic views of the painting. Her findings help guide the conservators in restoring the painting.
X-raying the painting
X-ray radiograph equipment, similar to that used in
hospitals, reveals details hidden beneath the top layer.
– Damage to plaster layer shows as black
– Wooden framework from a previous restoration
– Dark line shows where painting was cut in half during
its removal from the wall on which it originally was
painted.
Analyzing a tiny sample
The cross section of a sample taken from Toulouse-Lautrec’s
painting provides a view of its layered materials.
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Different instruments are used to determine the makeup
of the sample’s layers.
– Top layer of paint
– Lead-based paint from wall
– Plaster from wall
– Sealant
INSTRUMENTS USED IN ANALYSIS
# Minimum size, in microns, of material that each instrument can analyze (a human hair is about 50 microns in diameter)
Infrared micro-spectrophotometer
5 Uses infrared light to determine the chemical structure
and particle makeup of the materials of the painting.
Used to analyze pigments in all the sample’s layers.
Raman laser microscope
1 Uses a laser reflected off the sample or directly off
the painting’s surface to identify its chemical structure.
X-ray fluorescence spectrometer
100 Uses X-ray radiation dispersed across the sample’s surface to reveal what elements are present and in what concentrations.
Used to identify pigments in the sample’s top layer.
Scanning electron microscope
.005 Uses a beam of electrons to determine the texture
and elemental composition of the sample’s surface.
Source: Art Institute of Chicago Photo courtesy of the Art Institute
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– See microfilm for complete graphic.