When a major museum receives apainting on loan from a private owner, the first step is documentation: photography, examination, report-writing. But it’s surprisingly rare for collectors to do the same with their new acquisitions. Skeptics might dismiss the effort and expense of institutional loan protocols as a bureaucratic performance, done more to appease the insurance company and the lender than to benefit the art. Paintings aren’t plants, after all—why behave as if they’ll suddenly wilt? But (for better or worse) paintings have many more moving parts than the casual observer might suspect, and it’s easy to underestimate their capacity for change.
What is paint, anyway? What might look like a simple dab of dark red can actually comprise, on the molecular level, thousands of particles of metals and stones, blended with extracts from plants, insects, and animals, all suspended together in the delicate equilibrium of the paint film. It’s actually hard to say whether a painting counts as flora, fauna, or mineral. If an artist mounted vines and beetles and chunks of iron to a wall, this would be considered a mixed-media sculpture. But when tiny grains of the exact same materials are ground into processed seeds and brushed into strokes, this is reductively and misleadingly named an “oil painting.”
Paint is also dependent by nature; a brushstroke can’t hold itself up. Artists support their paints by laying them onto all sorts of planar materials, often fabrics, which may in turn be tensioned onto yet another structure (such as stapled to a stretcher). All of these multifarious internal organs of the painting—from the metallic dust within the pigments to the twisted threads of the fabric weave—exist in dynamic conversation with one another, as well as with their ever-shifting environments. The number of variables in play is daunting, even for professionals. Here is how a team of chemists, writing in Heritage Science in 2020, attempted to describe a painting: “a metastable, multilayered, heterogenous polymeric material” of “overwhelming complexity.”
What this means is that each painting is a unique entity, and that forecasting any given painting’s behavior over time is no simple, generalizable matter. Paint films that are still relatively young can have special vulnerabilities. Oils may take over a century to harden into tough, inflexible films, and the aging processes of acrylics are still being discovered in real time—it hasn’t even been a hundred years since acrylic paint was first invented. Dust poses a particular threat to still-soft, unvarnished paint films, since this grimy powder can become permanently embedded in impressionable colors.
Condition reports, particularly at acquisition, are a key tool for preempting irreparable loss. While any notes, however brief, can be valuable, the quality of the report does matter. Like an experienced consultant’s audit, a good condition report by a professional conservator is more than a description: It provides both summary and forecast, assessing the work’s history and internal material dynamics to flag its most vulnerable aspects.
And the more eyes on a painting, the better. It’s always a good idea to set aside time for looking at the works in your collection—during different times of day, alone and with others, from up close and far away. Appreciating your paintings and preserving them go hand in hand.
TAKEAWAYS
Commission a condition report with photography early on to create a baseline against which any future changes can be evaluated. Look at paintings regularly, and take dust seriously. Make sure any stored paintings are elevated on blocks or tables, not resting directly on the floor, especially in basements. For works on canvas, ask a conservator or framer to attach a backing board to the reverse of the stretcher bars (and handles, if necessary). This is a crucial preventive measure that protects against impact, dust, and vibration, and can even reduce cracking.