Repairing Art Damaged By Natural Disasters
By JOEL HENNING | August 12, 2008; Page D7

Chicago

(image caption : Chicago Conservation Center
A worker cleaning waterlogged textiles at the National Czech & Slovak Museum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. )

Water from the Iowa River was rapidly creeping up the walls of the University of Iowa's Museum of Art during June's floods. Ann Kennedy Haag of the Chicago Conservation Center was masked in a respirator to protect her from highly toxic black mold. She was holding one of the works of art that she and her colleagues, along with museum staff and volunteers, were attempting to rescue. Then the power went out, as it did repeatedly while they struggled to get the remaining art out of there. "We had to freeze and just stand there holding the pieces until the power came back on, which often took several minutes."

Each time the power failed, the electronic scrubbers removing black mold from the air also failed. "Even with our respirators on," recalls Ms. Haag, "we would have to go outside from time to time -- because when the scrubbers failed, the mold made us sick." If gagging on mold wasn't bad enough, she added, "the place smelled horrible because the flood waters were full of farm waste, gasoline and sewage."

Several days earlier, before the dikes were breached, the Chicago conservators had worked with museum staffers, volunteers and other art handlers to remove as much of the collection as possible -- including works by Picasso, Braque, Pollock, Beckmann, Kandinsky, along with a highly valued African collection.

Working nearly nonstop during the week of June 9, the professional and volunteer teams evacuated works constituting about 99% of the value of the museum's collection and representing nearly 80% of many thousands of works. "We had to inventory and assess every piece to determine how it should be wrapped and packed for moving," Heather Becker, CEO of the Conservation Center, told me. What they couldn't get out of the museum before the rising flood waters forced their getaway, they moved to higher levels. The center, which was called in by the museum's insurance underwriters, Lloyd's of London, is involved in disaster recovery nationally because it uniquely can field conservators skilled in virtually all media including painting, sculpture, prints and photography, as well as furniture.

The daunting work amid the mold occurred two weeks later, when the rescue crew was readmitted to the building to remove the remaining art. Often working in the dark with spelunkers' headlamps, taking essential breaks because of the black mold, the center's team worked for almost a month to remove the last 3,000 to 4,000 works, wrap and package them, and load them on refrigerator trucks for shipment to the mold containment area for evaluation and restoration at the center's Chicago headquarters.

Bad as the Iowa River flood was for the university's art museum in Iowa City, the Cedar River made an even more formidable assault on the museums of Cedar Rapids, including the National Czech & Slovak Museum. While a 400-pound chandelier of Bohemian crystal remained above the flood waters, the river rushed through most of the museum's collection of Czech and Slovak textiles, which includes leather coats, leather vests, and vividly colored, embroidered and beaded clothing. When conservators from the center arrived on June 19, 15 feet of flood water had just receded from within the building.

The flood heaved the collection against the downstream walls as if there had been a tidal wave of mud. "When we began to remove objects, they were so heavily covered in mud that we didn't know what they were," recalls Joe Gott, a senior arts handler for the center. "We set up a triage system in the museum's parking lot, consisting first of a series of nine laundry tubs. As textiles were brought out, they were separated by color. In the first tubs, we loosened and scraped the mud off. We ran them through several successive basins of gradually cleaner water, gently brushing the fabrics. After they had been washed as well as possible, we blotted them and set them on racks to dry."

Throughout that flood recovery effort over almost a week, the center, summoned here by the museum's restoration contractor, found volunteer help invaluable. Locals brought towels donated by a hotel and helped man the washtubs and drying racks. "Finally we put the material in boxes and packed our refrigerator trucks for the trip back to Chicago for evaluation and restoration. Our final goal will be to have our conservators clean and repair everything they can," Mr. Gott said. "We could simply have loaded the 1,200 pieces from the Czech and Slovak Museum into the freezer trucks," Ms. Becker commented, "but when we can do triage on the scene the results are better."

The center worked entirely on site when it was called in by several private collectors who suffered soot-damage to their works by Botero, Calder, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Matisse and Picasso in last year's fires in California's Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego. There, they set up "clean rooms" in the collectors' homes, totally encapsulating them by stretching plastic on all the rooms' surfaces -- ceilings, floors, windows -- and worked in them to remove soot from the art. "The less moving of valuable pieces, the better," counsels Ms. Becker.

That couldn't be done with the flood-damaged art and antiques that were among the pieces the center recovered after Hurricane Katrina from the New Orleans Museum of Art and several private collections. Among the beautifully restored items about to be returned to a New Orleans home are two Sheraton sideboards with boxwood inlaid veneer and brass hardware that the center staff recovered from several feet of water.

Closer to the center's Chicago home, Ms. Becker was instrumental in recovering the multimillion-dollar LaSalle Bank photography collection when the bank's Chicago headquarters suffered a fire in December 2004. "To organize the recovery, inventory and take down a collection of 4,500 works and then preserve the ones damaged by smoke, soot and water was an amazing job," says retired La Salle Bank CEO Norman R. Bobins. The collection dates back to an 1839 photo by William Henry Fox Talbott and includes work by Ansel Adams, William Eggleston and Edward Weston. Remarkably, only about 50 prints were irretrievably damaged. Ironically, when Ms. Becker and the collection's curator, Carol Ehlers, were struggling through a stairway with one of the prints, they were stunned to see that it depicted the devastating 1871 Chicago Fire. (The bank was recently acquired by Bank of America, which plans to maintain the collection.)

So what should even those of us with modest art collections do to minimize risk in the event of floods, fires, hurricanes and the like? Ms. Becker suggests that we "regularly update inventories and appraisals and keep insurance coverage up to date. Always keep an off-site copy; otherwise your access to vital information can be challenging when a disaster occurs."

Only 25% of the center's conservation work is disaster response. An equal percentage comes from museums. The other half involves private and corporate collectors. Recalling their efforts to save the remaining artifacts at the University of Iowa's Museum of Art, Ms. Haag says: "When the lights went out while we were trying to breathe through the black mold, inventorying and packing pre-Columbian artifacts with light only from our headlamps . . . awful as it was, I realized how much I love my job."
Mr. Henning writes about arts and culture for the Journal.