“The Challenge of Altered Paintings”
Alum Mark Tucker The Neubauer Family Director of Conservation Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Department of Art and Art History presents conservator/technical art historian and UC Davis alumnus Mark Tucker, The Neubauer Family Director of Conservation Philadelphia Museum of Art, who will give a presentation, “The Challenge of Altered Paintings,” at the Student Community Center, meeting room D, on Thursday, April 16 at 3:30 P.M. The event is free and open to all.
In his talk, Tucker considers how paintings change over time, and the challenge of discovering and recovering qualities of original appearance and effect.
What are you seeing when you look at a painting? For many paintings, certainly those of any age, it’s both what artists put into creating them and everything that happened to them afterward, beyond the artists’ control. Whether by others’ interventions or aging of materials, it is common for a gap to open up between how a painting looked as the fresh, pure expression of an artist’s will and how it comes to look over time. Conservators conduct technical and historical research into the nature and breadth of that gap, gathering information that may be used to support restoration of features that had meaning for the artist and the painting’s first audiences but that that with time have been obscured, weakened, or removed. Mr. Tucker will share examples of this basic challenge of art conservation and the insights and satisfactions that come with better understanding what we see when we look at paintings.
As the museum’s head paintings conservator for thirty years, Tucker oversaw the historical and technical research on which conservation practice and object-based scholarship are based and was in charge of preservation and restoration of the museum’s collection of more than 6000 European and American paintings dating from the 12th century to the present.
Tucker earned his BA in Art Studio from UC Davis and MA in Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works from the State University of New York. He has worked throughout his career to shed light on paintings’ effects and meanings obscured by restorations, reconfigurations, and aging of artists’ materials, devising conservation treatments to reflect recovered knowledge of original appearance and restore fragile ties between the materials of the work of art and the ideas, values, and varieties of expression they serve.
