Conservation grant enables Nelson-Atkins to restore an El Greco masterwork
January 31, 2014 | In the PressFrom The Kansas City Star (http://www.kansascity.com/2014/01/31/4787977/conservation-grant-enables-nelson.html)
Scott Heffley channels the masters through a tiny brush.
Over the past three decades, Heffley, senior conservator of paintings at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, has restored masterworks such as Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Young Man” (1666) and Caravaggio’s “Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness” (1604-1605) to their original splendor.
Heffley’s latest project is El Greco’s “The Penitent Magdalen” (1580-85). Acquired in 1930 from a private collector in Madrid, the painting depicts Mary Magdalene as a repentant prostitute gazing heavenward beside the cave where she once lived as a hermit.
The painting was one of the first from Europe to enter the museum’s collection and has long been in need of major repair.
Last spring, Bank of America’s global Art Conservation Project agreed to fund the restoration. It was one of 25 projects selected.
Bank of America and the museum declined to disclose the amount of the grant, but it was “generous,” said museum spokeswoman Kathleen Leighton.
“The grant facilitated Scott’s ability to study El Grecos in museums around the world,” she said, “and it helped free up his time so he can focus on this.”
Before beginning work on the painting, Heffley performed numerous tests, Leighton added, including X-rays, infrared reflectography and an ultraviolet light exam, to understand the condition of the painting and the changes El Greco made.
Heffley spent eight months removing previous restoration efforts, including stubborn patches of old oil paint, which he had to remove speck by speck with a microscope and scalpel.
“It’s the most challenging treatment I’ve ever done,” Heffley said while perched on a stool before the painting in the museum’s conservation lab.
The north light makes it easy to see why: A “rough cleaning” hundreds of years ago left the surface badly abraded. The damage is most painfully evident in the Magdalene’s right arm, where patches of brown underpainting and raw canvas disrupt the illusion of smooth flesh.
“It’s one of the Nelson’s treasures,” Heffley said. “The key is to remove all the repainting and have only El Greco’s work.”
That meant removing not just the restorations but the enhancements of earlier restorers.
“I knew it was very damaged,” Heffley said. “I didn’t know there was so much old overpaint. Some (restorers) got carried away and added flecks of white to her curls.”
That’s all gone now, and Heffley is deep in the process of inpainting the abraded areas, carefully matching El Greco’s original hues with his own mixture.
“He painted in linseed oil. I mix pigments with synthetic medium that would be easy to remove at any time in the future.”
The goal, Heffley said, is “to knit El Greco’s work together so that the genius of his brushwork comes back.”
Heffley started with Mary Magdalene’s blouse and sheer scarf, and has also done inpainting on her blue mantle. Working on those areas is giving him a feel for how El Greco worked — “It’s very brushy, very light and very direct,” he said — before he moves on to the more challenging background.
Now that all the old overpainting is gone, a pronounced diagonal line in the upper right is visible, where the canvas had been folded years ago. There’s also a small tear.
Thankfully, the figure’s face is in fairly good condition. Heffley attributes that to El Greco’s use of lead white, which is resistant to solvents, and to the many layers of paint he applied to give the flesh transparency.
But the face has many small cracks. He will tone those dark recesses as he matches the original color, working with a tiny sharp brush and a palette the size of a note card.
“The flesh is not ‘flesh,’ ” he said. “It’s a whole variety of colors. There’s green, purple, red.”
By the time he’s done, “she’ll be three-dimensional,” Heffley promises.
Heffley is under bit of pressure to get the work completed, as it is scheduled to be part of “The Greek of Toledo,” a major international loan exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death, opening in mid-March at the Museum of Santa Cruz in Toledo, Spain.
If the restoration is completed in time, “The Penitent Magdalen” may join the exhibition in midrun. The painting will definitely be part of a second celebration of El Greco in Toledo, in the fall, which means it will not return to view at the Nelson until the end of the year.
But these things can’t be rushed, and the Nelson will definitely have one El Greco work in the first Toledo show — “The Trinitarian Friar” (1614), which Heffley restored several years ago.
“That’s one of his last paintings,” Heffley said. “ ‘The Penitent Magdalen’ was painted in the peak of his middle career.”
The piece was singled out for a reproduction and commentary in the museum’s 1988 publication “The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,” written by Ellen Goheen, who contextualized the work as a Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation.
“She was an appealing symbol to Roman Catholics during the Counter-Reformation,” Goheen notes, “because the validity of the Sacrament of Penance, or Confession, was denied by the Protestants.”
Goheen also remarks on the Magdalene’s “rapturous vision” and the way the “shadowy intermingling of figure and background heightens the sense of drama.”
In the course of his work, El Greco changed the way he wanted to convey that drama, as Heffley discovered in his examination.
“He originally had a ray of light coming through clouds but decided it was too overt,” Heffley said.
El Greco painted over the ray, but heavy cleaning more than 100 years ago exposed it, and restorers covered it again.
“The ray of light is now visible. … As I work on the painting, I will cover the ray as El Greco did in his final version of the image.”
Heffley is thousands of pinprick spots of paint away from achieving that moment, but that doesn’t faze him in the least.
“I like it,” Heffley says. “It’s kind of Zen.”
