Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

Here is a post from one of my summer interns, Lucie Alig, that speaks for itself.

My desk in the conservation lab was situated amongst Renaissance sculptures, ornately painted vases, African artifacts, and yet I was there to devote myself to one specific artwork far too large for any lab: Robert Indiana’s 1970 sculpture, LOVE. Needless to say, it is a piece that prompts a nod of recognition. Whether identifiable from its centralized positioning on the grounds of the IMA, or through its plastic incarnation as a dangling, mass-produced key chain, most everyone seems familiar with the trademark tilt of LOVE’s “O,” as it has been so hopefully interpreted to symbolize a movement forward or—in the case of my research of LOVE’s conservation history—a rather complicated stepping back.

Lucie Alig considers LOVE

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The following blog post was written by Sara Croft, Print Room Intern.  She worked out of the Registration Department which is part of the Collection Support Division of the IMA.  Her project was to do a physical inventory of our flatfiles in our Print Room Storage.  This included many W.W.I and W.W.II posters.

Sara Croft

The current economic situation is an issue that is known to all living generations.  Those of us who understand the purpose of being “green” act as if the idea is, or should be, second nature.  However, there was a time when people all around the world needed to be taught how to reduce, reuse, and recycle.  Some of it was so extreme that it became propaganda, specifically during the first and second world wars.

As an intern in the Print and Drawing department, I have uncovered some of this propaganda in the form of war posters.  The IMA houses a variety of French, Russian, British, Canadian, Mexican, and American posters with subject matter pertaining to war bonds, consumption, food rationing, health and safety issues, enlistment, and many other topics.

Many of these posters ended up at the Herron Art Institute during both world wars. They first arrived when the school became a site for men to register for the draft, two months after the first war. It would have been important for young men to be surrounded by war propaganda while they enlisted in the military as to create high morale.  Whether the poster constructed an image of a clean shaven, happy soldier with a bright smile or it showed the excitement and joy of being out of the battlefield, those images became iconic to those on the home front who only knew of those images when they thought about their loved ones at war.  There was no such thing of live Internet feed or constant updates of information that would have actually shown the tumultuous lives the soldiers were really living.

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The following post was written by Charles Falco (pictured below), Professor of Optical Sciences; Physics and UA Chair of Condensed Matter Physics.

Professor Charles Falco

OK, yesterday Richard gave you his version of events.  Today, it’s my turn.

Part I: Making the Connections

My Background

The year: 1960
The place: Ft. Dodge, Iowa
Richard started his story ten years ago in Madrid.  I’ll start mine fifty years ago in Ft. Dodge.

I’ve been keenly interested in images since early childhood, starting with an old Kodak box camera, and advancing to my first “serious” camera when I was twelve. This involvement with creating and manipulating images using various processes — photography, cyanotypes, silk screening, etc. — steadily expanded as I got older, to the point that by age 30 I owned at least 20 lenses ranging up to a 800 mm super-telephoto, as well as had designed and fabricated various pieces of specialized photographic equipment for my imaging experiments.

The infrared camera described in this blog is the most recent piece of fabricated/altered imaging equipment dating back to an enlarger I made in high school by modifying an old bellows camera. Read the rest of this entry »

My guess is that you’ve never considered what motorcycles, medical illustrators, Madrid, two cameras that can see into the Infra Red, and underdrawings in Renaissance-era paintings have in common.  Frankly, before last summer I hadn’t either, and now that I’ve started out this way it’s going to take some work to connect all of these things together.  To do it, I’m going to break this post into two parts. Today I’ll give my side of the story and tomorrow you’ll hear from my new friend, Charles Falco, who will tell his.

Group IR Shot. David Miller, Charles Falco, Richard McCoy, Zina Deretsky, Aimee Allen, Christina Milton-O'Connell, and Linda Witkowski

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The IMA rarely has the luxury of reframing the paintings in its collection, since funds to pay for new frames are not readily available. A frame is an important part of a painting that serves not only to enhance the image but also to protect it.  Several paintings at the IMA have unsuitable frames that do nothing to enhance the beauty of the work and may actually detract from it.  One of those paintings is Abbott Thayer’s 1886 Still Life, a simple but lush depiction of a peony in a pewter-lined copper bowl.  This spare but dramatic still life was in a deteriorating reproduction frame that had a negative affect on the painting.

Last year the work appeared in the exhibition American Art and the East at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.  It was seen by Eli Wilner, a leading frame dealer and restorer, who noticed that the frame did not show the painting to its best advantage.  Mr. Wilner contacted the IMA and made a proposal to reframe the painting for a minimal payment from the museum.  The IMA was being given the opportunity to obtain a museum quality frame that we would not have been able to purchase if Mr. Wilner had not offered to donate most of its cost.

A comparison of Thayer’s still life before and after reframing shows a stunning transformation in the presentation of the painting.  It is now surrounded by a frame that resembles those of the period in which it was created and one that brings out the beauty of the image.  Mr. Wilner has offered to help the IMA reframe additional paintings with his support, so we are hoping that we will be able to take advantage of this very generous offer in the future.

The next time you are visiting the IMA come to the American galleries and see the Abbott Thayer still life in its new frame and experience what the appropriate frame can do for a painting.