Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

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.

Ever since Indiana Jones began his pulpy adventure series into far-flung and exotic locations, the discovery of artifacts has gone from a virtually unheard of profession to a glamorous one, seemingly designed for a dichotomous group of swashbuckling rogues and charming intellectuals.  Archaeology has evolved (much like its subjects) from the cavalier work of aristocratic colonialists like Lord Elgin and Captain Cook to a field far more accessible to the public.  Some of said discoveries may even take place in, wonder of wonders, Indiana.  Mine was free of cannibalism and international conflict, but not, I promise, free of intrigue.

Now, Dear Reader, you can by a mere flick of the clicking finger discover what we’ve discovered at the IMA, which, I think, is pretty rad in the stealthy world of museum administration.  Most recently, what we’ve unearthed is not from Jaipur or Nimrud, but from an apparently long-forgotten box on a shelf.  But sometimes it happens that real life discoveries are just as romantic as those of Dr. Jones’s folklore.

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CoOL logo

I remember the first time I saw the CoOL web page (Conservation Online).  It was about 1995 and I was a student working in the Lilly Library’s Book Conservation department when Jim Canary told me to check it out.

I really can’t think of a topic that isn’t covered at CoOL.  I can remember spending hours digging around all of the pages when I first saw it.  It seemed to answer all of my questions about my interest in the profession and point to ones that I hadn’t thought of.  Have a look at all of the “Conservation Topics,” or look at the number of national and international organizations who have their home pages associated with CoOL.  Dig around there.  It’s amazing.

Perhaps most importantly, though, look at the ConsDistList, an e-mail distribution list that at last count had just under 10,000 subscribers.  This dist list has been going strong since 1988 and has been one of the most important ways for conservators to share and find information on a truly international level.  It has been the central hub for information sharing within the conservation community.

Yesterday that changed when Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources announced that Stanford is no longer going to support CoOL and that the ConsDistList had produced its last instance.  Bang.  It’s over.

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