Cincinnati Art Museum Conservator Conducts Conservation of van Gogh in Public

CINCINNATI, OH.- From Monet’s garden to Art Deco delights, the Cincinnati Art Museum will take you on a journey through time and place as part of its 2011-2012 Exhibition season. Highlighting both the Art Museum’s superb permanent collection and great works of art it is bringing to this community, the exhibition schedule also includes major renovations to galleries. “We will be using our collection of sixty thousand objects covering six thousand years of human history to reveal beauty in gardens, streets, and dance halls; in the past, the present and the future,” said Art Museum Director, Aaron Betsky.

Chief Conservator Per Knutas is conducting a conservation project in public. He is stabilizing and cleaning Undergrowth with Two Figures, one of Vincent van Gogh’s last great masterpieces, which he painted just before his death in 1890. This iconic piece, which has been part of the Cincinnati Art Museum collection since 1967, will be on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art when the five-month project is finished.

Visitors to the Art Museum can see Knutas bringing his painstakingly detailed work out in the open in the Cincinnati Wing. The precise and delicate technique is being filmed and streamed on to a projection screen. Knutas is working with a powerful microscope, solvents and special tools. His work mirrors the detailed activities of a surgeon. In particular, Knutas is removing wax from the painting (a side effect from an in-house treatment) to reveal the vibrant colors and textures as the great Van Gogh intended.

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