See it now: Japanese Armor Rotation

This weekend is your last chance to see our Japanese armor for a while. But don’t despair – next week there will be a new one to enjoy. If you want to catch both, you’ll have to drop in twice.

XRay of a pre-Meiji set of samurai armor.

So why are we taking this armor off view? Well, armor may look tough, but some of its components are surprisingly fragile. While steel, leather, and wood are used to create the protective plating, these are laced together with leather or silk cord. After several centuries, these materials may not be strong enough to hold the weight of the armor for extended periods. Materials can also be damaged by prolonged exposure to light, meaning that the armor needs to be rested periodically.

Our conservation center has written an article on how we look after our Japanese armor, and there are more images on Flickr.

Our conservation team has also been working to prepare the new set of armor, which is on loan from a private collection. In these pictures you can see Katherine Holbrow, our head of conservation, using a spectrometer to determine what metals are present in the samurai helmet.

Samurai helmet undergoing spectrometry. Helmet from Private Collection.

Head of conservation Katherine Holbrow adjusting the helmet.

We rotate many of the pieces in this collection, not just armor. Over the next few months we will be doing several gallery rotations, many in preparation for Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past. Keep an eye on the blog to hear about what’s coming down and what we’re replacing it with. We’ll try to make sure you don’t miss a thing.

Jeepers Creepers, Where’d You Get Those…

A journalist asked us today about the enamel eyes sported by our Vishnu and Lakshmi sculpture in Sanjay Patel’s Deities, Demons and Dudes with ‘Staches.

One of our conservators with some ready-made enamel eyes.

This sculpture was originally intended to have eyes like these. There are carved depressions in the stone for them, as you can see from the picture below. We don’t know whether the sculpture never got its eyes, or lost them at some point.  Years ago we made a mold of the eye depressions, and I gave the mold to an artisan in India who makes such eyes. The artisan then created a pair for us from enameled metal, as is traditional.

Vishnu and Lakshmi in their former, eyeless state.

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Space Aliens Invade Emerald Cities

No, actually it is contract conservator Emy Kim finishing the cleaning and consolidation of the surface of an elaborately lacquered, gilded, and inlaid table from nineteenth-century Siam that will be on view in the Emerald Cities exhibition.

She wears a respirator for protection from the fumes from solvents used in the cleaning.

Countdown to Emerald Cities

Putting together a major art exhibition is not a quick process, with the planning for most shows starting years in advance. But no matter how ahead we begin work, the final two months before an exhibition opens will always be crunch time.

Emerald Cities does not debut until October 23, but its installation is complicated by the concurrent deinstallation of Lords of the Samuari (ending September 20). This is not atypical — we try and keep the turn around time (or “dark time”) between exhibitions as short as possible. Since these two exhibitions share many of the same behind-the-scenes staff, the result is a whole lot of people running around with brains and workspaces messily split between Japan and Southeast Asia.

So here are a few pics of this ongoing mayhem, as museum staff work to complete as much Emerald Cities prep as possible before jumping into packing up Lords of the Samurai.

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Inscription Found

Shiho Sasaki holding a Siamese painting. She discovered a faint inscription, which extends between her hands in this photo.

The sorts of Siamese and Burmese artworks that will be shown in our Emerald Cities exhibition seldom have inscriptions or other documentary evidence associated with them. This makes research particularly challenging. When an inscription turns up, it’s exciting.

Our conservator of paintings Shiho Sasaki phoned me this morning to say she had found a previously unnoticed inscription on one of the Siamese paintings she is preparing for display.

The one-and-a-half-line inscription on the back of the painting is very faint and so far hasn’t been read. The few words that can be made out suggest that the inscription records donors’ names and their pious intentions.

Next steps are to ask our photographer to take detailed shots under optimal lighting conditions, and to ask the conservators to try infrared photography, which sometimes reveals what cannot be seen in ordinary light.

Thanks go to Shiho for her careful, sharp looking.

Wearable Art

A peek behind-the-scenes at Emerald Cities:  Chief Curator Forrest McGill and Textile Conservator Denise Migdail examine a partially completed costume mount. With the help of museum preparation staff, Denise has designed and built this diminutive torso and a set of elaborately cut rigid supports (only one is shown here) to show off an embroidered and sequined nineteenth-century Burmese court costume.

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Damage Control

There’s nothing quite like posting incorrect information in a web video to get people’s attention. No sooner had I posted the video on conserving the “green monster” than I heard from the usually-so-quiet conservators. I had misunderstood the use of a Japanese seaweed called funori. Time for this non-conservator to do some damage control in the area of information. Here’s how it really happened…
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Conservation and the Green Monster

As xensen mentioned in his blog post “Gilt-y Pleasures,” the Emerald Cities exhibition involves an enormous amount of conservation work. Lots of the artwork that you’ll see had been damaged in some way — some by the flood of a hurricane, some by the Southeast Asian climate, and some by previous conservation work that did as much harm as good. And some objects just weren’t meant to last long in the first place.

One of these, a painting on cloth, earned the nickname “The Green Monster” among the conservators. It’s a tall painting in which all the green paint was made of a copper-based pigment. The copper pigment is highly acidic, and it ate holes through the backing cotton fabric. Check out this video as Director of Conservation Katie Holbrow and Conservator Shiho Sasaki talk about patching the hundreds of green holes in the painting.

Gilt-y pleasures

Even as the museum is gearing up for the opening of Lords of the Samurai in a few weeks, many of us are working on upcoming shows. Here Katie Holbrow, head of conservation at the museum, is working on a gilded object for Emerald Cities: Arts of Siam and Burma, which will be on display from October 23, 2009 through January 10, 2010, in our Lee, Hambrecht, and Osher Galleries on the main floor. This exhibition, which is drawn from the museum’s own collections (about 70 percent of the works were the result of a recent donation from the Doris Duke foundation) has involved the most extensive conservation work that I can remember. Many of these objects are decorated with gold, silver, gems, or glass, and, thanks to the work of the conservators, they really sparkle (wear shades)
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