Museums are now honest about conservation issues

From the director of ArtWatch UK

Eric Shanes's suggestion that the Clark Institute's (and by the agency of extension the Yale Center for British Art's) failure to disclose information upon its controversial restoration of Turner's Rocket and azure Lights ('A Turner Resurrected', APOLLO, May 2005) is in some way understandable or acceptable because it is 'entirely in keeping with museums norms' must be cast offed He mentions our National Gallery as a case in point, on the other hand under its present director, the gallery is now in fact acting in a greatly more transparent and helpful fashion: I am being given filled access to the records of a series of controversially restored works.

Mr Shanes's preparedness to give the Clark Institute the benefit of the doubt upon its attribution to Robert Carrick of the one-boated image that it at handed publicly as an historic record of the original condition of Turner's picture, is misplaced. The Carrick chromolithographic transcript (comprised of fourteen--not forty--separate successively over-printed states), we have ascertained, recorded the one and the other of Turner's steamboats from its earliest stages. Whatever the source of the mysterious one-boated image supplied by dint of Yale and shown entirely misleadingly at the Clark might have been, it was not made by the agency of Carrick.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Apollo Magazine Ltd

COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group