WACC Conservator Featured in Documentary Short

A short documentary about the treatment of a Norman Rockwell drawing at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center is now available on the Internet video site YouTube. The film, produced by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts for an exhibition there, features WACC chief paper conservator Leslie Paisley treating a six-foot charcoal drawing by Rockwell titled United Nations.
    The nine-minute film follows Paisley as she cleans and repairs the 28 by 74 ¼ inch charcoal and pencil drawing, created as the final study for a painting Rockwell never realized. The highly detailed 1953 drawing is a group portrait of some sixty-five men, women and children representing a cross-section of the world’s races and nationalities. The film gives viewers a glimpse into several of the processes, issues and practices related to the complex operation of treating a fragile artwork on paper.

    The drawing was brought to the Center for cleaning and repair in advance of its exhibition at the Rockwell Museum. It had long been in storage and arrived framed, mounted on cardboard and stapled to a plywood support. It was obvious that the artist had treated the study as a working document, with little concern for its permanence. In addition to fifty-five years of grime, the work showed creases, warping and buckling caused by the moisture and uneven drying of three different glues and adhesives used by Rockwell to adhere the heavy-weight paper to a cardboard backing. The film watches over Paisley’s shoulder as she releases the work from its mounting, at first with a screwdriver and needle-nosed pliers to lift staples from the plywood, then with a small spatula and scalpel to painstakingly scrape adhered cardboard from the back of the paper.
    The documentary’s most dramatic moment follows Paisley as she lifts a large section of the drawing by two corners, slowly removing it from a tray of deionized water. This aqueous treatment, made possible by the large amount of fixative Rockwell applied to the work, was undertaken after extensive testing to confirm that the charcoal medium would not be affected by submersion. In all, the brief documentary condenses more than 100 hours of work into nine minutes and 17 seconds.

    Rockwell abandoned United Nations before beginning his planned painting, but in 1961 revisited many of the figures in the drawing for a Saturday Evening Post cover illustration titled Golden Rule. That painting, which is on display in the exhibit, was eventually reproduced on a series of mosaic tiles and installed at the UN.
    The documentary was filmed and edited by the Rockwell Museum’s Jeremy Clowe, with the assistance of Martin Mahoney, manager of collections and registration. It is on continuous view in the exhibition, "Conserving Norman Rockwell's United Nations," at the Rockwell Museum through September. For more information, visit the museum’s website at www.nrm.org.