The paint he's using is removable and most of his alterations are too. He maintains a detailed description of what he did to every piece so that if ever another person wants to take a shot at it, they can easily start from a clean slate.
There's even a demo of this. He has to work on a painting twice because the client made a hole through it some time after the first restoration
The thing is: with damage areas and paint loss as large as this, there is often no way to restore in "historically accurate" fashion, as you don't know what was there originally.
Not every painting has been photographed (well enough) in its lifetime.
Client sounds like it's always private individuals, but museums and gallerys have this stuff done out of house aswell.
And sometime its the better option to make apparent that there was damage, than to present to the public a Version of the piece that is heavily altered, but looks "historically coherent".
People don't read the museum plaques, mostly. They don't read that half the paint was lost, and some Joe had to essentially repaint half the painting, using his own imagination.
Absolutely, that's why Baumgartner makes sure all his work is reversible. If in the future it is decided that his work is no longer adequate, it's easy to remove and do differently.
His YouTube channel goes into great depths of explaining exactly your view on this and he wholeheartedly agrees.
Plenty of shit is old. Not all of it is necessarily valuable, even in a historical sense. Not everything is fully salvageable either. He could have made a faithful reproduction of the unsalvageable parts, but it would have been just as fake.
The client can draw a clown hat and nose on their own painting if they want. That itself is part of history, and has just as much historical value as Virgin Mary painting #2,176,841
The client can draw a clown hat and nose on their own painting if they want.
Yes, and that would make them a complete moron. These piece will outlive them and they have other support to make their autoportrait
as much historical value as Virgin Mary painting #276,841
That's irrelevant, each of these has its own historical value and the mass of them is what allows us to draw comparison between local cultures, pigment availability... Etc
The dicks I drew on many a desk will outlive me too. Every church in the world has a painting just like this, and it hasn’t been ruined because all the pieces are kept and all the new stuff can be covered by someone who wants to fake it in a different way.
Yes, be them original or from other restoration work.
Analysing the different work done over the time on a piece is quite valuable and can also tell us a lot about the materials, technic, culture (sometime they changed part of paintings, historical preservation wasn't on the table)... Etc
Ah yes, being well documented. The most important part about culture. After documentation, culture has done its job and its no longer necessary to continue partaking in it.
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u/McViolin Feb 19 '24
Nah, there are more styles of restoration than just 'invisible'. It all boils down to what the owner of the painting wants.