Destructive buildup of soap can emerge as paintings age. It happens as fats in the original oil paints combine with alkaline materials contained in pigments or drying agents.<\/p>\n
Tiny blisters emerge in the paint and turn into protrusions that resemble tiny grains of sand and can appear translucent or white. Thousands of the tiny blemishes can noticeably darken a painting.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re a little bit bigger than human hair, and you can see them with the naked eye,\u201d Kronkright said.<\/p>\n
The creeping problem looms not only over O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s iconic paintings of enlarged flowers and the New Mexico desert but also the vast majority of 20th century oil paintings in museums, in part because professional-grade canvases from the period were primed with nondrying fats or oils, Kronkright said.<\/p>\n
To develop imaging technology that can assess the growth of the protrusions, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded $350,000 to the O\u2019Keeffe museum and a collaborative art-conservation center run by Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago.<\/p>\n The project aims to create a web-based system that allows any art conservator to upload and analyze images of paintings in efforts to limit damage from soap formation.<\/p>\n Scientists still do not fully understand what triggers and speeds up the formation \u2013 though changes in temperature and humidity during transportation are prime suspects, Kronkright said.<\/p>\n The two-year project is likely to record paintings under light frequencies that stretch beyond the visible spectrum in search of clues about the chemical composition of paintings. In the past, gathering that information would mean removing a postage-stamp-sized chip from the works.<\/p>\n \u201cIt now gives us a way to analyze the entire painting without taking any destructive samples whatsoever,\u201d Kronkright said. \u201cThat\u2019s a really big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s work offers a special opportunity to unravel the mystery of soap formation because so much is known and preserved about the techniques and materials she used on more than 800 paintings spanning a six-decade career, allowing for controlled experiments.<\/p>\n The Georgia O\u2019Keeffe Museum first grew alarmed about soap protrusions to its collection in 2011, when a traveling exhibit returned with visible damage that couldn\u2019t be linked to vibrations or jostling, Kronkright said.<\/p>\n \u201cLeft unchecked, they will continue to grow, both grow in number and grow in size \u2013 and in damaging effect,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He estimates that five paintings in the museum\u2019s collection have obvious damage linked to soap formation, while 90 percent of all O\u2019Keeffe paintings are susceptible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Scientific experts in art conservation from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Chicago area announced plans recently to develop advanced 3-D imaging technology to detect destructive buildup in paintings by O\u2019Keeffe and eventually other artists in museum collections around the world. Dale Kronkright, art conservationist at the Georgia O\u2019Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, said the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":102114,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5961,5843],"tags":[21,13],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-102113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-and-entertainment","category-living","tag-cortez","tag-frontpage-lead"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102113"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=102113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}