DALLAS — Nearly a month after the Dallas Museum of Art suffered a break-in that left four ceramic objects shattered, a piece of good news emerged: “Everything has been saved,” said the head of the museum’s conservation team, Fran Bass, “even the smallest of fragments.”
The DMA’s conservation experts responded “almost immediately after the incident” to assess, document and retrieve the wreckage, Baas said in an emailed statement. Saving all of the pieces “involved treating the galleries almost as an ‘archeological dig,’ gridding out the entire area where the incident took place so we could group the fragments and identify which of the four ceramic objects they belonged to,” said Baas, who took over the museum’s conservation team on an interim basis in 2019.
Pieces of the four broken objects — three ancient Greek ceramics and a contemporary Native American sculpture — now lie in storage trays. There is no date set for the objects’ return to the DMA’s galleries, and questions about museum security continue to swirl. But Baas said her team is “optimistic about the potential for restoration.” The conservators, she added, are “now at a point of pausing, reflecting, and having discussions with the DMA’s curatorial and leadership teams” before diving into repairs.
“Conservation work takes time and involves methodical research: it is a surgery that you do not want to hurry,” said Bass. “Modern conservation must consider the appropriate adhesives and techniques, as well as the potential research opportunities that could develop. Luckily, we have full documentation and high-resolution photography of the objects prior to the incident that we can reference.”
Art conservators from around the country said a hopeful prognosis is to be expected. Putting a shattered ceramic back together involves painstaking mechanics: gluing pieces back together, filling any gaps, color-matching hues that are centuries old. Nonetheless, given the proper time, money and resources, a trained conservator can almost always reconstruct a piece.
But the DMA faces a task beyond merely reassembling broken objects. The museum’s conservators and curators, experts said, must decide what exactly they want a repair to look like, and how they want it to inform the life of the artwork.
In other words, said Susanne Gänsicke, the head of antiquities conservation at the the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, when objects sustain serious damage, conservators must answer a crucial question: “How do you address a loss?”
“Just using a purely craftsman, mechanical approach to make something whole and beautiful again, that’s something we can do,” said Gänsicke, “but there’s so many other questions that come to play.”
Those questions revolve around the signs of damage to the object that persist even after basic repair. Even when an object is made structurally stable enough to go back on display, the signs of damage can never be totally obscured. Thin flakes of a ceramic may have been pulverized, leaving minuscule gaps that have to be filled with another material, like spackle. The damage itself could have caused small distortions in the object, meaning even if every piece is saved, they may not fit perfectly back together.
Those in the field are then led to ask: How and how much should they intervene aesthetically?
“We have ways of in-painting the surface, find the right colors, the right gloss, the translucency, fine tool marks — we can do all of that. But what would be the desired effect or outcome?” said Gänsicke. “In conservation, we’re becoming more and more aware of what we’re adding to the narrative.”
These concerns are made all the more crucial in the case of the three Greek vessels at the DMA, which incorporate intricate scenes. For instance, if there is a break along the shield depicted on the Greek vase, should the conservator try to conceal it, or leave it visible? Should the conservator try to reestablish visual coherence, or to leave the imperfections as a testimony to the damage?
Experts say there is no one answer. It its code of ethics, the American Institute for Conservation says that any compensation of loss “should be reversible and should not falsely modify the known aesthetic, conceptual, and physical characteristics of the cultural property.” Beyond that, conservators say, these types of repairs are up to them and their colleagues.
“The decisions that one makes when you look at an ancient ceramic with missing elements, it’s not settled policy,” said Tony Sigel, the senior conservator of objects and sculpture at the Harvard Art Museums. “A lot just depends on the staff of the museum, both on the curatorial side and the conservation side, the training they’ve received, the era that they’re working in, the condition that they found the pieces in, the resources available, the expertise available.”
A museum may be more inclined to preserve damage inflicted on an object from a historic mile-marker, such as war or ritual use. (Think the crack on the Liberty Bell). The scars of a one-off act of vandalism, said Gänsicke, may be seen as less worthy of preservation. Fine art museums in particular, said Sigel, tend to make signs of damage as inconspicuous as possible, even though that takes more time than a simple repair, he said.
“It makes the vessels much more intelligible to their audience,” he said. “It’ll often be restored to a fairly high level of what conservators may also call ‘aesthetic reintegration.’”
The DMA’s restoration choices — and the rationale it gives for them — have the potential to contribute to the field of conservation as a whole, said Claire Barry, the longtime director of conservation at the Kimbell Art Museum before she retired in 2021. It may be worthwhile, Barry said, for the museum to detail its work on the four objects through a symposium or publication. (The DMA has hosted a number of conservation-themed events over the years, and chronicled the treatment of a French terracotta bust in a 2020 blog post).
Baas said her team “will fully document the work being done, both for our records on the history of these objects and in case there will be future programming.”
“The silver lining,” said Barry, “is that there’ll be greater awareness of these objects and the learning opportunities that will come from this — and, hopefully, that will also translate to greater support for conservation activities at the Dallas Museum of Art.”
