A Fashion Illustration, Before and After

The treatments are finished!  This is the fifth in a 12-part series on selected conservation treatments of artwork and photographs.  "Preserving a Family Collection" concludes on September 1.

Fashion illustration by June Anderson receiving surface cleaning with
grated erasers.

As part of its mission the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts offers opportunities for post-graduate study in paper conservation.  “Post-graduate” is the key term here.  The fellowship program at the Center is for professional conservators, graduates of some of the best programs in the world, at the very beginning of their careers.

Marion Verborg, who performed the conservation treatments described during this past week, is bound for conservation greatness.  She received her Master’s degree in Conservation of Cultural Property, with an emphasis in graphic arts, from Pantheon-Sorbonne University, Paris.  She’s held paper conservation internships at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Albertina Museum (Vienna, Austria), the Picasso Foundation (Malaga, Spain) and the Deutsches Historisches Museum (Berlin, Germany).  This month, she concludes her year-long fellowship at the Conservation Center, jets out to an International Association of Book and Paper Conservators conference in Berne, Switzerland to present a paper on light bleaching, then returns to the States to embark on her next fellowship at the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums.

And we wish her the best!

A detail of the fashion
illustration.

As she was preparing to leave, I asked Marion which was her favorite of the treatments and this was her choice – one of my mother’s homework assignments from the Traphagen School of Fashion.  “I love this woman in the dress,” she said.  “It’s a lovely fashion illustration.”

For this treatment, Marion surface cleaned the artwork with grated erasers and a soft brush, washed it on blotters, repaired the tears, and finished with humidification and flattening.  She did beautiful work.  Harvard’s lucky to get her!

Fashion illustration by June Anderson, before treatment.

Fashion illustration by June Anderson, after treatment.

© 2011 Lee Price