Portland Art Museum begins careful restoration of Claude Monet

In the basement of the Portland Art Museum stands a brand new, state-of-the-art conservation suite, built as part of the ongoing campaign for a $111 million museum renovation and $30 million to expand the museum’s endowment.

The doors are fitted with high-tech locks. The lighting is colour-coordinated to match the natural light. And the floors and walls are grey to facilitate colour coordination.

The museum’s chief conservator, Charlotte Ameringer, looks through thick jeweler’s glasses and leans close to examine a huge canvas in shades of blue and green.

“It’s a privilege to be so close to a work of art for such a long period of time,” said Ameringer. “I feel that restorers often spend more time on a painting than the artists themselves.”

She has just begun cleaning one of the museum’s most popular works of art: Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies.”

Journalists are not allowed to make subjective statements, but this is undoubtedly a beautiful painting. It is as tall and wide as a human and fills the vibrant blue tones of the water. Water lilies and flowers decorate the scene in green, red, pink and blue.

It was painted at a time when the French Impressionists began to move away from depicting people and objects and instead captured emotional moments.

“What’s special about this painting is that Monet moves away from the typical landscape where we see the horizon, sky, etc. He actually paints water looking down on it, reflecting the sky like a mirror,” said museum director Brian Ferriso.

“It was a very, very contemporary idea for the period 1914-1915.”

The museum bought the work in 1959 for $60,000, at a time when Monet and his aquatic plants were not yet so celebrated. That’s about $650,000 today and is nothing compared to the $80 million that water lily paintings change hands for today.

“That was very forward-looking,” said Ameringer, laughing.

But Ameringer is not fixated on the price of the artwork. Instead, she tackles it piece by piece. As a trained organic chemist, she has mixed a solvent specifically for this restoration measure. She dips a homemade cotton swab into it to slowly dissolve a yellowed varnish that was painted over the original work.

She said her work is meditative, giving you time to admire each brushstroke and the blend of intertwined colors.

“Hours go by and suddenly I think, ‘I have to move. I’m so stiff,'” she said.

The effort will take six months, so Ameringer will have to work on other parts so she can stand up and protect her back from overload.

To prepare for the project, she studied Monet in depth, for example, she discovered that he was very poor to begin with and that his financial situation changed when he fell in love with Giverny, his garden in France.

“He was obsessed with his garden and his water lilies,” Ameringer said. “He had a team of about eight gardeners.”

Monet was also very productive. It is believed that there are about 250 water lily paintings by Monet, which are in the so-called Great decorationHis vision: a series of huge paintings hanging in an oval room, so that the viewer is practically standing in the middle of his pond.

The work still hangs in France.

However, the Portland Museum’s water lily painting was not part of the grand decoration. Monet kept this special work for himself.

“He destroyed so many paintings during this time because he didn’t like them or was not satisfied with them,” said Ameringer.

“The fact that he kept (this) in his own collection makes it a very special painting for me.”

When Monet died, the painting passed to his son Michel Monet, who hung it in his family home until he decided to sell it in 1959.

The painting was then shipped to Portland so the museum could examine it closely before purchasing it. Museum staff discovered that during shipping, one of the small pins that attach the canvas to the frame had come loose, tearing a hole in the painting.

The whole thing had to be sent to a restorer in the renowned Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art returned to Missouri for repairs. As part of this conservation work, the canvas was varnished, as was common practice at the time.

“I think they viewed it partly as something to protect the surface of the painting,” Ameringer said. “But the varnish saturates the colors.”

It’s similar to what happens when you cover a dry stone with water. Suddenly it shines in previously unknown patterns and colors.

Art historians who have studied the Impressionists’ methods recently discovered that many of them, including Monet, did not want their paintings varnished, preferring the raw, new colors of their works.

The market wasn’t so sure back then.

“People didn’t think their unpainted paintings, with their bright colors, were finished,” Ameringer said. “Many of them were varnished by dealers because they couldn’t sell them unpainted.”

Some paintings were even covered with tinted varnishes to give them a patina and make them look less new.

“Today, ‘Water Lilies’ no longer looks the way Monet intended,” said Roger Hinshaw, president of Bank of America for Oregon and Southwest Washington, which financed the restoration effort.

Since 2010, the Bank has supported the conservation of more than 6,000 works of art in 40 countries.

Water Lilies is set to shine in new splendor when the museum unveils its major renovation next year. The renovation promises to connect the museum’s four old buildings with large, new, light-filled galleries.

The Brooklyn Museum’s famous European art collection “Monet to Matisse: French Moderns” is on display at the Portland Art Museum until September 15. It features about 60 works of art that are considered masterpieces of modernism, from Paul Cézanne to Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse and Claude Monet.