![]() As the file of interviews has grown, collaboration for enhanced international collection is in progress with the International Institute for Conservation (IIC) and the Working Group on History and Theory of the International Council of Museums Committee for Conservation (ICOM-CC). Over the last 39 years, more than a hundred and twenty international conservators and students have assisted with conducting interviews on a volunteer basis, and for the last two decades the FAIC/AIC office in Washington, DC, has provided funds for transcriptions. In 2004, the files were officially transferred to the Winterthur Archives for professional management. Six months later, in September, the board of directors of the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation (FAIC) approved the project under my leadership, and in 1976 Winterthur Museum consented to informally house the oral histories and archives in the conservation department. George Stout emphasized that the project should be international. Thomas Chase, and I met in March 1975 and discussed beginning an oral history project and establishing an archive to safeguard early records associated with the conservation profession. After the meeting, he went to his summer home and began to make handwritten notes about his early experiences at the Fogg, but ten days later he died.ĤTo continue Gettens’s proposal, George L. Gettens emphasized the necessity of recording personal recollections, anecdotes, and informal doings that would tie together “serious events”. He went on to remark: “Knowledge of the beginnings and growth of our profession is a necessary background for training programs in art conservation.We wouldn’t really be a profession without a stepwise history of growth”. In 1974 Rutherford John Gettens, one of America’s pioneer conservation scientists who worked at the original technical laboratory of the Fogg Art Museum, spoke at the American Institute for Conservation meetings in Cooperstown, New York: “To come to the point quickly, I think we should begin to think about collecting material for a history of the conservation of cultural property”. Background of the FAIC Oral History ArchiveģAs of early 2015, there were 295 interviews with pioneer conservators, conservation scientists, and allied art historians in the FAIC oral history archive. We have to listen to the artists: from the very moment they started painting their works, they took the floor, and they are still talking 1.ĢThat field of technical examination has undergone many changes since the 1950s this article will briefly survey the field, focusing on the examination of easel paintings, with the aid of voices and personal observations from the interviews available in the international oral history archive of the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation. ![]() ![]() It was an exciting period and a great privilege to have been involved. Since the 1950s, I have been in a position which allowed me to follow closely a phenomenal revolution in studying works of art: the rise and development of their technical examination. 1 MARIJNISSEN, Roger H., “Introduction” in The masters’ and the forgers’ secrets.
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