June 27, 2012, 5:52 p.m. ET
Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304765304577480801357375164.html
At the interview for his first job as an art
conservator—at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the late 1970s—Mark
Leonard brought his résumé and other papers that indicated he knew how to
restore paintings, but he also brought his painting portfolio. Mr. Leonard had
gone to Oberlin College with thoughts of being an artist, but in 1976 he earned
a Bachelor of Arts degree in a multidisciplinary program involving studio art,
art history and chemistry. From there, he earned a master's in art history and
art conservation at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. A lot of art
conservators have a studio-arts background—helpful because you might have to
fill in an area where the paint has fallen off, for instance, or know how to
mix paints to get a certain color. John M. Brealey,
who was in charge of paintings conservation at the Met, took a look at the
portfolio and pronounced the work "very good." But then he told the
young applicant, "You can be a paintings restorer or a painter, but you
can't do both."
For close to 30 years, Mr. Leonard followed Mr. Brealey's advice. But more recently he has proved his old
boss wrong. Five or so years ago, Mr. Leonard started painting again, and last
year he had a solo exhibition at Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood,
Calif., at which 26 of the 28 drawings and paintings on display were sold. Come
this December, other paintings will be on view at the Yale Center for British
Art in New Haven. And, starting July 2, Mr. Leonard will start his new job as
chief conservator at the Dallas Museum of Art, which he now refers to as his
"day job."
"Brealey was right
in his advice to me," Mr. Leonard said. "I was only able to follow
one passion completely, and I wouldn't have been able to enjoy it as much if I
had been pursuing another career at the same time." The job of a
conservator "is to disappear, to humble yourself to the voice of the
artist" whose work needs cleaning or mending, while the work of an artist
is to "make your ego as visible as possible."
Mr. Leonard left the Met in 1983, joining and
eventually heading the paintings conservation department at the J. Paul Getty
Museum in Los Angeles, from which he retired in 2010 to devote himself to
full-time painting. During his last years at the Getty, "I became more
comfortable with the back-and-forth of having another artist's work in my hands
and then doing my own painting."
His own painting is geometric abstraction, with
precious little resemblance to the Old Masters that had been the focus of his
career. Well, maybe there is some resemblance.
"From time to time, I've taken a photographic detail from an Old Master,
say the sleeve on a figure in a 17th-century Dutch painting, and blown it up,
and what you see is a geometric abstraction," he said.
Still, his "weavings"—drawings and
paintings consisting of criss-crossing lines on a
grid in a range of colors, which were exhibited at Louis Stern Fine Arts—are
quite unrelated to the stitching on any Dutchman's coat or shirt. To Mr.
Leonard, the woven elements reflect things loved and lost in life, and one of
those losses was a partner who died of AIDS in the 1980s.
The paintings that will be on display at the Yale
Center for British Art were inspired by a series of 200 plein-air
paintings of clouds that were done in the early 1820s
by the British landscape artist John Constable. Mr. Leonard was very familiar
with the Yale Center, as he had done conservation work on paintings in the
overall collection while at the Met and the Getty. The Constables, which were
donated to the Yale Center by philanthropist Paul Mellon, were intended to be
studies rather than artworks to sell. "Constable was told that his clouds
weren't realistic-looking," Mr. Leonard said, "so he spent a couple
of summers in Hampstead . . . just painting clouds."
Mr. Leonard's paintings, which bear titles such as
"Constable Study IV" and "Constable Study IX," are still
abstract geometric shapes that wouldn't be confused with Constable's own work,
although the colors used are the same. "Mark's paintings look very
different than Constable's," said Cassandra Albinson,
the Yale Center's curator of paintings and sculpture, "but Mark was able
to see an intensely structured element to Constable's paintings of clouds,
which he has picked up on and used in his work."
"I was very taken by these cloud
studies," Mr. Leonard said. And after he left the Getty, the director of
the Yale Center, Amy Meyers, "invited me to do a body of work that related
to the conservation work I had been doing there. I spent a week as an
artist-in-residence last October, doing a series of sketches and color studies
that are a direct response to Constable's compositions and color
patterns."
There is another way in which his work as a
conservator has influenced his painting: "I paint with the same materials
I use in conservation, because they are the most stable materials I can get my
hands on." Mr. Leonard happened to have formulated that particular type of
synthetic retouching paint along with National Gallery of Art conservator René
de la Rie,
and it is now manufactured by Gamblin Colors, an
art-materials supplier based in Portland, Ore. Among the benefits of this
retouching paint is that the colors do not fade as quickly.
It isn't easy to start an art career in your mid-50s (gallery owners are more interested in young artists),
but Louis Stern had known Mr. Leonard through the Getty Paintings Conservation
Council, which raises money to help smaller museums without conservation
departments or budgets, and he was willing to exhibit Mr. Leonard's work.
"Mark doesn't knock them out, but I'm happy to be patient with him,
because everything he produces is a quality product," Mr. Stern said. That
patience also paid off, since almost everything from Mr. Leonard's first show
found a buyer.
But, having barely started his art career, Mr.
Leonard is going back to full-time museum work, starting a new conservation
department at the Dallas museum, "and I guess now I'll have to be a
Saturday and Sunday painter." Part of the draw is the stimulation of
trying something new ("I like to build things—in this case, a new
department") in a new city ("what's going on in Dallas in the arts is
very exciting, very stimulating"), as well as the challenge of tending to
the museum's sizable and growing collection of modern and contemporary art.
"There wasn't much of that at the Getty," he notes. Time for a contemporary artist to do contemporary work.
By Daniel
Grant
Mr. Grant is the author of "The Business of Being an Artist."
A version of this article appeared June 28, 2012,
on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street
Journal, with the headline: Conservator Restored.
http://lebomag.com/5311/outdoor-art/