Sunday, February 10, 2002		Article

Breathing life into old paintings
Ashok Malik

EVER since her marriage to a reputed industrialist in Kanpur, Sujata Goenka was fascinated by an old, dark canvas of an Indian nautch girl, mounted in her husband’s study. Nobody knew who had painted it. All that her in-laws could say was that "the painting has been there ever since the house was built".

One say, Sujata brought the canvas down with the intention of cleaning it up. Over the years, accumulated layers of dust had formed a near-permanent coat over the painting. On closer inspection, she found that moisture had seeped into the fibre of the canvas, making it wavy and worse, the colour had flaked in parts.

But what took her breath away was a tiny scrawl in red at the bottom of the painting — "Raja Ravi Varma, 1885"! It didn’t take Sujata long to figure out that the family had unknowingly been sitting on an original painting by India’s greatest artist ever.

"After inquiring within our extended family and friends, we leant that my husband’s great grandfather had purchased the painting from the artist himself," Sujata narrates. "We had to spend a small fortune to restore the painting to its original glory, but the effort has been worth every rupee."

The painting, which occupies pride of place in the Goenkas’ drawing room today, has been freshly mounted, with a new frame and has spotlights specially trained on it for illumination. Hitherto unseen details like folds of the saree, patterns on the jewellery and the shine on the girl’s cheekbones now stand out.

"This is the magic of restoration," says Sujata, who took up a crash course for being an art restorer after this incident. "The painting has found its soul. So long, it was like a lifeless body, no doubt beautiful, but without a soul!"

"Maintenance is vital for any work of art," says M.N. Manikandhan, a professional restorer with the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH). "As a painting decays, it loses its value. So it is not always true that old is gold. An antique piece, if not maintained well, is worthless."

With consciousness on the need for restoration mounting among art lovers, Manikandhan has his hands more than full. Among the projects he is handling on behalf of INTACH, there is one priceless portrait of an Oriya prince Deen Bandhu Mahender Bahadur which had been salvaged from a cow shed!

Other damaged paintings requiring special attention include a portrait of the Mahrani of Kapuurthala, the Festival of Holoi (owned by the Doon School in Dehradun), Jesus Preaching in Galilee (belonging to the former royal family of Jamnagar) and Amrita Sher Gil’s famous Fruit Vendors and Dressing the Bride.

Apart from the common cases of flaking and discoloration, each of these paintings had its own peculiar set of problems, ranging from brittleness of canvas and peeling or loss of paint to destruction by fungus, faulty storage and moisture.

"The nature and extent of damage to a painting has a lot to do with storage or display conditions as well as the technique adopted by the artist," says Goenka. "For instance, a recurring problem restorers face is the shrinkage crack that develops when the artist adopts the wet-in -wet painting technique."

According to Nilabh Sinha, a conservator from the national Museum, Delhi, fungus can be the biggest "enemy" of paintings. "In coastal cities or during the monsoons, walls are usually infected by fungus," he explains. "Any painting hanging on such walls gets immediately affected."

While every problem has its own special prescription for remedy, the diagnosis can be quite a laborious process. It usually begins with the restorer taking photographs of the painting from different angles (in varying light conditions) with particular focus on the damaged portions.

Thereafter, a superficial cleaning of the surface is done with the help of solvents like turpentine and ethyl alcohol. Once the surface dirt and grime is removed, a thorough study of the technique and medium used by the artist, including his style, the brush strokes, layering, mixing of pigments and so on is undertaken.

This provides a clue to the treatment necessary to restore the damaged parts. Even then, to be doubly sure, the restorer would put the painting through an infrared treatment to locate underlying paint layers. (Many masters are notorious for repainting on used canvases). Only then would the work begin.

"Restoration is a very tedious and time-consuming process," says Manikandhan. "Depending upon the extent of damage it can take one month to over a year. The rates accordingly vary. It could be as low as Rs 500 to as high as Rs 100,000!" (MF)