In 1990 the family of Museum trustee William S. Beinecke (through the Prospect Hill Foundation) contributed $250,000 to the cost of restoring some of the disintegrating murals. The contract went to a New York company called Art Preservation Services, headed by Steven Weintraub. Consultant Robert Sawchuck, working with Felicity Campbell, developed a detailed plan of action. Over the next two years, Campbell executed the meticulous restoration, assisted by contract conservators Yelena Budylina, Marina Yashina, and Elena Raposo.

Most of the preliminary work was done at a studio outside the Museum; later, the murals were set up in one of the empty halls for the final stages of restoration. First, the tattered murals were spread out on a large table at the conservator's studio. Visitors were sometimes surprised to find the restorers sitting on the backs of the unrolled artworks as they removed lead adhesive or repaired tears. However, that was the only practical way for them to reach the centers of the huge canvases.

"The real horror was the next step--lining the paintings," said Campbell. "That meant gluing the fragile, tattered originals to strong, new fabric supports. Heat and pressure were necessary to set the adhesive used for the linings. Since the paintings are nine by twenty feet, we had to construct a huge table with a vacuumpressure device and heating system, which Robert brilliantly engineered. I don't know if it's ever been done on this scale before. The larger canvases had to be heated in thirds, as there wasn't sufficient electrical power in the studio to heat an entire sheet at once. When we unrolled the paintings for the first time, an industrial hygienist put us all in white Tyvec suits and masks to protect us from any lead dust that may have flaked off the paintings' backs."

One of the team's major difficulties was finding seamless pieces of lining fabric large enough to back the murals. Campbell and Sawchuck investigated materials made for awnings and sails, but finally decided on a double lining made of Reemay (a stable, nonwoven polyester) and a semirigid polyester cloth. Reemay is manufactured in giant sheets that farmers spread out over fields to protect young plants from frost. "It's the same material you throw in your dryer to freshen clothes," Campbell explained, "and it is also used to stiffen collars. The polyester cloth is used in large paper-making machines." When the double lining was in place, the paintings were temporarily rolled onto cylinders; they were so heavy that they could only be taken out of the studio by a crane from a second-story window. At the Museum, they were mounted on reinforced plywood panel stretchers before the final restoration work could be done.

Now that the murals were relined and mounted, the restorers faced other serious problems. Autumn in New Jersey, Giant Beavers and Moose was full of tears, holes, and missing strips. New patches had to match the original surface, down to the weave of the canvas. Using silicone, Campbell made molds of the painting's surface, then spread thin layers of a waxand-resin compound over the gaps, and finally ironed on the silicone impressions of the canvas texture. With the surface even, the missing parts of the composition were reconstructed using paints made from hand-ground pigments in a modern synthetic medium.

Intimate involvement with the paintings, down to the brushstrokes, gave the restorers an appreciation of Knight's skill. "He was more than an animal painter or anatomist or illustrator," said Campbell. "After the paintings were cleaned, we were able to see that he was an acute observer of light effects." Knight meticulously determined where the shadows should fall. He sculpted clay models of the prehistoric creatures and then observed the play of sunlight on them. In some paintings of groups, he used the same animal model painted from different angles.

In depicting the woolly mammoths, Knight used not only the mounted fossil skeletons for reference but also copies of the paintings and engravings left by Ice Age cave artists in France. All of the engravings and paintings of mammoths by these artists of 15,000 years ago are in precise agreement with one another on the high hump on the forehead, the notch between the hump and the neck, and other anatomical details. In 1927, Knight visited the French caves to see the paintings for himself. He wrote of gazing at the mammoth and reindeer images "with unalloyed enthusiasm and astonishment" and with "a distinct feeling of awe and admiration for the skill of the man who had painted [them] thousands of years ago."

Campbell found that Knight's palette "tended to be impressionist. He used light pastel colors and specifically chose a coarsely woven canvas so that he could delicately brush over the tips of the weave with an almost-dry brush to achieve the subtlest lighting effects. I strongly suspect that when he finished, he left the paintings unvarnished."
Some time later, Campbell believes, someone varnished the murals with an unknown material that had yellowed substantially; the blue snow beneath the woolly mammoths looked more like a green golf course. Standard solvent mixtures failed to remove the discolored layer, so the conservators developed a technique of swelling it with solvent vapors, then painstakingly rubbing it off.

Years ago, someone had attempted a partial restoration of some of the murals, but the overpainting was crudely executed and had to be entirely stripped off. In one instance, a torn reindeer was transformed by the earlier restorer into a tree, a simpler task than reconstructing the animal figure. Campbell, following Knight's original, turned it back into a deer. The previous restorer had also added a beard to a mammoth; this detail, not in Knight's original, was also removed.

Three of the murals that languished in storage were too badly damaged to be rescued within the present budget. Of the original group, however, Reindeer and Mammoths in Winter on the River Somme (1916), which measures nine by fifty feet, has been completely repaired, restored, and remounted in the refurbished Osborn Hall. Two of the subsequent works, Rancho La Brea Tar Pit and Autumn in New Jersey, Giant Beavers and Moose, have also been successfully brought back from near-extinction and remounted in the Osborn Hall to delight new generations of Knight fans.

—Richard Milner, The Living Museum

To read all text go to: http://scilib.univ.kiev.ua/doc.php?10084761