Kunstsammlung NRW
Bei der Arbeit: Restaurator Otto Hubacek bearbeitet "Number 32" von Jackson Pollock

As Though Blown Away: Jackson Pollock's "Number 32" appears with new radiance after cleaning by restorers

A filthy automobile drives through a car wash, dirty dishes are deposited into a dishwasher. But what is to be done when a painting that is as important as it is sensitive needs to be freed of the dust of decades? Otto Hubacek, Chief Restorer of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, develops a special method for cleaning Jackson Pollock's masterwork Number 32. For the online magazine #32 (itself named for this prize work from the collection of the K20), Gerd Korinthenberg looked over this expert's shoulder during his challenging labors.

When Otto Hubacek slips on his restorer's gloves and puts on his magnifying glasses with integrated light beam, he resembles a surgeon who is about to enter the operating theater. The "medical" procedure that preoccupies him at the moment involves freeing Jackson Pollock's painting Number 32 (1950) – one of the most radical creations of abstract Expressionism, and a key work of postwar US American art – from the fine dust and grime of the past 65 years.
Although this picture has been on display in the museum since 1964 under optimal conditions, extremely fine particles have covered the surface of the unprimed canvas, on which Pollock, using black industrial enamel paint, left behind his breathtaking, vigorous "drips," with a grayish-brown veil. Needless to say, wiping and polishing the work "housewife style" is out of the question – not with a work that makes the Kunstsammlung the envy of the international art world. Little sponges and swabs would likely do little more than to rub the soil even more deeply into the material of the fabric.
 
For this special case, this experienced restorer has further developed a method that was originally invented to clean works on paper. With painstaking care, an air stream is used to blow wheat starch onto the picture, which then absorbs the soil before being sucked up by a vacuum cleaner. This dedicated specialist proceeds centimeter by centimeter; the procedure will require up to 300 hours of patient labor for a painting that measures 269 x 457.5 cm, and hence covers an area of almost 12 m².
 
Once a searching discussion that included all of the responsible staff members of the Kunstsammlung led to the adoption of this method, the 63-year-old restorer realized exactly what was involved: in order to achieve a noticeably brighter canvas, one that displays the furious gestures of this masterwork even more strikingly and with greater sensitivity, freed now of streaks and smudges, the only viable tool is the air jet. "It's like handwriting," he comments. Other staff members of the restoration department would have used the air jet from a different distance, and from another angle, which would then have been visible. From the very start, meanwhile, it was clear that spills from the artist coffee cup onto the canvas (which Pollock spread out on the floor in order to work), and which have now become more noticeable, would by no means be removed: they are vital testimony to his remarkably energetic style of painting, thanks to which Pollock's work has become absolutely unmistakable within the art of modernism.
 
Beginning on February 1, after cleaning, Number 32 in its freshened up form will be on view in the permanent collection of the K20. Additional information on this painting and its history is available in the online collection of the Kunstsammlung:

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