A Laboratory for the Arts: Harvard's Fogg Museum and the Emergence of Conservation in America

摘要

If one were to construct a genealogy of conservation in the United States, the Fogg Museum would be a progenitor of regional laboratories (through Richard D. Buck, who joined the Fogg as a conservator in 1937 and left the museum in 1951 to establish the first regional conservation laboratory in Oberlin, Ohio), graduate level conservation training programs (through Sheldon W. Keck, who was an apprentice in the Fogg laboratory from 1932 to 1934 and was involved in the establishment of both the New York University Institute of Fine Arts Conservation Center and the Cooperstown Graduate Program in Conservation of Works of Art), conservation publications (Technical Studies in the Field of the Fine Arts, the first American conservation journal, published by the laboratory from 1932 to 1942), and many museum conservation laboratories (among them the Brooklyn Museum laboratory founded by Keck in 1934; the Freer Gallery laboratory founded in 1951 by Rutherford J. Gettens, a chemist in the Fogg laboratory from 1928 until 1951; and the Morgan Library laboratory established in the early 1950s by Minna Horwitz Nagel, who worked in the Fogg laboratory from ca. 1933 until she moved to New York City in 1950).