AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

Over the past decade, museums have prioritized outreach, engaging online audiences through blogs and social media platforms with increasing sophistication. Conservators have joined the effort, creating digital content that raises awareness about the field of conservation and carves a window into the day-to-day operations of museum conservation labs. This type of outreach, however educational and entertaining, is generally rather unidirectional, with the information being transmitted from the museum to the audience. It is rare for social media interaction to directly influence the course of a conservation treatment. In contrast, this talk will present an example where outreach resulted in a conservation treatment being revisited and revised.

In 2018, I treated the Japanese woodblock print Abalone Fishergirl with an Octopus (c. 1773-74) by Katsukawa Shunshō. The treatment was performed in preparation for LACMA’s ambitious 2019 exhibition, Every Living Thing: Animals in Japanese Art. The print had suffered significant loss and subsequent restoration in the area of the octopus’ mouth. Treatment involved removing an overall lining and disfiguring overpaint that did not correspond to the original design, and filling losses in the primary support. When it came to adding visual compensation to the lost image area, I ran into trouble. There were no other known impressions of the print to which I could refer. I scoured museum catalogs and auction records. My supervisor contacted art historians in Japan. We had no luck. Eventually, deadlines necessitated that I move forward with treatment. In the end, I in-painted the lost image area with an intentional vagueness, adding a fill of background color but no new lines to define form. The result was obviously incomplete but attracted minimal attention, allowing the rest of the print to be properly appreciated.

Soon after treating Abalone Fishergirl with an Octopus, we published an entry on LACMA’s Unframed blog explaining the treatment process. The post included an appeal to readers to contact LACMA’s Paper Conservation lab with any information about other impressions of the print. It felt like a long shot at the time. Miraculously, four years later in 2022, my supervisor received an email from an art dealer in Venice, Italy who had come across the blog post. He had an intact impression of Abalone Fishergirl in his possession and generously sent a photo, solving the mystery of the missing octopus’ mouth in an instant.

This year I finally had the chance to return to Abalone Fishergirl. This talk will describe how I modified the earlier treatment to incorporate the new visual information, including by creating a digital fill (printed onto tengujo and finished by hand with watercolor). It will explore the lightfastness of some accessible printing methods, consider the importance of re-treatability, and celebrate the sharing of information.