AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

In 2023 a major exhibition about Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) in Auvers was held at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the second venue for this show. A significant exhibition since it was the first to be devoted to Van Gogh’s final months, bringing together works from all over the world, some of which had never before been shown at the same time. The question arose if several works of the Van Gogh Museum, which due to their fragility were not allowed to travel, could be transferred to Paris for this unique occasion. There were serious concerns about the impact of shock and vibrations during transport on two paintings in particular, Wheatfield with Crows and Wheatfield under Thunderclouds, which suffered from heavily cracked paint layers and poor paint adherence. When the strain levels caused by transport exceed the elasticity limits of the canvas and paint layers, they can inflict or aggravate material changes such as cracking and delamination (Kracht 2011: 51-53), thus posing a great risk for those paintings. Reducing the excitation levels is therefore crucial. 

This research, which builds strongly on the experience gained from an in-depth study of the vibration behavior of selected Van Gogh paintings in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (Bisschoff et al. 2023), explores the vibration behavior of the wax-resin lined Wheatfield with Crows and Wheatfield under Thunderclouds. The panoramic, atypical format of these paintings (ca 50 x 100 cm height by width), which differs from the paintings studied in the Kröller-Müller Museum, and the permanent deformations in their support caused by lining are factors that contribute to their fragility. To establish the general difference in vibration behaviour between wax-resin lined, loose-lined and unlined Van Gogh paintings, the vibration response of View on Auvers, which has a loose-lining, and Garden of Daubigny, an unlined painting, was also investigated. The mechanical behavior of the paintings is explained in relation to their condition, conservation history and framing, the combination of which accounts for the paintings’ variable, non-linear vibration behavior. To achieve a more complete assessment of the transportation risk, not only the characteristic vibration modes of the paintings were investigated, as was done in the Kröller-Müller study, but their wave propagation behavior was examined as well. 

By combining an improved backing-board and framing construction with specific transport conditions, the mechanical stress in the two Van Gogh paintings could be significantly reduced during transport. A tailored method for transporting these fragile paintings is presented, while the possibility of its application to other paintings of the Van Gogh Museum collection is also discussed. In this research an ansatz is proposed to quantitatively assess the risk of vibration during transport. However, the results of this study should not be regarded as a formula or justification for sending paintings on loan that are too fragile to travel. Yet the presented measures of improvement can certainly be considered as a means to minimize the impact of shock and vibration when transport cannot be avoided. 


Kracht, K. Untersuchung des Schwingungsverhaltens von Ölgemälden in Abhängigkeit der Alterung. Dissertation at TU Berlin published at Shaker Verlag, 2011: pp. 51-53. 
 
Bisschoff, M., Leeuwestein, M., Kracht, K. Optimising the protection of the Kröller-Müller Museum’s wax-resin-lined van Gogh paintings from shocks and vibrations in transit. ICOM-CC Valencia 2023, 20th Triennial Conference.