AIC's 53rd Annual Meeting

Lead and lead contaminated materials can be a danger in art. It can be obvious or hidden, for example: lead-containing primers, pigments, sculpture substrates, corrosion products, pigments, or art that contains contaminated synthetics. Identifying lead-containing materials can significantly change the treatment strategy, require additional safety precautions, and increase costs. However, even with the commercial availability of highly sensitive spot testing kits, determining if the artwork poses a “real” risk is not a straightforward process. Conservators at Monumenta and MoMA recently found themselves in a confusing world of false positives, opaque and uncooperative technicians at testing laboratories, and misleading thresholds. It suddenly became hard to answer the simple question “does the sculpture contain an unsafe level of lead?” using readily available testing materials.

Lead spot-testing kits available for home use range widely in precision, accuracy, and sensitivity, and are marketed for a variety of use cases. Scant comprehensive research available on the efficacy and suitability of commercially available lead spot-testing kits for conservation purposes further exacerbates the challenge of parsing out the differences between tests, making it difficult for conservators to make informed testing decisions. Further uncertainty follows because many laboratory test results offer only "presence or absence" reporting; the identification of lead does not necessarily indicate unsafe levels of lead, only that lead exists in the sample. Additionally, Federal and State standards for the total amount of unsafe lead in parts per million are inconsistent and not well delineated compared to contamination from the environment or another source. Commercial environmental testing solutions also do not provide the interpretation of test results owing to liability concerns.

In response to this need for a reliable lead-testing practice, Conservators aim to develop a lead-testing protocol that includes both interpretation of in-the-field spot testing followed by comprehensive (qualitative) analytical testing using environmental laboratories all to ascertain a creditable risk. This work includes evaluating commercially available spot testing kits for their usefulness, surveying state and federal thresholds for lead-containing coatings, cultivating relationships with toxicologists, and developing strategies to communicate with environmental testing laboratories that are reluctant to interpret data for liability reasons. A summary of research to date will be presented, which represents only the beginning of much-needed research on this crucially important safety topic.