About me
James L. Coddington served as The Agnes Gund Chief Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art from 2002 to 2016. Mr. Coddington joined the Museum as Associate Conservator in 1987, rising to become Senior Conservator, and then Chief Conservator in 1996.
In 2013, Mr. Coddington completed a thorough restoration of Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950, a process he and Jennifer Hickey chronicled, along with the restoration of two other Pollocks, on the Museum’s blog. In his role as Chief Conservator he has overseen the restoration of many important works in the collection, including René Magritte’s The Portrait, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and Vasily Kandinsky’s Paintings (Number 198–201)._x000d_
At MoMA Mr. Coddington was dedicated to the preservation of the Museum’s collection, which involves both an art-historical understanding of artist techniques and materials and the adoption of cutting-edge conservation practices and facilities. To this end, he has promoted the use of new technologies such as reflectance transformation imaging (RTI), multi-spectral imaging, dual-RGB imaging, and flash thermography, particularly for contemporary art that often incorporates unorthodox materials. He has published widely, writing for the Journal of the American Institute of Conservation, Signal Processing, Art Journal, Directions Magazine, and Studies in Conservation, and contributed to publications on artists such as Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Willem de Kooning, Joan Miró, and Jackson Pollock. Before joining the Museum, Mr. Coddington worked in painting conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow.
Mr. Coddington received his BA (1974) in biology from Reed College and his MS (1982) in art conservation from the Winterthur Museum and the University of Delaware.
