Scenes from an art conservation space

Saving old paintings calls for painstaking, specialised work. Barkha Kumari witnesses two Ravi Varma prints being worked on

Please sit down, Sharanappa Barangi asks his children, 10 and 5. His wife repeats after him. It’s a Saturday morning. We are in the living room of Barangi’s home in Devanahalli, 20 minutes from the Kempegowda International Airport in Bengaluru.

Barangi brings out an over-a-century-old Raja Ravi Varma print of goddess Saraswati playing the veena, seated by a lotus pond. The print has fold marks, wrinkles, tiny holes, white spots, and ripped edges. The ‘i’ in Saraswati is lost, Varma is missing from the signature, and the name of the printing press has faded. The print needs to be flattened and strengthened, Barangi says.

He will show me how art conservators add years to historical pieces such as this. After working in the field of art conservation for 18 years, he is now pursuing it as a hobby. It is not just time that artefacts are up against, he begins. They are also mishandled, vandalised and neglected. They also face infestation, fire accidents, and floods.

On his dining table, he puts down a pane of toughened glass, then a sheet of white paper, and finally the print. Picking a magnifying glass, he inspects the black dirt on the grass and then shifts his focus to a white smattering closer to the feet of Saraswati.

“Fungus,” he declares. The white spots mean the fungi have eaten away the paint while the black mould means they aren’t done yet. “The fungus attacks brown, red and green colours first. These pigments are ‘sweeter’,” he says.

He dusts the print with a broad brush and dislodges an insect shell stuck on it with a scalpel. He then mists the artwork with a solution of ethanol and water to kill the fungus. It is gleaming like a water body under the sun. I squeal, dreading the paper may turn soggy and lose colour. Barangi is not alarmed. Hydration makes the paper pliable for further handling, he explains. He dabs a tissue on the print, rolls out a clear film (silicone release paper) on it, and runs a wiper all over. He flips the print and repeats the process.

Yellow-brown liquid is seeping from the sides. That’s dust and a bit of soot, he says. “Old artworks often look dark and dull and their back brownish mostly due to soot deposition. Back in the day, people would cook with firewood in addition to lighting incense for their puja,” he explains.

After the clean-up, I am able to read ‘Karla’ of the Karla Lonavala Press, where it was printed in Bombay, at the bottom.

Backing it up

Barangi dashes to the kitchen to prepare an adhesive. He mixes Jin Shofu, a Japanese wheat starch powder, with water in a pot for cooking. Sanmita, his daughter and “junior conservator”, is called in to stir it and see that no lumps are formed. I offer to help. “Looks like butter, no?” she quips as I whisk. “Cake batter,” I say. She giggles.

He cools down the whitish paste and spreads it evenly on a white desk he has just wheeled in. He places a piece of white fabric on top, then some paste, a sheet of white paper and more paste, and smoothens them. Now he adds the print from the dining table and presses down until the air bubbles disappear. He peels off the clear film clinging to the ‘Saraswati’ print.

“The lining is done. We will let it dry for a few days,” he says. Lining means adding back support to an old or brittle painting to prevent it from warping and tearing. It is a common treatment in conservation.

Toolkit

This is my second visit to Barangi’s home. He lives on the campus of a government school where he has been teaching art for a year. During my first visit, I learnt of Barangi’s disdain towards household glues. I had told him I like to restore stuff. A woman’s figurehead broke, among a flurry of things, when my school friends and I were trying to call ‘spirits’. An imitation pendant had come undone just as I was returning it to a delivery agent, and a marble pestle had cracked into two in the kitchen.

Barangi’s advice: go slow on this fixation. He has seen hundreds of paintings, rare even, suffer irreversible damage because their caretakers went in for ordinary glues. Brown packaging tapes and lamination have also scarred many paper artefacts.

Almost all the 30 prints awaiting his touch in his house are works of Raja Ravi Varma, often referred to as the ‘Father of Modern Indian Art’. They are “at least 100 years old” and a few have lost slivers of paint or paper due to gluing and taping.

Barangi offers bitter gourd chips to me and my photographer colleague. They are addictive, I tell him but he is busy rummaging through the crockery unit, his computer desk, the kitchen island, and other nooks. Ten minutes later, on a table, he sets up his toolkit, “a part of it”. There are conservation-grade adhesives, solvents and pigments, and very many brushes. My eyes flit from micro spatulas, awls, scalpels and bone folders to curved needles, hammers, gloves and a magnifying glass. I don’t see microscopes, X-ray guns or spectral imaging cameras. But I know, from my reading, conservators use them to study pigments, materials, and underlying layers in paintings.

I am intrigued by a wad of translucent off-white sheets. Some are coarse, some butter smooth, some woolly. “These are sheets of handmade Japanese kozo paper. They are considered the best quality for conservation of paintings, manuscripts and silk textiles,” Barangi fills me in. They are flexible and strong, and being acid-free, they don’t yellow or become brittle with age. “Earlier, the Nepali Lokta paper was widely used,” he shares.

To restore or not
The toolkit is tied to the ethics of art conservation. Every treatment has to be reversible. “If a lining needs to be removed in future, to restrengthen the artwork, for instance, one should be able to do it without damaging it. The Jin Shofu glue is reversible with water,” he explains. Neither should a treatment take away from the original artist’s intent — if an artwork came unvarnished, probably the creator wanted that and conservators may avoid applying a coat of it.

The goal of conservation, Barangi says, is to preserve a work of art in its current state, good or bad, and slow down further decay. According to
Nitin Kumar, deputy director, INTACH Conservation Institute, Bengaluru, ‘The Mona Lisa’ by Leonardo da Vinci, and works of Raja Ravi Varma and M F Husain are examples of good conservation.

Art restoration veers into a disputed zone. It tries to mend a damaged artwork back to its ‘original’ look as much as possible. Some liken it to fictionalising history. ‘The Last Supper’ has undergone multiple restorations since it was painted over 500 years ago that critics now argue how much of it is actually original. And restoration is not without its risks. Elías García Martínez’s fresco ‘Ecce Homo’ in Spain, depicting Jesus crowned with thorns, is the Internet’s most loved restoration fail. Despite her best intentions, an elderly parishioner left the flaky painting from the 19th century with a monkey-like appearance in 2012, turning it into a meme. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel in the Vatican comes second. A few characters lost their eyes in the makeover.

Museums don’t encourage restorations, says Rajeev Kumar Choudhary, acting head of conservation, Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), Bengaluru. Barangi is aware of these dilemmas. He says he doesn’t take requests for extensive touch-ups. “Minimum alterations are fine as long as they don’t damage the artwork,” says the 43-year-old.

There is no end to the debate on ethics of art conservation. H A Anil Kumar, an art historian from Bengaluru, offers, “The British officers and cultural policy makers in India, who were influenced by Buddhist thoughts, did not encourage restoration. Everything is transient, including artistic works, they believed.”

Pulp fiction

It is past 1 pm. Barangi’s kids are playing carrom while he is readying a slanted work desk overlooking his garden. On it, he places another Raja Ravi Varma print, ‘Vasantasena’. A woman draped in a green sari and red shawl is standing in a royal setting. I see two holes and a fissure cutting through the pastel green wall behind her. Strangely, they look real, like a peeling damp wall.

The plan is to fill the cracks with pulp. Barangi throws bits of Japanese paper in a bowl containing the adhesive we had prepared, and asks me to beat them to pulp. Using forceps, he lifts the gummy pulp and deposits it along the torn edges, dabbing them to level with the original paper.

As much as I like fixing broken things, I also find them beautiful as they are. Once, I found a ceramic planter, broken in half, by a footpath. It was blue and glossy. I brought it home and put it up as a decor piece. I tell Barangi, “I don’t mind holes in this print. Why fill them? They give the painting a vintage look.” He corrects me: “This is not for looks. The pulp will reinforce the torn edges and prevent further tearing.”

I find myself returning to the restoration debate. He has touched up the walls as well as the woman’s face, the corner of an eye, and her hairdo. I can make out the original parts from the restored, so what is the point? Barangi isn’t offended. He says, “Viewers should be able to distinguish the two. We keep the touch-ups a shade lighter. That’s transparency.”

Other projects

Barangi has a large body of work. He has “stabilised” milestone cricket bats, a 1791 map of Bangalore, and black-and-white images of Indian life on glass lantern slides, the latter from a pre-photography era. He also talks of a silk tablecloth from 20th century England, a silverfish-eaten line drawing by M F Husain and a gold zari peta (turban) worn by eminent businessman Sajjan Rao. A stone hand grinding mill, swords, family photos, blankets and flags are other things he has treated. His dream is to conserve the murals in the Mysore Palace.

Barangi says art conservation is “90 per cent science, 10 per cent history”. It helps that he has a BA degree in fine arts. Kumar from INTACH pitches in, “Art conservation is an interdisciplinary field. A good team should know science, art, and history.”

And sometimes, geography. Kumar joined the Bengaluru office last July and received paintings with fungal growth every week or so until October. “Similar paintings by the same artists up north did not have such problems. It was down to Bengaluru’s rain,” he explains. The paintings in Mumbai and Chennai turn chalky because the air is humid and salty, Barangi has noticed. Ladakh’s winter, on the other hand, has been harsh on conservators. Choudhary recalls working barefoot on a chilly floor because the assignment was set inside a monastery. Kumar’s team could not roll open a conservation mat (used to flatten documents) because it “froze”.

Kumar turns my attention to the disregard for art. He once unwrapped a bundle of birch bark manuscripts kept in a museum to find that insects had eaten away 20 per cent. He has seen rats, pigeons and mongooses in store rooms housing prehistoric artefacts. His team was hired to move an 18,000 kg sculpture from the backyard of an institution to its porch. “We asked its electrical team to open a shortcut route for the transfer. They refused as they would have to strip CCTV wiring along the route. They wanted to save a few thousand rupees over an 11th century idol. We then transferred the sculpture through a 15 ft opening,” he shares, adding that art conservators are trained in “handling objects”.

In institutions like MAP, conservators also assist art collection teams in drawing up emergency evacuation plans. If a calamity like an earthquake strikes, a textile work may be
prioritised over a metal sculpture, Choudhary gives an example.

It is 3.15 pm. We have finished lunch. Barangi is looking out at the rain. He is in no mood to work. “Art conservation is time-consuming,” he says, sipping tea. We have only attached a supporting paper, and filled in some pulp in five hours. “Not many sustain the enthusiasm,” he says. There are about 400 art conservators in India, and only a hundred are fully trained, Kumar says.

Care for the art in your house
1. Try to maintain a temperature of 20°C (+/- 2°C) and humidity around 40-60 per cent in the room and ensure proper ventilation. Don’t expose paper and textile works to harsh lighting. Keep metal sculptures indoors.
2. Don’t mount paintings on walls prone to seepage, or near electrical boards.
3. Dust your painting with a soft brush. Avoid wet cleaning.
4. Don’t use lamination or home-use glues and tapes on paper artefacts.
5. Seek expert help when you notice foreign materials, like fungi, appearing.
(By Nitin Kumar of INTACH)