Media
NICAS Project Day 2023
NICAS COLLOQUIUM
NICAS COLLOQUIUM
NICAS COLLOQUIUM
NICAS COLLOQUIUM
NICAS COLLOQUIUM
NICAS COLLOQUIUM
NICAS COLLOQUIUM
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NICAS Project Day 2023
Margriet van Eikema Hommes on - Study of the Matthias Withoos' View of Amersfoort 1671 -
NICAS COLLOQUIUM
Emilie Froment and Melissa Daughtery - The Dutch Method Unfolded. A Masterclass on Wax-Resin Lining, Review of the Program’s Achievements Abstract: Emilie Froment and Melissa Daugherty will present on The Dutch Method Unfolded, a masterclass on wax-resin lining targeted to an international group of conservation specialists. The Dutch Method Unfolded is a two-week multidisciplinary program that aims to help professionals in the fields of art history and conservation to understand the physical condition of wax-resin lined paintings. It therefore contributes to the conservation of paintings that have been subjected to wax-resin lined treatment. Furthermore, the masterclass provides a platform to share expertise and reflect on the consequences of wax-resin linings for today’s conservation approaches and art history. The masterclass ran throughout 2 years; it was completed in June 2022 with a workshop in Amsterdam. The talk will review the two years of activities and share future perspectives. The project was funded by the Getty Foundation as part of its Conserving Canvas grant initiative. Bio: Dr. Emilie Froment is trained as art historian and paintings conservator in Paris I, Pantheon Sorbonne. Since 2008 she has been teaching paintings conservation at the department Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage of the University of Amsterdam. She also coordinates the paintings specialty. In January 2019, she received her PhD at the UvA on the consequences of wax-resin linings for the present appearance and conservation of Netherlandish seventeenth century paintings on canvas. In 2020, she created the Amsterdam Wax-Resin Project (AWRP) a research and educational project focused on wax-resin lining and the conservation of wax-resin lined paintings. Melissa Daugherty obtained her bachelor’s in Art History at the University of Leiden and completed her master’s Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage at the UvA, specializing in paintings. After receiving her post-graduate diploma in 2014 she founded a multi discipline conservation studio with four colleagues in Amsterdam. She has been a private paintings conservator for the last eight years but started working for the Rijksmuseum in January 2023. Since 2020 she has been working together with Emilie for the AWRP focusing on the masterclass. -
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Julia Alting - Traces of the past or presence in a curatorial “now”: disrupting chronology at the museum Abstract: The question of linear chronology and historical time is taken up more widely today by art historians. This paper investigates the disruption of chronology in the exhibition A-historische klanken (1988) curated by Harald Szeemann at Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. I trace the history of a Sri Lankan ivory portable cabinet (c. 1680-1710) in the exhibition. It was brought to the Netherlands by the VOC, purchased by the museum in 1945 and restored for a period of 11 years (1959-1970) in which the entire wooden inner structure of the cabinet had to be replaced. This turbulent ‘life’ is obscured by the cabinet’s inclusion in A-historische klanken, which emphasizes the ‘timeless’ quality of art objects. The tension between the ahistorical temporality of the curation and the many time scales of the cabinet and its colonial history provoke further questions of how the historical time of art history could be negotiated. Bio: Julia Alting is a PhD candidate at the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG). Previously she studied art history and cultural studies at Amsterdam University College and New York University, and completed an MA asian studies and a ResMA arts and culture at Leiden University and SOAS, University of London. Her research assesses nonlinear approaches to art historical time and she lectures on feminist and decolonial critiques of the discipline. She has been a recipient of the Amsterdam University Fund, Erasmus and Uhlenbeck Scholarships and Research Grants at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. -
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Ida Bronken - What now? Soft and dripping paint in Cobra and Art autre Abstract: The thesis: French Connections: Soft and dripping paint in Cobra and Art Autre (1949-1972), was defended at the UVA in 2022. A central aspect to the thesis is to document the material practises of artists associated with Cobra and Art Autre and condition issues associated with soft paint. Soft paint is for this purpose defined as a layer that reacts by deforming in response to light-to-moderate pressure applied in standard museum climatic conditions. The talk will include the visual and physical tell-tale signs associated with soft paint. The main findings from a comparative and contrasting qualitative analysis of the contextual material on artist studios, materials and biographies will be presented. Furthermore, extensive analysis was conducted on samples typical with a set of condition categories. These results strongly indicated that the condition categories do have a stronger association with particular chemical fingerprints. Bio: Ida Antonia Tank Bronken is a senior paintings conservator at the National Museum of Norway. Before graduating in conservation of art in 2002 at the University of Oslo she studied art history, history of ideas and art. She currently focuses on the conservation and study of 20th century art, but has experience from travelling exhibitions, medieval, folk art and cultural heritage collections. In 2022 Bronken defended the PhD thesis French Connections: Soft and dripping paint in Cobra and Art Autre 1949-1972 at the University of Amsterdam with Klaas Jan van den Berg (RCE and UVA) and Ella Hendriks (UVA) as promotors. A revised version of the thesis is due for publication in 2023 with Archetype publications. -
NICAS COLLOQUIUM
This NICAS small project will provide knowledge and insight into the structure of the plain woven canvas of old master paintings. This will be achieved by connecting the structure of the canvas to the making of the canvas. The structure of the plain woven canvas is analysed by using highly advanced computational analysis, newly developed at the Rijksmuseum. The structure of canvas is, among other things, influenced by the way it was manufactured. This will be examined by handweaving linen canvas and executing a set of experiments in an effort to reconstruct the structure of handwoven canvas of old master paintings. These experiments will subsequently be analysed in the same way as the plain woven canvas of old master paintings. A comparison of these two sets of analysis will provide unique knowledge and insight into both the composition and the making of plain woven canvas of old master paintings. -
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Ellen Pater is a PhD student at the NWO project Visualizing the Unknown, and the Huygens institute and Leiden University. Previously she completed her Research Master at University Groningen and her Bachelor at Minerva Art Academy in Groningen. Seventeenth-century drawings made with the microscope are easily taken for granted. Especially the artistic knowledge involved in their production. In my research project I am looking to uncover the artistic processes and materials involved in making images of the microworld: from preparation to drawing to print. To do this, I draw with seventeenth century microscopes during MicroLabs at Rijksmuseum Boerhaave and also produce early modern artistic materials based on recipes by o.a. Willem Goeree (1635-1711) and Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678). In this presentation, I will take a closer look at a drawing of the uterus of the queen bee that was made by Johannes Swammerdam (1637-1680), to show how such drawings may have come to to be, and why it is important to consider the role of artistic knowledge to gain a deeper understanding of such representations. -
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Jesse Buijs is a postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University and an expert in Laser Speckle Imaging (LSI). In 2022, he earned his PhD from the same university, during which he developed an algorithm to perform real-time LSI analysis. In collaboration with the Rijksmuseum, he adapted LSI to measure solvent presence in oil paints during varnish removal from oil paint. Currently he is working as a postdoc on making the method broadly applicable and user-friendly and is exploring the potential of commercializing the technology by means of a spin-off company. Imaging inside non-transparent materials is often challenging and requires complex equipment. Laser Speckle Imaging (LSI) visualizes nanoscopic motions inside such materials and gives a unique insight in dynamical processes such as solvent activity, drying, melting, crystallization, cracking. LSI can be performed with a simple machine, but relies on advanced data processing algorithms to visualize the results. This presentations main focus will be on our current effort in adapting the technique to make it accessible for conservators and heritage science, by automating these data processing tasks. I will also show the results of LSI experiments on varnish removal from oil paints, cracking in metal objects, and salt crystallization in porous materials. Our findings show that there are many possible applications where LSI can be used for monitoring objects, fine-tune conservation efforts, or gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental processes underlying dynamical materials. -
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Joen Hermans is Assistant Professor Conservation Science in a joint position between the Conservation & Restoration program and Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences, both at the University of Amsterdam. Since 2017, he holds an additional position as researcher at the Conservation & Science department of the Rijksmuseum. He obtained his PhD on metal soap formation in oil paint under supervision of Piet Iedema and Katrien Keune at the University of Amsterdam in 2017. Between 2018-2022, he worked on a NWO/Veni project studying the influence of water on oil paint chemistry. A central question in paintings conservation is the influence of solvent exposure on detrimental chemical reactions in paint. Using infrared spectroscopy and a polymer model system that contains metastable amorphous zinc soaps, we could show that, while solvent swelling alone has no effect, water does induce zinc soap crystallization. In particular fast-diffusing polar organic solvents with water impurities are able to induce extensive crystallization, delivering high concentrations of water quickly deep into paint layers. Crucially, experiments with the model system and with real oil paint samples show that, even at very short solvent exposure times, significant quantities of crystalline zinc soaps are formed. This strong effect of water impurities in common solvents gives reason to be cautious when conservation treatments are being considered for oil paints that contain zinc white or other water-sensitive chemicals.