Everybody loves a good "before and after" shot, right? Well none understand that better than today’s Art Conservator. In their world, a multitude of treatments and steps bring damaged old artworks from "before" to "after."
Take the images below for example. This painting of a woman from 1890 was badly torn when it arrived at a conservator's studio. The paint was flaking and a discolored varnish had created a grimy layer on top of the paint. Not only were these damages significant, but most of the tear was
through the woman’s face! Although the problems facing the conservator were extensive, there are a number of techniques in an experienced conservators arsenal to tackle the project.
The flaking paint was treated with painted adhesive, and the tear was realigned and held together with small patches and adhesive. To reinforce the wilting canvas, the painting was lined with a secondary linen canvas. After these steps were taken and the huge tear was repaired, the painting actually had very little paint retouching to be done.
The conservator filled in the gaps of missing paint with a pliable material, like putty, and sculpted it to match the surrounded surface. Once the paint surface is unified, a resin-based paint is used to correct the empty spots, a technique called inpainting. The point of using a resin-based paint is to avoid any future discolorations and is easily removable if a repair is needed in the future.
Finally a new varnish is applied to the painting, and the result is astonishing! Don’t be fooled into thinking that this was a “quick fix” project. In many cases, a restoration like this can take days or even months of detailed, meticulous work to complete.
Museum-quality art restoration is as much a science as it is an art. Additionally it is a delicate balance between restoring repairs and conserving the cultural and historical integrity of an artwork. Besides human abuse, art pieces mainly acquire damages from sunlight, humidity, and poor maintenance with the wrong products. Science helps conservators to understand the reasons art works deteriorate and what to do to save them. Solvents, resins, fungicides, and silicones are among many essential chemicals to an art conservator and help them maintain and restore the world’s artistic heritage.
It is always best to consult with a professional art appraiser to determine whether or not restoration is worth the investment of the service costs. In certain cases, restoration or conservation may not be feasible or may devalue an artwork, even by a qualified professional conservator. As a courtesy to our clients, at MIR Appraisal Services, Inc., through one of our many consultation services, we offer conservation and restoration services and treatment proposals.
Moving to Chicago just a little over a year and a half ago I was unfamiliar with Chicago artists. Loving the artists from my native Minnesota made me curious about the artists of Chicago. The beauty of the city of Chicago and the wonderful geography of Illinois gave me a strong incentive to discover these artists. After searching on the Internet for artists from the Chicago area I found very little information and it became very time consuming. When I joined MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. I finally became immersed with some excellent Chicago area artists. I found that most of these artists were born outside of the United States, but chose Chicago to progress their artistic talents. These artists have helped pave the way in making Chicago one of the premier artist cities in the world.
Gianni Cilfone was born in Italy and came to Chicago when he was five years old. Gianni Cilfone trained at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting "Moonrise" that is hanging on the walls at Mir was exhibited at the 1929 annual exhibit at the Art Institute. Cilfone's paintings are characterized by his warm colors and impressionistic style. His landscapes give off a peaceful tranquility with his calm compositions. Cilfone would paint side by side for many years with another artist who resided in Chicago named Samuel Bartilotta. Cilfone would later become a instructor at the Art Institute where he would share his knowledge and skill to young artists.
Henry Hulsmann was a German immigrant artist who painted in and around the Chicago area. Hulsmann grew up in a small farming town in Germany and moved to America when he was nineteen. Hulsmann would individually create frames to match his paintings. This would put a valuable relationship between the painting and the frame. Hulsmann's landscapes look like they could have painted in Germany. Many of his landscapes would have farming themes, which may have reminded him of his native Germany. Hulsmann's daughter was also a well known Chicago artist.
Harry Mintz was a polish born Artist who immigrated to America where he became a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago. His lively abstract paintings capture the vitality and energy of Chicago. He experimented with a abstract expressionist style that was in a color field style. His paintings are very intuitive and emotionally intense. Some of his compositions would be entirely abstract, while others were more concrete.
Joseph Tomanek was born in Czechoslovakia and came to Chicago when he was 21 years. old. Tomanek painted very nice nudes that look similar to that of Renoir. His paintings were very delicate and feminine, with his loose brushstrokes and pastel colors. His nudes were very idealized, Tomanek would pick and choose different parts from his models to create the idyllic woman.
These artists are only a small sample of the incredible talent pool of Chicago artists. Chicago is a such a melting pot of cultures that these artists were able to come from all over the world to bring their own styles and cultural experiences to the city of Chicago. This would not have been possible without the proper institutions to harbor the talents of these artists. The Art Institute of Chicago showed how incredibly influential it has been in developing the art scene in Chicago. There are also a number of different artists groups and coalitions that have nurtured the arts scene in Chicago. Here at Mir our appraisers have a wealth of information on Chicago artists, but we are constantly trying to expand this knowledge. If you have any artwork by Chicago area artists, please let our dedicated staff take a look.
Many Polish artists, although beginning their studies in Poland, studied and traveled extensively throughout Europe and the United States. Three such artists share similar beginnings, all starting their training at the Warsaw Drawing School. Artists Jan Van Chelminski, Jozef Marian Chelmonski, and Wladslaw Czachorski attended the art school in Warsaw in the late 1860s and early 1870s and went on to have successful careers as painters, gaining fame in Europe and the United States.
Jan Van Chelminski, perhaps the most recognized of the three painters, was born in 1851. After training at the Warsaw Drawing School, he left for Munich and worked with Alexander Strahuber and Alexander Wagner, Jozef Brandt, and Franz Adam. During this time, Chelminski traveled to New York, Paris, and London and built a name for himself as an artist. He painted mostly hunting scenes and eighteenth-century genre pictures.
As his popularity grew, he was commissioned to paint portraits of Princess Teresa, Prince Regent Leopold, and Prince Emanuel. King Louis even bought his “The Hunt Par Force”.
In England and America Chelminski painted sport and genre scenes with the air of a traditional English painter. These gained the artist enormous success and provided Chelminski access to important peoples, including Theodore Roosevelt, of whom he illustrated numerous hunting stories. These paintings appeared in Century Magazine in 1885.
As his financial and artistic success grew, Chelminski’s love of battle scenes grew as well. He began collecting weapons, particularly from the Napoleonic period, which later became a significant theme in his work. Through intense study, the artist was able to take his portrayal of battle scenes to the next level, and in 1904, a collection of his battle paintings was exhibited at the Galerie des Artistes Moderns in Paris. The same year forty-eight paintings in tribute to the army of the Duchy of Warsaw were exhibited in Paris as well. These paintings, along with all his battle scene paintings, provide incredible documentation and are extremely historically accurate. Permanent collections of Chelminski’s work are exhibited throughout Poland and abroad. In the United States his paintings have been sold at auctions for close to $100,000.
MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. has had the good fortune of appraising pieces by Jan Van Chelminski in addition to researching various reknowned Polish artists. For more information, take a look at our past blog entry about Chelminski and his success in the United States.
Jozef Marian Chelmonski trained at the Warsaw Drawing School from 1867 to 1871. During his studies he worked in the private studio of Wojciech Gerson who greatly influenced his early work. He moved to Munich for the years of 1871 to 1874 and formed a relationship with a circle of Munich-based Polish artists, including Jozef Brandt and Maksymilian Gierymski.Throughout his years in Munich, the artist made many returning trips to Poland, visiting Podolia and the Ukraine. These trips undoubtedly left a lasting impression on Jozef that is quite evident in his work.
Jozef Marian Chelminski traveled to Paris during the 1880’s and in 1889 he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Universal Exposition. While working in Paris, the artist formed a relationship with art dealer A. Groupil, who made his paintings available to English and American collectors. Some of his most popular paintings feature a motif of horses galloping through the snow.
The artist also worked as an illustrator, and from 1884 to 1892, was employed by the Parisian magazine Le monde ilustre, like Polish artist Wladyslaw Teodor Benda.
Jozef exhibited in Chicago in 1903 and continued painting up until his death in 1914. He was most inspired and most happy in his native Poland, where he returned permanently near the end of his life. His later works are reflective and melancholic, showing a huge respect and affection for the border regions of his country, where he spent so much of his life.
Quite opposite to Jozef Marian in his affinity for depicting their native country was Wladyslaw Czachorski.
Like Jan Van and Jozef Marian, Czachorski began his studies at the Warsaw Drawing School and like the others, he traveled to Germany and eventually settled in Munich. Czachorski did a lot of traveling throughout his early years as an artist, mostly to France and Italy, sometimes visiting his native Poland.Although he came from a similar background of culture and training as both Chelminski’s, Czachorski created paintings with an English flare, and abandoned Polish cultural influences. In fact, many of his paintings are of Shakespearean scenes. His most recognized work, “Hamlet Receiving the Players”, from 1875 shows his affinity for English literature.
Czachorski also painted portraits, still lifes, and genre scenes. His paintings of young women in luxurious interiors show off his ability as an artist, for the women, jewelry, fabrics, and clothing are depicted with incredible detail. His canvases exude luxury and elegance with an almost photographic realism.
The staff at MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. seeks to fully understand the arts in their particular cultural contexts and to analyze relationships between various artistic mediums and genres; in this way we can broaden our expertise as art appraisers. We are located just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center; please do give us a ring to set up an appointment for a verbal evaluation of your most prized works of art.
Researched and written by Taylor Maatman
MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM 307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308 Chicago, IL 60601 Phone: (312) 814-8510
Works Cited: http://www.thekf.org/kf/gallery/artists/Czachorski/
Few artists could paint such a compelling Parisian street scent as Edouard Cortes. Painting from the turn of the century well into the mid 20th century, Cortes witnessed great changes in Paris through the Belle Epoque, the Great War, the international depression, the Second World War and beyond. Much of what Monet did with haystacks, lily ponds and fields in Giverny; Edouard Cortes did for the grand city of Paris. Capturing the changes in light, atmosphere, season and mood; Cortes was internationally known in his day and remains so today, one of the best examples of street-scene painters to have ever graced the Champs-Elysees.
Cortes came from a long line of artisans; the son of a Spanish Court painter and grandson of an artisan, Edouard was immersed in an art-heavy environment early in life, leaving a deep impression on the artist. Edouard’s father originally traveled to Paris from Spain for the Exposition Universelle in 1855, eventually settling permanently in Lagny-sur-Marne (Rehs). Schooled in painting by his father and enrolled in private schools from his birth, Edouard rose above his siblings in his ability in and passion for the visual arts, eventually exhibiting his first work, titled La Labour, at the Societe des Artistes Francais (Rehs). This early success set Cortes on his path to popularity in Paris, the city he would paint for the next 60 years until his death in 1969.
Cortes managed to capture all of the landscapes of Paris in new and interesting manifestations, representing the sights in ways only the Parisians would be familiar with during their regular strolls through the city. Landmarks such as Notre Dame, the Place de Clichy, the Opera, the Quai du Louvre and the Place de la Bastille are rendered during different times of the day, under unique weather conditions and from a multitude of angles, Cortes’ work stands as a testament to the visual variety of a single place. The sale of street paintings is commonplace on European city corners today but the vast majority pale in comparison to those of Edouard Cortes.
Interesting insight into the artist’s work and collectability comes from a recent Antiques Roadshow episode recently aired on PBS and captured in an online transcript. While in Michigan a guest brought a Cortes painting after hearing the name on a previous program. The guest explained to appraiser Alasdair Nichol that the painting had been owned by her grandparents, both artists, who traveled to Paris frequently. Noting that paintings of Cortes are frequently forged because of their near-universal appeal and high value the appraiser noted that one secret to detecting a genuine Cortes painting is locating a pin mark in the middle of the painting that the artist had originally placed there as a point of origin for the perspective.
Spotting this and noting the fine quality of the work, the appraiser was convinced that the work was genuine and stated that at auction the painting could fetch anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 (Nichol). Flabbergasted, the guest broke down into tears of joy, astounded by the value of this beautiful painting.
MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. has been fortunate enough to have appraised works by this artist and enjoys inviting art collectors and owners alike to their Michigan Avenue office for a consultation session. A skilled team of appraisers and researchers on staff welcomes your questions and concerns and urges you to make an appointment to stop by our office to discuss your item. You never know what you have in your collection until you get your work properly appraised, and MIR is a great place to get that done!
Written and Researched by Justin Bergquist
MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA, AM 307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308 Chicago, IL 60601 (312) 814-8510
Works Cited: Nichol, Alasdair. “1959 Edouard Cortes Painting,” on Antiques Roadshow website. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/archive/200805A14.html Rehs, Howard. “Edouard Leon Cortes,” on Artrenewal.org http://www.artrenewal.org/pages/artist.php?artistid=190
A few weeks past, I attended an eloquent artist’s talk by sculptor Christine Tarkowski centered about her striking exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center— Last Things Will Be First and First Things Will Be Last.It brought to mind a favorite poem, “The Monument” by Elizabeth Bishop:
***
An ancient promontory
an ancient principality whose artist-prince
might have wanted to build a monument
to mark a tomb or boundary, or make
a melancholy scene of it…
“But that queer sea looks made of wood,
half-shining, like a driftwood sea.
And the sky looks wooden, grained with cloud.
It’s like a stage-set; it is all so flat!
Those clouds are full of glistening splinters!
What is that?”
It is the monument.
--Elizabeth Bishop, from “The Monument”
***
Tarkowski began the talk by reciting some evocative lines relating to governance, liminality, eternity: “Pioneers circle the wagons to protect the women and children”; “Any point on the circle is the beginning and the end.”The motif of the circuitous path in Last things Will Be First And First Things Will Be Last abounds: the beginning of the exhibit is the end—you must pass through the first room again to exit the gallery space); it is unclear if the double helix in her massive ship is ascending or descending;
the final room in the exhibit is filled with images of cyclical objects; the excellent lp Tarkowski made with founder member Jon Langford of The Mekons spins in “eternal return” on the stereo.
She sees the first works—the ship and the textile print—as symbols of western wreckage along a historical/global timeline.Ben Nicholson proclaims her massive ship “a tippy cardboard hulk held together with stringy bamboo staves and shiny aluminum scaffold shackles.One thing is for certain: This thing is going nowhere, except in our dreams” (excerpt from Nicholson’s vibrant essay “The Feral Cosmos of Christine Tarkowski”).
Textiles wildly printed, superimposed images of the ceiling of the Pantheon and a tortured landscape.
(Photograph taken just before a rainstorm.)
In the sails of the ship, motifs from the floor of the Pantheon— her thoughtful reference to the Pantheon in these works which concern the reinvention of cultural spaces—the Pantheon, with its columns native to Egypt, initially a temple to the gods, later a place for Christian worship and congregations of tourists.
The curator noted pseudomorphism here; a happy accident: the view from the window—the Frank Gehry bandshell—outside echoes of Tarkowski’s ship.
The self-referential quality of images of the clothesline and flags printed in the fabric itself.
The cast-off assemblage; once-utilitarian objects, now the junk of the world.
And the human figures—a man plaintively looks back at a woman on the boardwalk.They are suspended over an existential realm of cast-off things; they are headed anywhere else— “True life is elsewhere” (Rimbaud). (Also, a sort of military figure hangs about in the murk.)
The second room in the gallery space is permeated with the terrific Langford/Tarkowski call and response gospel album Thirsty Woman if You Drink this Water You’ll Never Be Thirsty Again! (it is wonderful and, hey, the 45 is only 5 bucks in the gift shop!)
Lyrics taken from the displayed screen-printed text.O, wooly mammoth (my favorite part of the gospel song)!
Tarkowski spoke about commodity—whale and whale oil; whale as metaphor for immigration; the relationship between fuel and faith.
Imitating God.An implied steeple-needle threatens to “pop” the blue sky.
***
Where then are the private turns of event
Destined to bloom later like golden chimes
Released over a city from a highest tower?
--John Ashbery, from “The One Thing That Will Save America”
***
Tarkowski reads work as “live rituals enacted on a negative space,” and an exploration of the way we create our own micro-faiths.
The geodesic “chapel” made me feel a tenderness towards even the wires and textured cement with its pebbles and glistening gems all lit up.The rote materials speak to us, reminding us that the chapel is a constructed thing. The sacred elements are in place, in a traditional religious sense and in a sort of ode to the devotional in the art culture—as Tarkowski related, her use of the geodesic dome references Buckminster Fuller, and the “god” he became.
Illuminated chapel “stools.”
In the words of Artschwager, “Furniture in its largest sense is an object which celebrates something that people do—or sanctifies it’” (Collins 120).
Imitating God relates a modern mythos—a 21st century conversion attempt.Tarkowski’s car broke down in Indiana, and an Amish woman took her in.As the woman related her ideas about God and faith, she attempted to convert Tarkowski, and the artist experimented for a number of months to see if the attempts would “stick.”
The experience for Tarkowski became an attempt to create a “faith-based system.”
Some “congregants”:
My best friend Suzanne, visiting from New York!
(This is me, with writing notebook.)
Fellow art devotees.
Tarkowski inverts what she frames as the typical process for formalizing religious intent—to “receive revelation,” then to attract congregants, finally to construct a space for worship, etc.In an artist’s statement, Tarkowski explains, “I’m building my system in reverse order, starting with only a fragment of the architecture, propaganda, and music.”
Tarkowski as Bishop’s “artist-prince”:
***
The crudest scroll-work says “commemorate,”
while once each day the light goes around it
like a prowling animal,
or the rain falls on it, or the wind blows into it.
It may be solid, may be hollow.
The bones of the artist-prince may be inside
or far away on even drier soil.
But roughly but adequately it can shelter
what is within (which after all
cannot have been intended to be seen).
It is the beginning of a painting,
a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument,
and all of wood.Watch it closely.
--Elizabeth Bishop, from the final stanza of “The Monument”
***
Tarkowski reads the “first” room in the installation as a “bombardment of sense material”, and the “final” room as sort of deathish space, which ironically addresses formal art-historical tropes—the iron sculptures in Methods of Egress—which become for Tarkowski kin to “models for future development” found in an architect’s office; here, in her words, is her version of spirituality—the models—“laid out as commodities.”
The vacuous-type third room, with bisecting table.
The table, constructed from former beech wood bleachers, is interesting to consider—in terms of reconfiguration—in relation to Rita McBride’s Arena, “both an autonomous sculpture and functional wooden seating unit like that found in sports arenas”(Collins 125).
Rita McBride, Arena
In Last Things Will Be First And First Things Will Be Last, we witness the gorgeous inherent defunctness of the sculptural works in the realm of practical human “progress”; the sail is “frozen”—it is going nowhere; the geodesic dome is heavy and “earth bound”, a meteoric event, says Tarkowski; we see the “perpetual purgatory” inherent in the photo etchings and sculptural models—ramps, cul-de-sacs, tires, traffic roundabouts.In fact the aesthetic of “parking lot egress” so permeates the space of human reality, Suzanne and I didn’t need to walk 15 feet from the exhibit, and she noticed another; here is “Niebs” as a human inhabitant of the ramp:
***
“The whole thing is scattered about inside me, the rooms, the stairs that descended with such ceremonious slowness, others, narrow cages that mounted in a spiral movement, in the darkness of which we advanced like the blood in our veins” (Bachelard 57, Rilke, Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, Fr. Trans p.33).
***
I think it is appropriate to consider Tarkowski in terms of what Siah Armajani terms “archi-sculpture” and Anthony Caro identifies as “sculpitecture” (Collins 130, 131).Perhaps of all the arts, sculpture, particularly in relation to large-scale installations, is the best-suited to philosophical inquiry.Indeed, when we walk through a building, we are in a sense walking through the canals of the human mind, as buildings are born there; and, further, these human-created spaces transform us: “The cosmos molds mankind, that it can transform a man of the hills into a man of islands and rivers, and… the house remodels the man” [my italics] (Bachelard 47).
In the words of Tarkowski: “For most, architecture invokes a utilitarian structure with a defined knowable program; house, church, garage, prison. I think of it in terms of the abhorrent program; the house is Theodore Kaczynski’s cabin in Montana, the church Jim Jones’s compound, the garage abandoned in the back alley inhabited by squatters, and the prison across the border in Mexico where the US out-sources incarceration services… It makes sense that architectural design should be driven by the future program of its inhabitants.”In the vein of works by sculptors McBride and Pernice, the manner in which Tarkowski’s ship overwhelms the gallery space creates a fruitful type of discomfort in the viewer.Constructed with little thought of human “use” in the realm of practicalities, and more a meditation upon liminal cultural structures, “swarming-still” (Bishop), I admire Christine Tarkowski’s impressive, menacing architecture, built metaphorically with some of the same deathish/restorative volcanic pumice found in the upper realms of the Pantheon.
***
The two envelope halves lying on a plate.
The message was wise, and seemingly
Dictated a long time ago, but its time has still
Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited
Steps that can be taken against danger
Now and in the future, in cool yards,
In quiet small houses in the country,
Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.
--John Ashbery, from “The One Thing That Can Save America”
***
Tarkowski’s installation runs through May 2nd, jubilantly closing with what is sure to be a raucous and lovely ”sing-along” performance/choral event with Tarkowski and Jon Langford at 2pm.
The staff at MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.—mere steps from the Chicago Cultural Center— seeks to fully understand the arts in their particular cultural contexts and to analyze relationships between various artistic mediums and genres; in this way we can broaden our expertise as art appraisers.
Bishop, Elizabeth.The Collected Poems 1927-1979.New York: The Noonday Press, 1983.
Hoover, Paul., EdPostmodern American Poetry.Ashbery, John.“The One Thing That Can Save America.”New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1994, pp.178-179.
Welcome to our blog site!
MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. is a fine art and personal property appraisal company dedicated to serving clients throughout the United States and abroad since our incorporation in Chicago in 1994. We specialize in the multi-faceted field of appraising fine art, jewelry, antiques, and decorative items. We also provide professional fine art restoration and conservation treatment for various media, including but not limited to, artworks on canvas, board, masonite, and paper.
We offer professional and precise appraisal services carried out by our team of accredited appraisers for the purposes of insurance coverage and claims, charitable donations, estate planning and probate, equitable distribution and fair-market value.
We started our art commentary blog site as a venue for colleagues and fellow art enthusiasts to share their experiences within the art community.
through the woman’s face! Although the problems facing the conservator were extensive, there are a number of techniques in an experienced conservators arsenal to tackle the project.
Museum-quality art restoration is as much a science as it is an art. Additionally it is a delicate balance between restoring repairs and conserving the cultural and historical integrity of an artwork. Besides human abuse, art pieces mainly acquire damages from sunlight, humidity, and poor maintenance with the wrong products. Science helps conservators to understand the reasons art works deteriorate and what to do to save them. Solvents, resins, fungicides, and silicones are among many essential chemicals to an art conservator and help them maintain and restore the world’s artistic heritage.
Written and researched by Taylor Maatman
Spotting this and noting the fine quality of the work, the appraiser was convinced that the work was genuine and stated that at auction the painting could fetch anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 (Nichol). Flabbergasted, the guest broke down into tears of joy, astounded by the value of this beautiful painting. 
Posts
