Training in the Conservation of Paintings - Calouste Gulbenkian ...

TRAINING IN THE CONSERVATION OF PAINTINGS
fied by productivity in terms of pupil/teacher ratio and such considerations,
is the extremely small number of students for whom the
Institute's main course would be intended. If, as some witnesses
have suggested, the practical training were to be separated from the
theoretical and the proposed institute were only to provide instruction
in art history, art and science, and in the theory and history of
conservation, in class and lecture, for students who were either on
release from apprenticeship in some studio or conservation department,
or were taking a one- or two-year course before or after, or
between periods of practical training, such an institute could well
justify itself as part of a polytechnic. In such an instance, there is
little doubt that the needs of such a training institute in the matter
of an archive, library and equipment would be met. But although
we would recommend that the Institute's theoretical and background
instruction should eventually be made available on appropriate
terms to supplement apprenticeships served elsewhere, we do not
believe that an institute could perform the co-ordinating and guiding
functions which we envisage for it within the total training facilities
of the country, unless it was itself carrying out actual conservation
work of the highest quality, and training students by apprenticeship
to carry out such work. The main training course in such an institute
must, in our view, be the four- or five-year course, for about three
students a year, or fifteen in all, at any rate at the beginning, in a
i/i or 2/1 student/teacher proportion, and we do not think this
appropriate to an educational institution.
Attachment to a Polytechnic
82. As there are no art schools within the four Inner London polytechnics
we have considered the possibility of establishing the institute
as a course in the Humanities Department of the Thames
Polytechnic which would afford, in immediate proximity, first-class
scientists and scientific equipment. Here, however, there would be
no material for conservation work, as at a museum or gallery, nor
any special inducement to owners and curators to entrust their
works of art for use as study material, and, like the National Maritime
Museum, it would be at a distance from the other centres of
art and conservation in London. For these reasons and those in the
preceding paragraph, we cannot recommend this as a solution. Even
if the expense of its non-teaching activities, including its conservation
work, could be carried for a time by a sympathetic stretching
of the rules governing expenditure on its activities, we believe that
the need to comply with these rules would, before long, reduce it to
a purely training establishment.
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