Paper Conservation: Decisions & Compromises

The Paper Conservator’s Role:
The Metropolitan Museum’s Renovated Galleries for the Art of the Arab
Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia
Yana van Dyke
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sherman Fairchild Center for Conservation of Works of Art on Paper,
New York, USA
The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses one
of the most important collections of Islamic
art outside the Middle East. Within this worldrenowned
collection is a significant body of
works of art on paper and parchment, representing
some of the most superlative accomplishments
of illuminated and illustrated manuscript
production in the Islamic world. The collection
safeguards approximately seventy-two fullybound
manuscripts complete with their entire
textblocks, in addition to several thousand
detached singular folios, representing a broad
span of time, from the tenth to the nineteenth
centuries. These works of art on parchment and
paper reflect great diversity and range of the cultural
traditions of Islam, with works from as far
westward as Spain and Morocco and as far eastward
as Central Asia and India. Comprising both
sacred and secular objects, the collection reveals
the interdependency of scholarly and artistic proficiencies
within the Islamic world.
In October of 2011, the Metropolitan Museum
of Art celebrated the grand reopening of fifteen
galleries dedicated to the permanent display of
its Islamic collection; following a monumental
eight year, $50 million dollar renovation. This
massive project encompassed hundreds of all
types of objects housed within the Islamic art
department; including objects made of glass,
ceramic, wood, metal, carpets and textiles, and
jewelry, in addition to works on paper and parchment.
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Throughout the course of this eight year enterprise,
the responsibilities and demands of the
paper conservator were multifaceted: from first
time surveys of the extremely rare manuscript
collection, participation in exhibition case design,
collaborations with curators, to probing
scientific inquiries. Moreover, traditional conservation
assignments were consistently juxtaposed
with surprising and extraordinary challenges.
In addition to the practical and ethical considerations
that arose alongside the treatment of
these complex works on paper and parchment;
material investigations with the enlistment of
numerous analytical techniques led to a deeper
scholarly and technical understanding of objects
examined.
The poster illustrates the multifarious professional
demands and ever-evolving complex web
ICOM-CC Graphic Documents Working Group Interim Meeting | Vienna 17 – 19 April 2013
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