30TH
v30n2
v30n2
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
A Note from<br />
the Director<br />
Photo: Anna Flavin, GCI<br />
I am privileged to be the director of the Getty Conservation<br />
Institute as it marks its thirtieth anniversary. The mission and the<br />
values it upholds have not changed since the Getty’s trustees created it and its first<br />
director, Luis Monreal, assumed his seat in 1985. The need to protect, preserve, and<br />
conserve cultural heritage is as relevant and critical now as it was when the GCI was<br />
founded. Indeed, for a variety of reasons it could easily be argued that the needs in our<br />
field have only increased in the intervening thirty years.<br />
If the GCI has been successful and had an impact, it is because of the vision and<br />
courage of many people from within the Getty and without. It is fitting that Otto<br />
Wittmann, a member of the Monuments Men (the World War II unit that endeavored<br />
to protect and retrieve cultural heritage during and after the war), planted the seed that<br />
would grow into the GCI. Wittmann—a former director of the Toledo Museum of Art<br />
and a Getty trustee—was the first to commit to paper the idea that the Getty should<br />
devote some of its substantial resources to an institute dedicated to the conservation and<br />
scientific examination of works of art. His notion was embraced by other Getty trustees<br />
and then robustly advanced by the trust’s founding president, Harold M. Williams. The<br />
GCI was born. Throughout its short history the Institute has been the beneficiary of<br />
such visionary trustees, advisers, and colleagues, generous collaborators and partners, and a remarkable and committed staff.<br />
Today the GCI is a part of the worldwide ecosystem of conservation. Each element of this ecosystem—which includes a<br />
wide variety of institutions and professionals—contributes to the collective goal of protecting and preserving the world’s cultural<br />
heritage through the education of conservators, the establishment and implementation of policies, advocacy to save threatened<br />
places, scholarship to create new methodologies, and science to forge new treatments. As a member of this international<br />
community, the GCI has evolved to meet changing needs, resources, and technologies, always emphasizing service to the field.<br />
This special edition of Conservation Perspectives seeks not only to chart the GCI’s growth and accomplishments, but<br />
also to put the Institute’s thirty years of work into the broader context of the conservation field’s own development during this<br />
period. In her feature article, Jeanne Marie Teutonico, the GCI’s associate director for programs, traces the movement of<br />
the Institute toward an increasingly holistic view of conservation and an integrated approach to conservation practice—<br />
an evolution that in many ways mirrors developments in the field as a whole.<br />
In the articles that follow, authored by GCI staff and conservation colleagues, six major areas of Institute work are<br />
examined: conservation science, conservation and management of archaeological sites, preventive conservation, earthen<br />
architecture, decorated surfaces, and modern and contemporary art research. Each area is one to which the Institute has<br />
committed considerable resources and, in the case of most, decades of work. Our efforts in these areas constitute a<br />
significant portion of the GCI’s investment in, and impact on, the field to date.<br />
While the GCI, in certain respects, is still a young institution, it has, I believe, made an important contribution to<br />
enhancing the practice of conservation and to supporting our colleagues engaged in that work. That is our mission, one<br />
to which we were dedicated in the past, and one to which we will be dedicated in the future.<br />
Each of us at the GCI thanks you—our partners, colleagues, and friends—for your efforts to protect and conserve<br />
the world’s cultural heritage, and we look forward to continuing our collaborative work to preserve that heritage for the<br />
benefit of civil society.<br />
Timothy P. Whalen