Portland Art Museum begins painstaking Claude Monet restoration

In the basement of the Portland Art Museum stands a brand new state of the art conservation suite, built as part of the ongoing campaign for a $111 million museum renovation and $30 million to grow the museum’s endowment.

There are high-tech locks on the doors. The lights are color balanced to daylight. And the floors and walls are gray to help with color matching.

Peering through thick jeweler’s glasses, the museum’s chief conservator, Charlotte Ameringer, leans in close to a massive canvas of blues and greens.

“It’s a privilege to be that close to a work of art for such an amazing length of time,” Ameringer said. “I feel like often conservators spend more time with a painting than the artists did.”

She’s just started cleaning one of the museum’s most beloved works, “Waterlilies” by Claude Monet.

Journalists aren’t supposed to make subjective statements, but this is undeniably a beautiful painting. As high and wide as a person, it’s filled with the vivid blues of the water, and lily pads and flowers dot the scene in green, red, pink and blue.

It was painted just as the French impressionists started moving away from depicting people and objects to capturing emotional moments instead.

“What’s so special about this painting in particular: Monet moves from beyond the typical landscape, where we see horizon sky etcetera, and he’s actually painting water looking down into it which is reflecting the sky, like a mirror,” said museum director Brian Ferriso.

“It’s a very, very contemporary idea at that time in 1914 to 1915.”

The museum bought the work in 1959 for $60,000, a time when Monet and his aquatic plants were not as celebrated. That is about $650,000 in today’s money, and it pales in comparison to the $80 million water lily paintings change hands for now.

“It was very forward thinking,” Ameringer said, laughing.

But Ameringer is not focused on the cost of the artwork. Instead, she’s dealing with it on an inch by inch basis. An organic chemist by training, she’s mixed a solvent specifically for this restoration effort. She’s using a homemade Q-tip dipped in it to slowly dissolve away a yellowing varnish that was painted over the original work.

She said her work is meditative. There’s time to admire each brush stroke and the mix of the intertwined colors.

“Hours will pass, and all of a sudden I’m like, ‘I need to move. I’m really stiff,’” she said.

The effort is going to take six months, so Ameringer has other pieces to work on. That lets her get up to protect her back from strain.

In preparation for the project, she immersed herself in Monet. For example, she studied how he started off very poor, and that his financial status changed by the time he fell in love with Giverny, his garden in France.

“He was obsessed with his garden and his water lilies,” Ameringer said. “He had a crew of like eight gardeners.”

Monet was also prolific. There are thought to be some 250 Monet water lily paintings, which culminated in what’s known as the Grand Decoration. His vision: a series of huge paintings hanging in an oval room, allowing the viewer to effectively stand in the middle of his pond.

The work that still hangs in France.

But the Portland museum’s water lilies painting was not part of the Grand Decoration. Monet kept this particular work for himself.

“He destroyed so many paintings during this period because he didn’t like them or wasn’t satisfied with them,” Ameringer said.

“So for me, the fact that he kept (this one) in his own collection makes it a really special painting.”

When Monet died, the painting went to his son Michel Monet, who hung it in his family’s home until he decided to sell it in 1959.

The painting was then shipped to Portland so the museum could get a good look before buying. Museum officials found that one of the little tacks that holds the canvas to the frame had come loose in transit and poked a hole in the painting.

The whole thing had to be sent to a conservator at the prestigious Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Missouri for repair. As part of that conservation work, the canvas was varnished, as was the custom of the day.

“I think they looked at it partially as something that was protective of the surface of the painting,” Ameringer said. “But what the varnish does is saturate the colors.”

It’s similar to what happens when you cover a dry rock with water. Suddenly, it shines with previously unseen patterns and hues.

Recently, art historians researching the methods of the impressionists have found that many did not want their paintings varnished, including Monet. They preferred the raw new colors of their work.

The market at the time was not so sure.

“People did not think that their unvarnished paintings with their bright colors were finished,” Ameringer said. “So many of them got varnished by dealers because they couldn’t sell them unvarnished.”

Some paintings were even overcoated with toned varnishes, to add patina and make them look less new.

“Today, ‘Waterlilies’ does not look as Monet intended,” said Roger Hinshaw, the president of Bank of America for Oregon and Southwest Washington, which helped fund the restoration work.

Since 2010, the bank has supported the conservation of more than 6,000 artworks across 40 countries.

“Waterlilies” should be ready to shine again when the museum unveils its big new renovation next year. The renovation promises to tie the museum’s four old buildings together with large new light-filled galleries.

The Brooklyn Museum’s renowned European art collection “Monet to Matisse: French Moderns” is running at the Portland Art Museum until Sept. 15. It showcases approximately 60 works of art considered to be modernist masterpieces from Paul Cézanne to Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse and Claude Monet.