Jennifer Mass, PhD '95, masters the chemistry of conservation
Jennifer Mass, PhD '95, masters the chemistry of conservation
Air, light, and water—the essential elements of life—can mean slow death for works of art. Fraud, a fourth and ineluctable human element in the art world, is its own kind of destructive force, the bane of curators, collectors, and connoisseurs.
Saving masterworks from those predations is the mission of chemist Jennifer Mass, PhD '95. Equipped with high-tech X-ray vision and a headful of science, she helps ensure that the old adage ars longa, vita brevis doesn't go vice versa in our time.
Mass, a senior scientist in the Scientific Research and Analysis Laboratory of the University of Delaware's Winterthur Museum, estimates there are roughly 140 conservation scientists in the United States. These scientist-scholars team up with art historians and other specialists to verify the authenticity of artworks or, in most cases, find out how they were made so they can be restored and repaired. Along the way, some interesting things can come to light—and that light just happens to be generated by powerful X-ray microscopy machines.
In a recent guest lecture at Ithaca College, "Art Meets Chemistry: Revealing Hidden Images and Vanishing Masterpieces in Paintings," Mass delivered a breezy PowerPoint presentation on the complex subject, describing it with such merry élan that few seemed aware that the talk had drifted into supper time. No one left the room during the extra twenty minutes it took to show and tell the tale of her collaboration on a 2008 project with the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), which can fire high-energy, ultra-intense X-ray beams (produced by the electrons and positrons that circulate inside the synchrotron) just shy of light speed. "That's about 100,000 to a million times more than what is available at most museum labs," Mass says. "It's astonishing what we are able do with that kind of shared technology."
The subject of their research: N.C. Wyeth's "Family Portrait," from the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. In 1924, a simple dentist's X-ray had revealed that Wyeth's unfinished painting was done on a reused canvas. Beneath layers of oil paint, a dramatic fight scene from one of the artist's popular magazine illustrations lay hidden. Their goal: find out if the piece, which was published in black and white in 1919, was originally done in color.
Using CHESS, the team showed that Wyeth had indeed colored the illustration; they also succeeded in creating a replica in the original hues. How? As X-rays penetrated the painting, some were absorbed and re-emitted by atoms from different pigments; the wavelength and levels of those re-radiated X-rays revealed the colors. "This is a very exciting time to be in conservation science," Mass observes. "There are so many new techniques that enable us to do things we could never do before." And most important, she says, the research can be done without damaging even the tiniest portion of a master-work. "Anytime we can get information from a piece without having to take a sample is great—a bonus to curators and the entire field," Mass says.
'This is a very exciting time to be in conservation science. There are so many techniques that enable us to do things we could never do before.'Mass entered the small but deepening field of conservation science just as many classmates were enticed with the lucrative promise of fiber optics. Blue-chip companies like Corning Glass and Eastman Kodak were luring engineers and scientists to their labs in what turned out to be a premature leap into a future that didn't pan out. Like the dot-coms, the fiber optic trend went from bubble to bust.
Happily ensconced in academia, Mass missed all that drama. After getting her doctorate in inorganic chemistry with a concentration in materials engineering, she won a Mellon grant for research at the Sherman Fairchild Center for Objects Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, studying the use of metallurgical byproducts like iridium in glass colorants. From 1998 to 2001 she was an assistant professor in the art conservation department at SUNY Buffalo, where she studied ancient Roman and Egyptian glassmaking practices and began her investigations into glassmaking in late Renaissance Venice.
At work, Mass looks more like a dental hygienist than a scientist as she maneuvers a barreled laser lens across a painting. Scanning an area the size of a quarter can take up to nine hours. But Mass believes the time is well spent—even if the value is hard to quantify. Preserving works of art is vital to our cultural heritage, she says: "There are critics who say that we spend way too much on art conservation, but it's a living investment in our future."
— Franklin Crawford