Even plastic art decays, but museum curators are on the case

Scientists can help them save their polymer-based collections.

Featured on popsci.com

On its face, art is often about beauty. From Mona Lisa’s demure smile to the blue dapple of Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise,” we flock to museums and galleries in search of the sublime. Museum curators ostensibly choose to dedicate their lives to art for the same reason—a profound desire to be closer to beauty—but they quickly learn something many viewers don’t: That art is more often a story of decay and destruction.

Take Leonardo Da Vinci's other great work, “The Last Supper.” Painted on the wall of a dining hall in a church in Milan, the mural survived a World War II bombing, the carving of a door through Jesus’s feet, and the more mundane—but dastardly—progression of time. Within just two decades of its completion, poor paint and an uncontrolled climate meant the mural was flaking. After just six decades, “The Last Supper” was described as “ruined,” the Apostles unrecognizable. Multiple restorations, namely one project stretching from 1978 to 1999, have brought back its original luster, but the lesson is there. Much like the humans who make it, art is always on the verge of falling apart.

In the last century, curators and restoration experts have made numerous advancements in the preservation of paintings and sculptures. They keep a hawk-eyed watch over the “The Last Supper,” carefully monitor Michelangelo's David and his weak ankles, and clean and preserve medieval tapestries like “The Unicorn.” But Katherine Curran, a chemist at the University College London’s Institute for Sustainable Heritage, says it’s only in the last two decades that anyone stopped to consider the preservation of artful plastics.

“There was something, for awhile, known as plastics denial syndrome,” Curran says. While artists have relied heavily on plastics since the 1960s (see: Charles Biederman’s pristine plastic and wood sculpture “New York, Number 18” or Naum Gabo’s poorly aged “Construction in Two Spaces: Two Cones,”), Curran says as late as the 1990s, curators “denied they had plastics in their collection.” As a result, many artful plastics started to degrade. “You do get plastic objects in museum collections that have degraded to the point where it’s too late,” she says. Some can no longer be transported without fear they’ll fall apart. Others have decayed to the point of being unidentifiable; an artist may no longer recognize the work they once made.

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