The signs posted in the hushed galleries of the J. Paul Getty Museum are polite, but unambiguous: “Please do not touch.”
That privilege is reserved for Jane Bassett, who holds the hands-on job of conservator of sculpture and decorative arts.
“Some people call it art forensics,” Bassett, ’80, says of work that requires her to examine, document and tend the museum’s European collection. Conservation “covers all aspects of the study and preservation of any art or artifacts created by a culture. You need to be interested in anything to do with the physical world.” Lately Bassett has been investigating such topics as glass eyes in 17th-century Spanish sculpture and the evolution of the marble drill.
Like any forensic scientist, Bassett also does a lot of “very mundane” paperwork: writing safety policies, setting environmental standards and monitoring “pest activity”—infestations of insects or vermin. Because the museum is perched on a hilltop with panoramic views of Los Angeles, Bassett spends a lot of time thinking about how to protect priceless artworks in an earthquake, working with specialists to design and install high-tech restraints. At the end of each day, Bassett carefully straps down any artworks undergoing conservation in her lab.
It’s a lesson she learned at Stanford, in a classics seminar. “For a few hours a week, a group of us sat in the basement of the Stanford Museum gluing together ancient Roman pots that had been smashed during the ’06 earthquake.”
These days Bassett is more likely to work with infrared lights and electron microscopes than glue. “The old-fashioned way of approaching the field was restoration: fixing broken things and trying to make them look new,” she explains. “But conservation is much less invasive than restoration was. It’s about preserving the artist’s original materials and intentions. It’s about respecting what’s left of the original in its aged condition and trying to prevent further deterioration.”
Bassett studies the methods that the artist used to make each object as well as how its materials will degrade. Then she figures out how to stop that process. In the Getty’s labs, she can analyze artworks using nondestructive techniques such as radiography, X-ray fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy.
Few museums in the world are so lavishly equipped, and Bassett faced a steep learning curve when she arrived in 1991. In her previous position at Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, Bassett had grown used to low-tech methods. “I had a friend who was an X-ray technician in a doctor’s office and I used to drive bronzes to the doctor’s office,” she remembers. “It didn’t work very well—units designed for tissue and bone have a hard time getting through dense metal!”
Since 2000, Bassett has been researching a forthcoming monograph on the casting techniques of Dutch Mannerist sculptor Adriaen de Vries. Little known today, de Vries was an influential and technically brilliant artist (“able to cast life-sized, multi-figured bronzes in one pour with almost no flaws”) who also was ahead of his time stylistically.
He had much in common with a later sculptor, whom Bassett got to know well during her time at Stanford: Auguste Rodin. “I loved the Rodin garden. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been drawn to cast metals.”
KIMBERLY CHRISMAN-CAMPBELL, ’94, is a freelance journalist in Southern California.
