image Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery

Antoine Pevsner, “Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,” 1926, cellulose nitrate on copper with iron. Gift of Collection Société Anonyme.

Time Will Tell: Ethics and Choices in Conservation
Through Sept. 6. Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., New Haven. (203) 432-0600, artgallery.yale.edu.

What might happen to Dorian Gray's portrait after the story ends? Decayed by age, it has experienced the ultimate restoration, having been returned to a pristine original state by its subject's effort to destroy it. This is an irony, of course, and one hopes that the murder of the artist and the suicide (if unintended) of the subject are not absolute prerequisites for the kind of resolution being sought by the various curators and conservators whose projects are on view in this necessarily wordy exhibition.

It is impossible not to think of the Oscar Wilde novel when looking at Antoine Pevsner's assembled portrait of Marcel Duchamp, crumpled in upon itself, with parts of it turned to rust and powder. The composition of cellulose, copper nitrate and iron was a recipe for self-destruction. It's gone, turned to something not unlike a desiccated corpse on the shelf of a monastic catacomb which, if it were displayed vertically as it was meant to be, would immediately disappear.

What it has become is extraordinary in its fragile futility. There is nothing to be done. A replica has been fashioned of different materials which current evidence suggests may be more stable than Pevsner's original choices (the artist was aware of the work's defects and made alterations which only hastened the damage), but is a chill approximation at best. And is there anything but a difference of degree which separates this piece from any other work that is not the "foster-child of Silence and slow Time," (as Keats' hidden Grecian urn briefly was) but rather, held in the abusive care of its actual parent, ruin?

Conservation begins by giving a definition of loss. To know that there was a loss is not always to know precisely what the loss was. The absence may be in some way diminished without being accurate. This is the case for a first century Roman figure with a right arm from some different sculpture attached to it. The mistake can be removed, but not corrected. No restoration can be absolute.

Conservators sometimes develop ideas of salvation that resemble those of the army officer in Vietnam who reported having destroyed a village in order to save it. A sixth century mosaic removed and embedded in concrete is a hulking fragment, alienated from past and present. In contrast, repairs made to a Korean tea bowl and Greek drinking cup in their own time were meant simply to preserve them for use, not to guarantee their survival as museum objects.

There is also accidental preservation as in the underside of a lid on an Italian wedding chest where the painting of a female figure, nude save for hips bound with a fringe of flowers and pubic leaves, was kept safe for its private audience of forsaken modesty.

Among the mockeries of restoration and restorations as betrayal included here is a restoration as benign fiction. A 16th century painting "Conversion of St. Paul," not a forgery, was later remounted and then had old worm-eaten wood applied to its back in order to make it appear consistent with its history.

Thomas Wilfred's early 20th century light machines made use of a now obsolete technology which, when operated, would accelerate the complete breakdown of his slapdash electronics. Is the real question here one of reconstructing the effects or the mechanism? What would he have used had it been available, given that there was nothing permanent to the effects he intended?

A drawing for Edward Hopper's painting "Sunlight in a Cafeteria" contains what endangers it in its title — its charcoal on already unstable acidic paper is slowly erased by light. The painting itself is also on view, with a graph recording the "Fourier transform infrared spectra" of copal varnish used, and now darkening, on its surface.

I came away angry that I had been given this information. There are things that one should refuse to know for the sake of encountering the work itself, damaged as it might be.

The motives for restoration sometimes involve competing strategies, in which later choices are a critique of previous choices. A number of early European paintings in Yale's collection were at one point reduced to only what was verifiable original work. What resulted in some cases resembled a primitive seafarer's map, with islands and archipelagos of color isolated on a wooden sea.

A 14th century Sienese panel of the "Virgin and Child Enthroned" that was subject to this imperious treatment has now been carefully, if only partly, repainted. Before that, according to one curator's passionate assertion, it had been "too painful" to look at.

As I reflected later, perhaps that was the point that actually needed conserving. Losses require our attention, especially when ideal preservation would mean removing every work of art from our sight. This does not require making the museum some chilled mortuary for dying paintings. Rather, we should stand in front of each and, like Yeats, "for every tatter in its mortal dress," sing.