ABSTRACT
Introduction by Joyce Hill Stoner The awareness of the impact of climate control, environmental factors, and risk management on the stability of easel paintings increased dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century. As conservation pioneer Harold Plenderleith noted in his 1978 oral history interview, when the paintings of the National Gallery, London were stored in the Festiniog slate quarry in Wales during the Second World War, they were kept at 50 per cent relative humidity and 15 ºC (60 ºF): ‘The pictures were found to benefit greatly by storage in these conditions there. In fact the restorers were out of a job’ (Plenderleith, 1978: 18). Paintings conservators in the 1930s to the 1950s had spent much of their careers setting down blistering paint on panels, but this activity was no longer as prevalent as more museums installed temperature and humidity controls mimicking the ideal conditions defined by the wartime storage in the slate quarries. The 1940 Manual on the Conservation of Paintings from the 1930 Rome Conference had briefly mentioned issues of heating and air conditioning in addition to ‘local protective and precautionary measures’ (International Museums Office, 1940; ICOM,1997); the International Institute for Conservation (IIC) Rome Conference of 1961 featured a section on museum climate and protection of works of art during travel (Thomson, 1963); in 1967 the IIC held a Conference on Museum Climatology in London entirely devoted to issues of air pollution, humidity control, lighting, climate, and museum design, etc. Publications on issues of pollution, floods, and fires, display materials, travel precautions, pest control, and light and humidity levels, etc. steadily increased from the 1930s forward, and by the late 1980s, the term ‘preventive conservation’ was in wide use as a conference topic, a career specialty, and a necessary part of the curriculum for conservation training programs. The last decades of the twentieth century also saw increased sophistication in the understanding of health and safety issues and the importance of public outreach.
