Christiana Cunningham-Adams established her independent conservation practice in 1982 after completing an Advanced Painting Conservation Internship at the Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum. In addition to conserving and restoring paintings over the past three and a half decades, she has traveled widely, consulting and lecturing on painting conservation in the United States, Italy, and South America, and led workshops in Ecuador and Cuba where institutional training was unavailable.
Training at the Fogg Art Museum followed Cunningham-Adams’ eight years’ study of art history and conservation in Rome, Italy, which culminated with a diploma from the Istituto Centrale del Restauro in Rome. Her 1977-1980 training there included participation in the restoration of the wall paintings by Giotto and Cimabue in the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi over a three-year period; 1st century frescos in the Palace of Augustus on Palatine Hill in Rome over a two-year period; and personal treatment of panel and canvas paintings by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Cima da Conegliano, Sebastiano del Piombo, Guido Reni, and Titian.
In 1979 Cunningham-Adams worked in the conservation lab at the Landesmuseum in Bonn Germany for two months under the direction of Chief Conservator Jochen Haag. In 1980 she completed the course “Preventive Conservation in Museums; Theft, Fire, Climate, Lighting” given by Gael de Guichen and Gary Thomson at the International Center for the Study of Preservation in Rome (ICCROM), and received a B.A. Degree at the American College of Rome with a major in Art History in the same year.
Monet, Constable, Vasari, Titian, Tintoretto and Sir Joshua Reynolds are European masters that she has literally lent a hand in conserving. While American paintings by John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins have received her attention as a fine arts conservator, she is now turning her eye to portraits of actors, playwrights and gentlemen of the theater adorning the fifth floor of the Lambs.
“When you walk into The Lambs, its wonderful atmosphere just wafts over you, like the smell of bread does in a bakery. I was just delighted at the idea of so many people gathering together to preserve the collegiality and history of this club. Not only is there the aesthetic richness of all the old paintings and wonderful playbills, you get the feeling right away of a whole world for an outsider to step into.”
Christiana first visited the Club to have dinner with her friend Sarah Ann Rodgers one Friday evening at Low Jinks. She right away felt at home. “I’ve always wanted to act, but it did not turn out to be my world.” Introduced to Marc Baron, she noticed that many paintings at The Lambs needed conservation, and she offered to restore some as her donation.
Christiana’s education and work have spanned continents. She attended the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and earned a bachelor’s degree at the American College of Rome and a Painting Conservation diploma from the Central Institute of Restoration in that city. There she worked on frescoes by Giotto in the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, frescos in the Palace of Augustus on Palatine Hill, and easel paintings by Titian, Guido Reni, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Ambrogio Lorenzetti.
Drawing on her studies in Rome, Christiana learned from the tradition that a conservator seeks to recover the original aesthetic character of works of art, thus preserving “their authenticity and correct place in time and history.” The goal is generally not to make works appear new again. She said, “We ought not to make a work look like we think it once looked, but rather to allow for the vicissitudes of its history in order to maintain its real place in time. I want the history of a work of art to show as I attempt to recover its original quality.”
Christiana was surprised to find some conservators in the United States were using a huge palette with as many as 80 colors. As she learned in Rome, a limited palette can be used to create the effect or impression of any color rather than trying to find a commercially prepared exact color that matches the original. Moreover, she says that it is more important to maintain or re-establish the optical value of the original colors used.
Her mother, who was a preservationist, strongly influenced Christiana and the development of her conservation philosophy. Her mother was once walking along Mill Brook in Arlington, Mass., when she passed an old mill. Inquiring about it she found that it had originally been a grist mill in the 1600’s, then a saw mill in the 1700’s, a spice mill, and finally in 1864 one where the German immigrant Schwamb brothers made circular and elliptical wooden frames. The historic site had been sold to a trucking company in 1969 that was planning to tear it down. Christiana’s mother saved it by setting up a non-profit trust that acquired the mill which they named The Old Schwamb Mill, got it listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and learned how to operate and maintain the historic machinery. “My mother had an incredible eye and artistic sensitivity, and taught me a lot about our culture’s need for preservation of its past.” she said.
Christiana set up a conservation studio at the Old Schwamb Mill in 1982 when she returned to the United States from Italy to undertake an internship at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. In her own conservation practice she served a variety of clients including museums, private collectors, churches and many others. Her varied projects in those first years back from Italy included preserving immigrant graffiti on Ellis Island, restoring an 1876 wall decoration of John La Farge in Trinity Church at Copley Square in Boston, treating a mural at the Museum of American Folk Art here in New York City, and conserving 3rd century Mithraic shrine wall paintings for Yale University.
As a Fulbright lecturer in Ecuador in 1983, she trained conservators in the capital, Quito. This involved teaching a group of conservators to arrest decay of a 16th-century fresco. “They were very desirous of learning. We worked in a conservation laboratory financed by the Central Bank, where supplies were so limited we would sometimes go to the American Embassy’s commissary to buy baby ‘Pampers’ that we took apart to get cotton we attached to sticks to make little swabs.” She was teaching them minimal emergency interventions on large collections and lectured on basic conservation principles. Traveling to Cuba in 2003, she gave lectures to conservators there as well on the principles and philosophy of conservation and preservation.
Among the many conservation and restoration projects she has undertaken in Washington D.C., in 1994 Christiana worked on two 250-sq. ft. murals in Attorney General Janet Reno’s conference room in the main building of the Department of Justice. Once used by Attorney General Robert Kennedy as his office, the room presents two murals by Leon Kroll that depictimages of good and bad government. The mural on one side of the room shows a desolate landscape with bare trees, broken musical instruments, torn books and the like. The other shows a landscape rich with fields of grain and pastured animals and a prosperous, healthy society. Ms. Reno told Christiana that she likes to sit at the end of the conference table where she had to look at the scene representing Bad Government because it served her as a reminder of why she was there.
In 1995-96 Christiana faced new challenges in working at the Lincoln Memorial. On the north wall Lincoln’s 2nd inaugural speech is carved into the stone wall, and on the south wall the Gettysburg Address is likewise carved. Above these inscriptions are 60’ x 12’ murals located 37 feet above the floor and glued to the limestone slabs the walls are made of. “Both murals were painted in oil on canvas and made to look like large tapestries.” Heaters located in the cellar, which kept the stone of the walls at an even temperature, had years ago been thrown out when they ceased to work, and never replaced. The humid spring air wafting into the chamber each year thereafter would hit the cold stone, causing condensation to run down the wall in torrents. The canvas regularly absorbed humidity, causing it to swell and then shrink when it dries out. But because oil paint does not absorb humidity, it pulls away when the canvas shrinks, and the paint lifts and flakes. Christiana applied a mixture of micro-crystalline wax and synthetic resin applied warm over every square inch and pressed down each inch with her thumb to re-adhere the lifting paint.
Beginning in 1993, restoring seven corridors on the first floor of the U.S. Senate likewise brought its own challenges in what proved to be the largest painting conservation project ever done in the Capitol and kept Christiana working in the Capitol for many years. The paintings combined visual elements of the ancient Roman, the Renaissance, and the unfolding Victorian eras.
The murals covered the walls and ceilings of the corridors and had had six previous restoration efforts over the past 125 years that virtually covered over the porous original surfaces. When the murals had gotten dirty in the past, the surfaces were repainted instead of cleaned. Christiana said, “I spent 25 years carving off four to six layers of over-paint with a surgeon’s scalpel covering over 25,000 square feet of wall and ceiling surfaces.
The perks of conserving the Senate corridors included meeting important elected officials. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the democrat representing New York State, once hosted a party for Senator Hillary Clinton. It was 1:00 a.m. or 2:00 a.m. in the morning. Leaving the party, Senator Moynihan brought President Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton over to see Christiana’s work. Moynihan told them, “See this lady? She’s here all night, every night, restoring all these paintings.” President Clinton extended his hand to shake hers. She took off her latex glove and shook his hand, then realized her hand under the glove had become soaking wet with sweat. Embarrassed, she said, “I’m sorry” and he replied, “That’s O.K.!” and complimented her on her work.
Other times she spoke with John Glenn, Ted Kennedy, John Warner, Robert Byrd, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, and several others particularly interested in the project. President George W. Bush, who had come by the Senate for a dedication of a bust of Vice President Richard Chaney cheerfully joked that she looked like a medical doctor in her white lab coat. On another occasion, a friend alerted her in advance that President Obama would be walking by. So she began to work on a mural near to where she knew he would walk by, but she never got the chance to greet him as he passed by with three body guards in tow.
Over the years she has received distinguished awards from organizations such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation as well as the Art Commission of the City of New York. Her publications include three works relating to the history and preservation of the U.S. Capitol: One is on rediscovering the art of Constantino Brumidi’s 1850s murals inside the Capitol; another on his ancient Roman and Renaissance sources; and a third on the process of change in the seven corridors
Many of the portraits in the Lambs have darkened and yellowed over time. As she explains, old paintings frequently have a natural resin like dammar as a varnish on them. As the resin ages, it oxidizes and turns yellow. This combines with ambient dirt, smoke, or dust in the air to darken the painting. There could be also city soot caused by windows of a room being open over the years. Traditionally, varnishes are removed and replaced when they darken in this manner, perhaps several times over the years. In modern conservation, once these varnishes are removed, they are replaced with stable synthetic varnishes that do not yellow. In addition, several of the paintings have tears and holes which need repair and retouching as well as having a new protective varnish applied.
Whether she works on fresco, tempera, acrylic, or oil paint, Christiana has had broad experience prior to her volunteering at conservation at The Lambs. She said, “I believe in what you are doing at The Lambs. So much of the ‘old world’ is worth saving as long as we can.”
–written by Gary Shapiro