PRETORIA – A project to conserve a large peeling and cracked oil painting that hung in a public section of the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Merensky Library has unearthed fascinating insights into the institution’s offerings and collaborations.

Not only does UP Museums have a painting conservator to restore it, but the University also offers a relatively new, one-of-a-kind course that can provide technical analysis of the painting to assess what is needed. The course, a two-year master’s programme in Heritage Conservation, is the only one in sub-Saharan Africa and falls under the School of Arts in UP’s Faculty of Humanities. It operates from the late sculptor Anton van Wouw’s Pretoria home, which was bequeathed to the University and is now a national monument.

Staff and students recently completed an intensive two-week assessment of the painting’s damage, along with visiting conservation scientists from the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH) at Yale University in the US.

“I don’t think I’ve had so much fun in years,” says Maggi Loubser, who coordinates the course and is one of its two senior lecturers. “It was a once-in-a life opportunity, because you don’t get two scientists from Yale working with us and our students on a real painting, in a real gallery, with all this equipment. It’s something that’s never happened here before.”

The painting – Harlequins Homage to Guernica by Christo Coetzee – was completed in 1987 and was donated to UP by the artist, who later bequeathed his entire home and art collection to the University. The artwork features five clown-like figures and a supernatural black dog, and pays homage to Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica, about the bombing of the town of the same name.

The project was a rarity on many levels in that the analysis took place in the Bridge Gallery at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett-UP), with the painting mounted on the wall rather than being laid out flat as would be the case in a conservation laboratory. Its technical analysis involved multimillion-rand equipment, which project leader Salomé le Roux, a lecturer, borrowed from major corporations and UP colleagues. The scientists from Yale brought along some equipment too. This enabled Dr Anikó Bezur, Director of the Technical Studies Laboratory at Yale’s IPCH, and Dr Marcie Wiggins, an assistant conservation scientist at the institute, to lead the painting’s analysis using advanced tools such as x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF), infrared technical photography, scanning electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy, which identifies vibrating molecules with a laser.

Lecturer Salomé le Roux and Dr Aniko Bezur from Yale IPCH.

Dr Bezur co-teaches the Technical Research Methods module in UP’s master’s programme, and each year, either she or Dr Wiggins comes to Pretoria to teach alongside Loubser and Le Roux. This time both came. Dr Bezur and Loubser met when Loubser taught an XRF course in Ontario, Canada, and they’ve been collaborating ever since.

Loubser has an MSc in Analytical Chemistry from UP. While she previously ran the x-ray analytical facility at the University, she left to work in the corporate world, where she was Group Chief Chemist and Head of Research and Development at Pretoria Portland Cement for almost eight years. Loubser was offered a two-year contract to run the master’s course from 2019, and hasn’t left. She teaches science to the course’s students, who have mostly a humanities background, in order for them to better understand the materials that they are working with.

Dr Aniko Bezur from Yale IPCH explaining the FTIR data.

“I bought into the dream to formalise conservation as a career in Africa, not just South Africa,” she says. “I was elected to the International Council for Museums’ Committee for Conservation last year and wrote a grant for community-led heritage conservation training for Africa. Over the past six or so months, we’ve been presenting two weekly online workshops, pulling together conservators from all over Africa.

“We are trying to develop the profession on the continent, because the time is over for Europe to dictate to us how we should look after our own heritage,” she adds. “Africa’s time has come. Conservation has been very Eurocentric and North American-centric, which is not necessarily applicable here. We need to develop our own methodologies that are fit for purpose and our continent, with all its climatic zones and cultures.”

Dr Marcie Wiggins demonstrating Raman Spectroscopy in-situ.

The actual course curriculum, which was developed and planned with the help of a grant from the New York-
based Mellon Foundation, was the subject of Isabelle McGinn’s 2021 PhD thesis in Heritage and Museum Studies, titled ‘More than staples and glue: Conservation, heritage and the making of a curriculum’. Dr McGinn, whose academic background ranges from fine arts to archaeology, anatomy and museum studies – all of which she studied at UP – is now both a conservator and a senior lecturer on the programme. She says part of the reason for the detailed analysis of Coetzee’s painting was “to understand what the deterioration processes at play are”. It could be the incompatibility of the materials used, an interaction between different components of the artwork, the way it’s been stored or it could be the result of environmental conditions, she explains.

The Tangible Heritage team is months away from completing its report. In the meantime, the painting has been removed from Javett-UP and taken to UP Museums where Sandra Markgraaf, the painting’s conservator, will start working on it next year.

The master’s programme has been running for only six years, yet its graduates are already making their mark, everywhere from the Norval Foundation in Cape Town to the conservation laboratory at the University of Cape Town (UCT) – which was established after the Jagger Reading Room fire in 2021 (Dr McGinn and four UP students helped to sift through the salvaged material) ¬– and the Brenthurst Library in Johannesburg. They’ve also put their skills to use abroad, at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Australia, the Lesotho State Library and its Department of Culture, the Windhoek Museum and the National Museum of Namibia.

“I chose this course because I wanted to conserve our South African history,” says Sadhana Moodley, a history honours student from UCT who came to UP to do the master’s programme. “If it isn’t taken care of, we’ll lose very important information and stories, especially minority stories. This course is teaching us how to look after books, for example, and repair what has been lost to recover those histories. This is conserving tangible history, but also the intangible.”