A damaged Georgia O’Keeffe painting is back on display after conservators spent 1,250 hours and $145,000 restoring it.
Dale Kronkright, head of conservation at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, called the job the most massive restoration project he has ever worked on.
The results will be on display at the museum through Oct. 10. The painting will then travel to the San Diego Museum of Art in 2023.
The late American modernist artist painted the piece, titled “Spring,” in 1948. It was last seen by the public in 2019, the Albuquerque Journal reported.
The painting combines such O’Keeffe trademarks as desert primroses, a large vertebra and the northern New Mexico mountain peak named Pedernal. Measuring about 4 by 7 feet (1.2 by 2.1 meters), it was the largest canvas the artist had painted up to that point.
The water damage likely was caused by a tarantula tunneling through the roof at the artist’s 18th century adobe home in Abiquiú, in northern New Mexico.
Conservators had to repair not only the water damage but previous restoration work that had failed. The artwork also had been varnished, a process no longer used in conservation.
“The damage is consistent with it being stacked against another painting,” Kronkright said. “It’s clear at some point that it was sanded. It was almost as if the paint had been pulled off.”
