The expertise of many different professional groups can be found within the Doerner Institut itself. The concentration and scope of these combined skills is unique in Germany. Practical museum work and research are consolidated here in the form of close, interdisciplinary teamwork.
We would like to introduce you to our fields of work and specialist areas. Using the extended links you can find more detailed information about respective terms.
Competencies
Competencies
The conservation of the extensive holdings in the Pinakothek museums, the Museum Brandhorst, the Schack Collection and the twelve state galleries is at the centre of our activities. Implementing our long-term strategies we look after 30,000 works of art from the 14th century to the present day. To do this, the focus is always on conserving the substance and on damage prevention. Looking after works in the collections and exhibitions revolves around regular checks on the condition of the artworks by the conservators and the monitoring of ageing processes. Conservation concepts are devised as preventive measures for works of art that include packaging materials and storage conditions as well. In close cooperation with Preventive Conservation and Museum and Exhibition Technology the ambiant conditions for works in exhibition rooms and the museum depots, as well as during transport, are optimised in this way.
Active conservation measures stabilise the condition of a work’s original substance. As such, these often enable the presentation of fragile works of art in the first place and safeguard their preservation for generations to come. To do this, the knowledgeable and carefully considered handling of traditional and modern conservation materials, as well as the ongoing scientific development of conservation techniques, are prerequisites.
Documentation is fundamentally important for conservation. Comprehensive documentation and artist interviews are pivotal component parts in conservational work, especially in the field of modern and contemporary art and new ‘time based’ media.
Restoration embraces all measures which enable works of art that have been damaged, altered, or impaired in their aesthetic appearance or with regard to their content to be exhibited once again. The aim is to restore the impact and legibility of the artwork while, at the same time, being committed to retaining the source character of the works as historical documents.
Different priority, however, is placed on the aesthetic and historical values of the some 30,000 works of art in the Bavarian State Painting Collections. A painting gallery in conjunction with an important collection of historical frames formed the core of the original collections. These were enhanced by sculptures and objects, followed over the past few decades, by a comprehensive expansion in the fields of modern and contemporary art and photography.
The intrinsic aim when restoring paintings is the legibility of the pictorial motifs and the work’s aesthetics. The restoration of frames generally focuses on their intermediary role between the picture and its surroundings. With contemporary installations and new media, on the other hand, the conservation of the concept or function often takes priority.
A comprehensive art-technological examination is fundamental to every major restoration project. No standardised mode of procedure is followed in the specification of the concept. Instead, decision processes on many levels to specify the concept always precede restoration measures. These are also discussed with curators and scientists as part of an interdisciplinary team.
In the same way that an original is perceived in a condition matching its age, restorations are equally well bound to cultural traditions and temporal contexts. The rich history of restoration at the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen reflects this vividly. At the Doerner Institut restoration is planned and executed systematically in the light of modern conservational, scientific findings and restoratoration-related aesthetics.
Preventive Conservation combines a number of indirect measures designed to help conserve a work of art or cultural object permanently. The creation of suitable spatial enclosures, the optimisation of ambient conditions and improvements to transport and storage processes contribute to the sustainable conservation of the holdings of complete collections and building complexes. The all-encompassing analysis and evaluation of all scenarios inherent to risk management are fundamental to Preventive Conservation and make it an effective and enduring economic tool for the prevention of damage and direct interventions to individual artworks. With Preventive Conservation, as an interdisciplinary construct, all those involved in the conservation of cultural assets bear the same level of responsibility.
In keeping with a long tradition, Preventive Conservation was established at the Doerner Institut in 2004 as a specialist area in its own right. By virtue of the broad spectrum of tasks it encompasses, the interdisciplinary cooperation with art historians, conservators, museum and exhibition technicians, as well as administration and maintenance work in the various different museums, is fundamental to our sustainable conservation strategy.
The Preventive Conservation team is responsible for the five museums in Munich as well as the twelve state galleries in Bavaria. In figures, with this number of buildings that means: looking after and displaying more than 30,000 works of art in exhibition spaces extending over more than 35,000 m² and making these accessible to more than some two million visitors a year.
Experts from various different technical professions work in the Museum and Exhibition Technology Team. They come into action wherever works of art need to be moved, put into storage or exhibited.
In addition to art handling, the packing and transport of works are among the department’s tasks which, as a logical consequence, also encompasses the management of the depot together with that of the premises as a whole. Another core competence is to devise different concepts for exhibiting works in the collections. Thanks to the in-house carpentry workshop the solutions can, in most cases, be made within the institute. This also applies to special exhibitions, for which the Museum and Exhibition Technology Team is involved in a number of different ways, in both planning and setting up and taking down an exhibition.
One key module in the long-term conservation of artworks is looking after the collections – a continuous process in all the museums in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, which is carried out in close liaison with the conservators.
At the Doerner Institut paintings are examined and analysed using special state-of-the-art, imaging and material-analysing technologies. Imaging techniques, used in close cooperation with the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen’s photographers, enable information to be gained on underdrawings and changes to compositions, before and during painting, without causing any damage. Similarly, overpainting carried out in later centuries and alterations made in the course of a work’s restoration history can be recognised and the condition of a work more precisely assessed. First insights into painting materials are also obtained non-invasively. For a more precise identification of all original materials used for a work and those applied subsequently, as well as ascertaining the structure of a painting’s layers, however, the minimally invasive removal of a few, very small samples, frequently as cross sections, is generally necessary. Using a broad spectrum of complementary x-ray- analytical, chromatographic and spectroscopic methods to analyse materials, historical and modern pigments and binders, varnishes, modern restoration materials and much more can be accurately and precisely identified.
Research in the field of technical art history has been one of the institute’s key tasks since its foundation. The parameters for this are unique in the Pinakothek museums: the close cooperation and interdisciplinary exchange between our conservators and scientists and the art historians and photographers of the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen takes place over the shortest of distances, directly in the heart of our rich collections. Both a broad specialist expertise as well as specific technologies for scientific analyses at a state-of-the-art level are available in-house. The institute’s reference files contain extensive research documentation for scientific comparisons. The topics of art-technological research are extremely diverse as these cover all aspects of techniques, materials and their ageing, as well as the practices of different artists (for further information see Projects). The findings gained are regularly reported in inventory and exhibition catalogues as well as other scholarly publications, concepts regarding restoration measures and public communications. In addition, this focussed knowledge also enables forgeries to be identified – the Doerner Institut acts in an advisory and expert capacity in disputed cases by issuing authenticity expertises.
Technical art history is an academic cross-sectional discipline combining expertise in the fields of restoration/conservation, chemical-physical material analysis and other scientific areas with research into historical source materials and art history. As a result, typical modules in art-technological painting appraisal range from the visual and microscopic examination of a work, the execution of imaging diagnostics and technical photography and, material analyses to the indentification of painting supports, layer structures, pigments, binders, etc., as well as research on comparative works, prototypes and written sources of autographic relevance or on painting techniques, sometimes also involving practical experiments to recreate certain techniques. These partial insights, gained from different methodological perspectives, are jointly evaluated and interpreted on a multidisciplinary level. They contribute significantly to a deeper understanding of questions related to materials and the working techniques of individual artists, dating, attributions or changes to a work’s original appearance due to ageing processes or reworking.
Many of our activities take place behind the scenes out of public view. In order to render diverse aspects of our work visible and to raise visitors’ awareness for cultural heritage conservation, communication is, for us, of great importance. Presentations are regularly given on major current restoration projects in the form of lectures, thematic tours or within the scope of an exhibition. Since 2018, the European Day of Conservation/Restoration, that takes place every October, has provided a fixed framework for this. Over the past twenty-five years the fascinating results of art technological research have repeatedly been included in exhibition presentations and catalogues that, complementing the art historical study of production techniques, provide a closer insight into artists’ materials and their ageing or new findings on work processes and the individual working methods of artists.
The careful documentation of restoration measures, art-technological and scientific examinations has long been standard practise. Files in the science department hold information on more than 7,000 works of art from the Bavarian State Painting Collections and other museums worldwide. Documentation on imaging and material-analytical examinations dates back to the early 1950s. In current research projects reference is repeatedly made of transverse samples also archived there when examinations are renewed using modern methods.
The conservation department can draw on existing files for around 10,000 works from the museums’ own holdings, the oldest of which date back to the early 19th century. These reports form an indispensable basis for the development of current conservation/restoration concepts by providing an insight into earlier restoration measures and techniques. They are also valuable sources for research into the history of painting restoration at Munich’s Pinakothek museums.
Access to this documentation is possible for scientific work and in individual cases (see FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions).
The Doerner Institut has an extensive collection of painting materials of all kinds, various artists’ bequests and painting technique experiments from the history of the institute. It contains several thousand historical and modern colourants in pure form, including a partial set of the Forbes Pigment Collection from the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies for objects in the Harvard Art Museum collections. In addition to historical and modern waxes, oils, gum, protein and synthetic polymers, the collection of organic binders also includes many resins from all over the world as well as various tars and pitches.
Several hundred test sheets and a wide variety of painting technique reconstructions, some originating from Prof. Max Doerner, document the Institute’s continuous preoccupation with questions concerning the properties and stability of all kinds of paint materials. Important items include those from artists’ estates (for example from Toni Roth, Fritz Winter, Lothar Günther Buchheim and many more) with many hundred historical tube paints, colour sample cards and working materials that are invaluable references for art-technological research.
As a special feature, the Doerner Institut also houses part of the Martius Pharmacognostic Collection from the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg that was assembled mainly in the first half of the 19th century by two generations of the Martius family (professors of pharmacy, pharmacognostics and botany). The collection contains reference materials, such as natural resins commonly used in painting, that are especially valuable.because they have aged naturally.