When Suzanne Siano walks around an art fair, she does not just see still lifes, portraits and colorful abstractions. She sees cracks in paint, staple holes, varnish layers and discolored canvases, any of which could be totally fine — or highly problematic.
It takes an expert’s eye to know the difference.
Siano, a painting conservator who sharpened her skills at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is a popular person at a fair like Art Basel Paris, the October event that was held in the Grand Palais.
Many millions of dollars worth of paintings were being sold, and those transactions hinged in part on whether the works were in good condition. Bad news from an art conservator could tank a big deal — why would a buyer take the risk?
As we strolled through the Grand Palais only an hour or so into the fair’s first V.I.P. preview day, Siano said she had already been buttonholed by people seeking her opinion.
“I walked into the fair and someone pulled me aside and said, ‘OK, I need a condition report,’” said Siano, who lives in New York, where she founded the Modern Art Conservation in 2007 and now has a team of 14 people.
The firm specializes in paintings from the 19th century to the present, with an emphasis on modern and contemporary work. Siano previously worked at the MOMA for 13 years; it is typical for the biggest art institutions to employ conservators on staff.
Many conservators specialize in older art, and she estimated that there were fewer than a dozen independent firms in the country with her specialty.
Her busiest fair of the year by far, she said, is typically Art Basel Miami Beach, this week’s gathering of some 286 galleries, because of its size and prominence with collectors. Her other busiest stretches come with the spring and fall auctions of modern and contemporary work in New York.
Siano explained that the condition report request she had just fielded came from a dealer. “Normally it would be examining the work front and back, and if the conditions allow, with ultraviolet light, which shows me many things,” she said. “I’m trying to give you a sense of the health of the artwork.”
Siano added, “We’re doctors of art.”
Just as it is with a medical doctor, discretion is part of Siano’s business model — she does not reveal to anyone what works she has inspected or conserved. Some of the paintings in the Grand Palais booths were familiar to her as former patients, but she was mum on which ones.
Sometimes Siano is even hired both by a dealer and a collector to evaluate the same painting, frequently in cases where a potential buyer wants more information or additional assurance; sometimes the parties will reveal to one another that she has looked at a particular work, and sometimes they won’t.
Whether a work sells or not does not affect her bottom line. “I have no stake in the sale,” she said. “It keeps me honest.”
Nick Olney, the president of Kasmin gallery, called Siano a “trusted source.”
“She’ll tell you not what you want to hear but what you need to hear,” said Olney, who has worked with her in the past. “That’s so valuable. It’s what you want as a client.”
As we moved from booth to booth on the main show floor of the Grand Palais, Siano reflected on the kinds of questions she gets. “Someone actually just stopped me at a Warhol and said, ‘What do you think about that crack?’” Siano said. “And it wasn’t a crack, it was a brush hair. And I had him put my magnifying glasses on so he could see.”
Siano has studied how the top artists of the last century worked. For instance, she noted, Andy Warhol’s “Oxidation” paintings of the 1970s were made with copper paint sprayed with urine, and the crystallized result is water-soluble. “It would not do well in high humidity,” she said. “Climate control is really important for that work.”
Among the many distinctions Siano considers when evaluating a work are the type of paint used, how a canvas is stretched, how old it is and whether it has any layers of varnish (which is sometimes used to protect a painting’s surface).
“Knowing if it’s an acrylic painting or an oil painting is huge,” Siano said. “You usually can’t remove a varnish from an acrylic because of the solubilities, they’re too similar. But on an oil painting, you can.”
A nonexpert might be worried about seeing a crack in a painting, but, according to Siano, there are normal cracks, which often happen with age, and bad cracks. Indeed, the lack of cracking can make her raise an eyebrow.
“With a thickly painted Joan Mitchell with no cracks, I would wonder why,” she said. “It’s very hard to hide cracks, and it’s an unusual thing to find certain artists’ work without them.”
Siano works on many Color Field paintings — mid-20th century abstractions with large areas of color — and she stopped at the Yares Art booth to look at two of them: Helen Frankenthaler’s “Swan Lake I” and Morris Louis’s “Number 30,” both from 1961.
The Frankenthaler’s sinuous blooms of color were made with Magna, an acrylic resin paint. The artist poured it directly on the canvas, a technique she helped pioneer in the 1950s, and Siano pointed out that around some of the areas of color was a slight halo of gray.
“The staining around the passages is actually part of how the art was made,” Siano said. “It was part of the materials that were being used at that time, and so that has caused this darkening.”
The Louis work, a series of bright vertical stripes, was also made with Magna. When I pointed out to her that the canvas seemed to have tiny holes, Siano smiled, noting that this might be worrisome — but only “if you didn’t know better.”
The punctures are part of the painter’s process. “It’s from the way that he would staple the canvas,” she said. “Those are little staple holes from where he pulled the staples out. It’s totally normal for this type of Louis.”
She added, “People don’t always know what they’re seeing, and they rely on me to explain all of this to them.”
At the Perrotin booth, she was intrigued by the sheen of Bernard Frize’s abstract work “Tane” (2024). “It’s got this interesting, smooth, waxy surface,” she said, guessing that he used resin in his paint. “It probably makes it easy to clean.”
Most notable to Siano was that the paint wraps slightly around the edge of the canvas. “If you had to roll this painting, you would have to unfurl it,” she said. “If you flatten that out, you could crack that whole edge. A good conservator would not do that.”
Siano said that collectors sometimes buy a work that is too large to get into certain spaces. “People think that every big work can be just taken off a stretcher and rolled,” she said. “That is quite incorrect. Because you can completely damage your artwork by doing that. But there are many that can be.”
Perrotin was also showing the Miami artist Hernan Bas’s “Can you hear my teeth cracking?” (2024) — a figural scene with two men — which she admired for its technique, “almost like an old master.”
She noted, in a couple of places on the canvas, areas of raised, thickly accreted paint, known as impasto, which can be tricky for shipping and storage. “If you wrap it incorrectly, it can get pressed,” Siano said, warning that the impasto can flatten out. “Putting it in plastic is really a mistake. Do not do that. The plasticizers from that can migrate, and make it almost melt.”
As much as she knows about the subject of painting, Siano said that the education process never stops. “I just saw an Albers at David Zwirner,” she said, referring to the German-born artist Josef Albers and his “Homage to the Square: Renewed Hope” (1951).
“It’s painted on the smooth side of the Masonite, which is very unusual,” Siano said, referring to the engineered wood that Albers painted on. “We’re more used to seeing the Masonite texture in his paintings, so someone might not understand it.” She talked to the Zwirner staff about the process and was still digesting the new information.
“I’m always learning,” she said. “I want to know the back story of everything.”
The post With Million-Dollar Paintings at Stake, What Does the Art Doctor Say? appeared first on New York Times.
