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- Tapestries were woven in very specialized workshops.
They decorated a room,
but also served as a form of insulation
in these very drafty buildings.
(staff chatters)
They could easily be taken on and off the wall,
moved around residences,
which often their fragile, and at times, altered state.
My name is Kathrin Colburn.
- My name is Kisook Suh.
- We recently embarked on this major conservation campaign
of the Heroes tapestry series,
one of the oldest in The Met's collection.
The series was moved around and cut apart.
Today, five of these original nine
(bouncy music) reside at the cloisters.
Before the museum acquired the King Arthur tapestry,
his entourage of bishops, archbishops and cardinals,
had already been separated.
It actually was incorporated (anticipatory music)
in curtains that were hanging
in a chateau in Normandy.
Between 1947 and 1949,
the museum hired very skilled needlewomen
to separate these curtains.
There were lots of missing parts.
They had to insert the original into modern material.
The series was installed in the cloister's Heroes room
and has been hanging there ever since.
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- [Kisook] We checked the condition of the tapestry,
and it was obvious
it needs some support and intervention.
- [Kathrin] One of the major decisions we had to make
was how do we clean this tapestry?
Wet-cleaning this tapestry (water rushes)
is an enormous undertaken.
We worked together very carefully in the wet lab facility,
which we use for washing historic textiles.
(water rippling)
(staff chattering)
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It was washed from the front and from the back.
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We use sponges to emerge the detergent
into the weave structure to release any soiling.
(staff chatters)
- Our treatment is not only about conserving
and treating tapestry for the look,
it's so much about how to support it
with other supporting, stronger, modern fabric.
We had to make it strong enough to hold the stress
during the display.
Janina Poskrobko, the head of the department,
she invited Anna Szalecki,
and she has more than a few decades of experience
working on tapestry conservation.
Janina'd actually trained Anya 20-something years ago,
and now Anya's training me.
It's a tradition.
It was a real privilege working
on the tapestry so closely.
(scissors snip)
We wanted to show the remaining original
as much as possible,
so we need to remove certain repairs.
The new material that we are using
has to match with the original.
It was woven much earlier
than the rest of the tapestries in the collection,
and the yarn quality is different.
So we chose yarn from Finland,
and the look of it was perfect.
We're lucky to have a really great resources
the department has been building on.
Whenever they did dye,
they kept all the recipes (bouncy music)
to have a selection of yarns
when they need it for the treatment.
So we have hundreds of recipes we can refer to.
I was fascinated with the way
the weavers combined those different colors
to render subtle shade effect.
So there's no color change,
but they make that shade effect by the weaving structure.
I call it medieval pointillism. (laughs)
- [Kathrin] To me, it was rewarding to work
in a larger team,
with different skill sets
and different years of experience.
We complimented each other very nicely.
- [Kisook] King Arthur is the first
of the series. (anticipatory music)
So what we learned, we will apply
and have a better, more efficient way
to address the next panels.
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