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ALICE BLOHM: I was young and very new to this.
And I just had tremendous respect for the piece,
and very carefully removed what I considered to be
old and restoration.
So my eye got much better just looking at it.
But in the very beginning, and all through I was very careful
to make sure what I was removing was restoration.
Alice trained me on the tapestry,
and she had been working on it already for a number of years
when I came in '78.
And she gave me such a sense of how sacred this art was,
and that it had to be treated like that.
And it's a tremendous privilege to be able to work
with something like this, and Alice conveyed that to me 100%.
KANE: So you can see the four distinct pieces.
The red lines that look kind of like veins indicate the cuts.
And the red blotches with the pins in them indicate the holes.
Early on, the decision was taken by the head of the department
and by Tim, the curator of The Cloisters,
that this tapestry, because of its value, its uniqueness,
and the fact that a lot of it was intact,
was going to be restored
rather than stabilized in some way or another.
And the first thing that had to be done in that process
was that it had to be cleaned, and to have it cleaned,
you had to take out all of the bad repair.
Because a lot of it was probably not color fast,
and also it had nothing to do with the original tapestry.
And it actually was distorting the images,
rather than helping with the images.
Alice did the most extraordinary job of that
because she saved every fiber of the original.
And later, when we started reconstructing it,
that was evidence about what had been there
before the damage had occurred.
And it gave invaluable information about color,
about the palette, about the way the artists
who were weaving drew in the tapestry, all of that.
It was a magnificent job.
And I think the rest of the job really depended on
that first phase of the treatment.
That is the success of it.
So after that was done,
Alice prepared the four fragments for a wet cleaning,
and we do that by sewing protective netting
around the damaged areas so that further damage won't occur.
Even today, we could barely wet- clean a tapestry of this size,
but we could do it in this department.
So that was in 1973.
And today, it is 2009.
And we are just completing this project right now.
It is very meticulous work.
Restoration of a tapestry means
that you're actually reconstructing
all of the missing areas of warp and weft.
And because there was so much damage,
simply even joining the four pieces
on a tapestry of this fineness--
which is 15 to 18 warps per inch--
if you take 25 feet and you divide that into inches,
and then you divide that into 18 to 15 warps,
you can calculate how many warps we've actually replaced
to get it back together again.
So that was sort of the physical challenge.
Then there was the aesthetic challenge
of getting the images restored
because we didn't know how much had been lost.
It was very, very painstaking,
actually researching the other tapestries in the series,
art from this period, other forms of art--
like prints and panel painting, and things like that--
to begin to understand how the artists from this period
actually drew the images that we were working with here.
Tremendous amount of research went into it.
And tapestry is unique in this department because we treat it
actually more like a painting than we do like other textiles,
which are basically stabilized in the condition that they're in
when they come into the collection.
Here, if there's missing images,
we do something equivalent to inpainting,
but we do it with wool.
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KANE: This tapestry was cut into four pieces.
We can't even really speculate why.
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The area that we're working on is this portion of the tapestry,
and the hole is this area here, and we're going to re-weave it.
These are threads that I have inserted into the tapestry,
and I'm going to go across the whole area like that.
And then I'll start working on what was in there
in terms of design.
We have bits of the original materials
that are in these warp yarns that are left,
so we can see that, and then we can begin
to piece it together as an image.
(music playing)
I started here in 1978.
It began about 20 years ago,
and we're hoping it will be finished in about four years.
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Its sister tapestry is called
"The Battle Between the Vices and the Virtues."
What we have here is the original tapestry.
This is what we have added, believing that this would be
the warp turn-under dimension.
And what this image indicates is that the original border
was like that.
Now, I have to say that this decision to do this
is 99% made at this point, but we were actually
just discussing with the curator this morning
whether this was something that everybody felt
entirely all right about.
The alternative would be to leave it a larger border
because in a way, it would define the images
a little more clearly.
To that edge is original 16th century tapestry.
So you see it's very comparable to this.
And this is turned under in the photo.
And so we will turn this under, in all probability.
The tapestry is very well supported on the back.
The department has put a whole system of straps on the back
to help carry the hanging weight.
And I don't think anybody's ever come up with a formula
of how much tapestries drop in the hanging time,
but it's one of the reasons that we're doing this
preliminary to taking it up to The Cloisters
is because we want to see if we can gauge that.
And if it starts to drop too much,
because we have limited space at The Cloisters,
perhaps there's something we can do
to kind of at least mitigate that.
So you know, you can imagine what a moment it is for me
to see this after having worked on particular parts of it
for so long.
And it's really part of the...
I'm not going to say the problem,
but maybe a kind of skill that restorers need
to be able to focus on a small part
and all the time keep the big picture in mind.
But I first saw this tapestry
when I started to work on it in 1978.
And in the subsequent years, this is only the fourth time
that I've seen the whole thing during the period
that we were working on it.
So we would bring it up periodically and lay it out
in there so we could see how what we were doing
actually looked in relationship to the whole thing.
But this is the first time that it has ever been seen
in the hanging position.
And that again is a very different thing
than looking at it flat.
You know, the problem with this tapestry was the fact
that it had been cut from side to side.
And I think one of my main questions
was what was going to happen when the tapestry went up
and the whole weight of it fell down on the damaged areas
that we had restored
that ran from one side of the tapestry to the other.
And now looking at it, I'm relieved.
I mean when you look at it, do you see the cuts?
WOMAN: Not a hint.
Not a hint.
Hooray.
(laughs)
We did it.
(indistinct chatter)
(applause)
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