let me sang was American artists who was one of the first wave of artists that
really exploded the scene with the American pop art movement that was made
in 1963 it's one of Lichtenstein's most sort of
recognizable paintings where he really is beginning to use common imagery in a
very confident ways was quiet by Tate in 1966 and I think since then it's been
exhibited extensively and what you can see from the paintings actually it's not
glazed it's not protected I think it was felt necessary to clean the world no to
make it sort of fresh for a new generation election Stein described with
quite a lot of detail how he went about creating worm first of all he purchased
a pre-primed piece of canvas and he projected the comic strip onto the pre
prime canvas and then drew around the projection so the next thing was to
apply the bendy dots he took a piece of aluminium mesh covered the surface of
the mesh with a traditional oil paint and then using a toothbrush he would
start to push the layer of oil paint on top of the stencil through the holes and
deposit it onto the surface of the canvas after that the colored areas of
paint and the colored areas of paint are comprised of a paint called Magna so
this is very much a paint of its time which is a very fast drying paint and we
know that from start to finish the two paintings that Ram is comprised of took
exactly a month for him to make due to the fact that listen Stein has
used several different paint mediums this has led to the painting being very
sensitive to the traditional methods in which we would use to clean that's one
of the reasons why the dirt has been left to continue to accumulate over 50
years many of my colleagues in the past have tried to clean the painting and
have found it too sensitive so that's why this is an incredibly exciting
moment for the painting we've actually found a new newly produced material
that's enabling us to lift that dirt off the surface when we start working on the
conservation treatment we firstly perform several scientific analyses we
then use these information to create a series of mock-ups and then we age the
paints in our environmental artificial agent chamber after that we did apply
some artificial soil as you can see here and AIDS again the samples these allowed
us to test our clean option on all the material which more or less approximate
the age of the original painting so when thinking about the concerns of wam in
particular we knew that some of the paints have particular sensitivity to
these of water or water-based systems we know that other paints have particular
sensitivity to solvent based systems so it doesn't mean that we can't use these
materials but we have to use them carefully
in addition to those solvent sensitivities their paints are quite
susceptible to any kind of rubbing or abrasion that you might do using sponges
or using swabs because the paints are too vulnerable and what we mean by that
is when we're rolling the swabs over the surface we end up seeing a little bit of
pigment so we were very much interested in the types of gels that were being
produced by the nano restart project gels are used in conservation for many
many things and they remain different types of gels and we use them
primarily to control the flow of cleaning systems that are normally free
liquids in a way that we can control the penetration of those liquids into the
work of art so we are now applying the gel onto the UM painting and we're going
to leave the gel for two minutes so just striking it is pushing the gel
into that very shallow texture and so lifting the dirt out we never ever take
any square inch of a painting for granted Pammy's up and as I lift off you
can see the gel has changed color because it's taken up all the dirt so
this is the one that's just been taken off the surface that's got the cleaning
solution in it and then this is the one that's going on which will clear any
residues from the surface
I mean for something that's supposed to look so industrial and machine made it's
so painterly when you look up place I
think to put it at its most simply the end goal of the treatment of wam is to
bring the painting back to life again Lichtenstein really believed that the
world of images could be reduced to hand-painted bending dots and lines
something about that sort of comic book style that religious ties were pioneered
in art have become very ubiquitous but I didn't there to see the work in the
flesh you see the painting you can see you know pencil on the sketching I think
there's something very
it's crass it's also kinda classy it's cheap it's expensive all these different
oscillations I think make this work really sort of powerful and relevant now
the whole point of pop art is newness and a very graphic and impersonal and
industrial surface and once that began to accumulate dirt we lost that
aesthetic that Roy was so conscientious about presenting to us the process of
cleaning the painting has really reestablished that newness of surface
and I think we are now going to be able to provide Tait visitors with the more
appropriate viewing experience of this painting
you