Awards
2010 CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
David Bomford
David Bomford (photograph by Bradley Marks)
The CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation recognizes outstanding contributions to the understanding of art through the application of knowledge and experience in conservation, art history, and art. This year’s award goes to David Bomford, associate director for collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for his more than thirty years of scholarship, practical application, and leadership in the field of paintings conservation.
Bomford started his career in 1968 as an assistant restorer at the National Gallery in London, and by 1974 he assumed the role of senior restorer, a position he held until 2005. During his tenure there he worked and published on an extraordinary range of paintings, including Giotto’s Pentecost; Raphael’s Vision of a Knight; Rubens’s Samson and Delilah; Rembrandt’s Ecce Homo; Canaletto’s Stonemason’s Yard; Hogarth’s Marriage á la Mode series; Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian; Degas’s Hélène Rouart; and numerous Impressionist paintings, including Monet’s Beach at Trouville, Renoir’s Les Parapluies, Morisot’s Summer’s Day, and Pissarro’s Fox Hill.
In the course of his work as a practicing conservator, Bomford has advanced the study of art conservation to new levels by combining science, art history, and practical conservation knowledge in his extraordinary list of publications, and by spearheading the influential interdisciplinary study of technical art history. His list of books is long and impressive and includes the superlative Art in the Making series, which documents comprehensive and groundbreaking research into the technical and historic significance of artists from the early Italian period to the modern era. These major studies include Rembrandt (1988), Italian Painting before 1400 (1989), Impressionism (1990), Underdrawings in Renaissance Paintings (2002), and Degas (2004). Other publications include the exhibition catalogue Venice through Canaletto’s Eyes (1998) and the single-most useful book for introducing both students and the public to the profession of paintings conservation, Conservation of Paintings (1997). Since its publication this book has been a standard reference guide for the discipline, providing aspiring paintings conservators with introductory case studies, professional terminology, and comparative technical analyses.
Bomford is also an outstanding and accessible public scholar. He was one of the editors of Readings in Conservation: Issues in the Conservation of Paintings (for the Getty in 2004), which forms the foundation for many entry-level graduate seminars in art history and conservation. He is the first and still the only conservator who has served as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford (1996–97), placing him in the company of John Ruskin, John Pope-Hennessy, and Kenneth Clark. His recent appointment to the position of associate director for collections at the Getty, a position traditionally reserved for art historians, is yet another indication of Bomford’s success in elevating the role and profile of paintings conservation in the broader museum culture. As one supporter of his nomination writes, “it is no exaggeration to say that he made possible the climate in which such a position [at the Getty] could be given to a conservator. In other words he has changed the nature of the profession to which he belongs.” And yet another supporter of his nomination, also a senior figure in the conservation field, surmises that Bomford might be the most outstanding living scholar in art conservation.
Jury: Jonathan P. Binstock, Citi Private Bank Art Advisory Service, chair; Michele Marincola, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and Wynne Phelan, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
