Restorers work to conserve art battered by Katrina

CHICAGO -- Helen Conklin whisks a cotton swab delicately across a 19th century painting of silvery fish set in deep earth tones. She's looking for, of all things, mud on the canvas -- and sure enough, there it is.\nShe peers at another painting through a microscope, focusing on a cardinal's rich crimson robes that have faded to a sickly pink. That's the mark of floodwaters.\nThese works and many others -- paintings and frames crusted with mold and fungus, bits of debris, even a few feathers -- are here to be repaired and revived by art conservationists participating in their own version of hurricane recovery.\nThey're part of The Chicago Conservation Center, a team of experts working in a sprawling seventh-floor studio more than 800 miles from New Orleans and the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina. They have much to do: A giant multicolored abstract is splattered with grime, an autumn landscape is flaking, canvases are sagging.\nIn an epic disaster where there were many harrowing chronicles of life and death, these treasures tell a different tale of survival.\n"Art is a narrative and tells a lot of personal stories," says Heather Becker, CEO of the center. "If we don't try to save the history of our culture, of our communities, we lose that forever."\nThe conservation work in Chicago is among many public and private efforts to salvage tens of millions of dollars' worth of cultural gems damaged in hurricanes Katrina and Rita.\nThe American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works, based in Washington, D.C., is sending conservators to the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency and cultural associations determine how to best repair waterlogged historic documents, sodden furniture and artwork. It also will help private citizens with damaged collections and heirlooms.\nEven before the floodwaters buried New Orleans, efforts were under way to preserve art treasures. Workers at the New Orleans Museum of Art secured sculptures and moved some paintings before the storm, then kept vigil inside in the chaotic days when looters rampaged through the streets.\nThe museum's insurer, AXA Art Insurance Corp., dispatched private security guards to protect the building as well as clients who had galleries or private collections in the French Quarter or other areas.\nThe museum, which has 40,000 pieces in a collection estimated to be worth about $250 million, escaped relatively unscathed. A giant sculpture in the garden needs repairs. Three other objects inside had water damage. The building is now haven to nearly 1,000 works that private collectors, galleries and other museums are storing there temporarily.\n"If there are angels in the heavens above, the museum's angels were archangels," says Jacqueline Sullivan, the museum's deputy director. "The storage was 12 feet underground. I can't imagine why it did not flood."\nBut others weren't as lucky.\nAXA estimates that Katrina-related losses to its private clients -- including collectors, corporations and galleries -- could be as high as $30 million, according to Christiane Fischer, the corporation's chief executive officer.\nIn recent weeks, hundreds of damaged pieces -- including paintings by well-known artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, William Merritt Chase and Alfred Bierstadt -- have arrived at The Chicago Conservation Center in climate-controlled trucks.\nThey were collected by intrepid staffers who secured the art in what they call "rescue and recovery missions."\nDonning impermeable Tyvek suits with hoods, gloves, boots and respirators and guided by flashlights, the workers often made their way through dark, flood-scarred homes in New Orleans.\n"It's like an oven," says Walter Wilson, the center's director of disaster response. "You're doing an excruciatingly difficult job when it's 100 degrees"