The Foundation of IIC and the Fight for Scientific Conservation

What is it about?

This article, in the field of the history of art conservation, discusses the promotion of a more scientific approach to conservation in the mid-twentieth century and the opposition it aroused. The International Institute for the Conservation of Museum Objects (IIC) was founded in 1950 to promote a scientific approach to conservation and to raise the proficiency and professional status of conservators. The idea for the future IIC was first raised in correspondence of 1945 between G. L. Stout (Head of the Department for Conservation and Technical Research at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts) and F.I.G. Rawlins (Scientific Adviser at the National Gallery, London). During the five years it took to found IIC the desire to make conservation more scientific encountered significant opposition. The paper discusses the emergence and nature of this opposition at the First Biennial Conference of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in 1948, where Philip Hendy (Director of the National Gallery, London) met with a hostile reaction to the cleaning of paintings at the Gallery. It describes the effect of this opposition on the progress towards the foundation of IIC, which was such that by the time IIC was incorporated the scientific approach that IIC had always sought to promote was defined against an aesthetic approach, a distinction upon which the subsequent term ‘scientific conservation’ can be considered to depend.

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Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash