Five years and $6m later, restoration at New York’s Nevelson Chapel is nearing completion – The Art Newspaper

Works of art, even those seen as divinely inspired, sometimes suffer embarrassing indignities. They can be broken and punctured, their colours can fade. They can suffer water damage—like the Rothko Chapel in Houston, battered last year by Hurricane Beryl, which damaged the building’s roof and the paintings inside. Add to this list paint peeling off a series of sculptures in New York by the late artist Louise Nevelson (1899-1988). It happened in 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown, after a heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system was shut off inside the Nevelson Chapel. The damage, resulting from a massive spike in humidity, has taken five years and millions of dollars to repair.

The Chapel of the Good Shepherd, more commonly known as the Nevelson Chapel, is located inside St Peter’s Lutheran Church, which is itself nestled by the Citigroup Center on Lexington Avenue. (The church’s original building was on the site, and its congregation made a deal with Citigroup to build a new structure in the same place when the bank’s skyscraper was erected.) Like most Manhattan office buildings during lockdown, the Citigroup Center was empty for months.

“Because there were no people in the building, Citigroup shut down their HVAC,” says Martha Singer, a conservator who has been working on the restoration of the Nevelson sculptures. There was a separate HVAC system for the Nevelson Chapel, but it was tied to the larger building’s HVAC, so when one was shut off, the other shut off too. This led to the chapel’s relative humidity rising to levels of close to 90%. “It caused some of the paint to peel in this extreme way,” Singer tells The Art Newspaper. “Some areas looked like they had been treated with paint stripper.” The situation went on for at least a week or two—no one is quite sure how long—until someone from the church came by and saw the damage.

Now, five years later, the restoration project is largely complete, the chapel is open again for quiet contemplation, and a better system of environmental controls unconnected to the Citigroup Center’s HVAC system has been installed. The overall cost of conservation has been $6m, including an endowment to cover future restoration needs. Funding has come from a number of sources, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Pace Gallery and the Henry Luce Foundation.

St Peter’s Lutheran Church, designated a New York City landmark in 2016, is a Modernist marvel with what Singer calls an “odd shape”. Nevelson’s series of nine white-painted wooden sculptures, referred to collectively as an environment, were made specifically to fit into its pentagonal space. She created crosses behind the altar and next to the door, a frieze of the 12 Apostles, a lintel of grapes and wheat over the door, a “sky vestment” and a three-part sculpture hanging at the front of
the chapel.

Jared R. Stahler, a pastor of the congregation, says that although he never met Nevelson himself, he heard about her from the former pastor who had commissioned her work. The artist, who was Jewish, “spoke about elements of the chapel in both Christian and Jewish ways”, Stahler says. “For example, the four circles that are below the 12 boxes in the Frieze of the Apostles. She’s spoken of these as being like the four fringes on a tallit [a Jewish prayer shawl]. The same thing can also be seen as the four evangelists imbued with the Holy Spirit. Those 12 boxes: the 12 tribes of Israel or the 12 Apostles.”

Nevelson’s sculptures, as awe-inspiring as they may be, have been a conservation project almost from the day they were installed in 1977. Within five years, they were already peeling, in part because Nevelson had worked with a fire-retardant paint. Used in offices, this type of paint reacts to intense heat by releasing a flame-dampening gas that delays the spread of flames, allowing more time for evacuation. It also absorbs moisture—good in a fire, less so for painted works of art. So why did Nevelson choose this particular paint?

In 1976, the artist had created an architectural environment for a federal courthouse in Philadelphia. It was also painted with fire-retardant paint. “We don’t know, and we have no way to prove this, but we think the federal courthouse being a federal building required a fire-retardant paint,” Singer says. “And so the next year, when she painted the chapel, she used the same paint, thinking she was probably doing the church a favour.”

Conservation complication

The problem of the peeling paint became evident in the early 1980s, leading the church to bring in a restorer. (“Nobody really knows who he was or who paid him, as he’s not really on the books,” Singer says.) But the underlying problem was never fully addressed. In the following years, a group of graduate students from New York University came in to try to fix things. And another conservator was hired in 2014. “We’re at least the fourth conservation campaign,” Singer says.

For the first couple of years after the HVAC disaster, Singer and her team investigated what Nevelson and the previous restorers had done. They eventually came up with a plan focused on “cleaning and re-adhering the paint that’s lifting off the wood back down to the wood”, Singer says. Where paint has been lost permanently, they are doing what is called in-painting—filling in the gaps with easily removable paint. It is an arduous process.

Scraping and painting is fine for the side of a house, but it is not a method accepted by many conservators today. “There’s a philosophical question about how important the original paint is to what the artwork is,” says Jean Dommermuth, a paintings conservator who has worked with Singer on the Nevelson Chapel. But it is also an aesthetic issue.

Pace Gallery, which long represented Nevelson and continues to show her work, “had a show not so long ago, and there were several of her white works that had, in fact, been stripped and painted,” Dommermuth says. “And actually, at one point, Martha [Singer] talked to the founder of Pace, Arne Glimcher, and that was his recommendation. But when you look at those works, they look brand new, and it has a slightly eerie quality—to know that something is 50 years old and have it look brand new.” There was a lot of back-and-forth on this issue, but eventually the church and its arts committee decided to re-adhere the peeled paint back onto the wooden sculptures wherever possible.

Dommermuth calls the damage to the Nevelson sculptures “a perfect storm” of problems—the type of paint originally used, the particular HVAC system installed, the shutting down of that system, the Covid-19 lockdown. No one specifically is at fault, but one cannot quite call it an act of God either. It just happened.