From the Archives | Conserving Jackson Pollock's "Portrait and a Dream"

A large painting like this on unpainted canvas acts almost like a filter in the air, so it's exposed to dust and grime, and at one point early in the history of the museum or in the history of this painting, it was even exposed to cigarette smoke. It had a little bit of the aroma of cigarette smoke to me when I was recently working on it and cleaning it. So that has yellowed the canvas, and there are a number of surface spills, little liquid spills over time. So my conservation work on this has been to clean the dust and grime from the surface to the extent possible. This is not like cleaning a traditional painting where you have a dense paint film and then grime on top of it. It's actually embedded somewhat in the surface and in the canvas. So my challenge was to reduce that without abrading the surface and without driving it further into the canvas, and I worked with a combination of techniques that are dry-cleaning techniques that is not the same as what you would do with a professional dry-cleaner who immerses something in solvent, but by dusting and removing dust and grime from the surface using a combination of soft brushes, followed by some soft sponges that are made for conservation and some dry-cleaning products that are made just for conservation that actually, when you tamp the surface, lift off some of that grime. So it was a process of very, very lightly working over the entire surface, removing as much of that dust and grime as possible, and then working with a very modest amount of distilled water, dampening some special, again, very pure polyvinyl acetate sponges to very lightly tamp off the surface and draw off the surface some of the additional grime.