Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • Page 2-2

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 123456 2 CHICAGO METRO 9 Expires Expires www.montalbanofurniture.com Pickup Delivery Available Comments, questions and suggestions about articles in this section are welcome. Write: Hanke Gratteau Associate Managing Editor for Metropolitan News 435 N. Michigan Ave. Chicago, IL 60611 Call: 312-222-3540 or e-mail: How to contact us By Lisa Fleisher Tribune staff reporter Flora Doody stood in a dimly lit garage in Highland Park on a chilly night last November, hoping that a dirty, damaged canvas would be the forgotten masterpiece she had been searching for. The moment was the culmination of a monthslong hunt for a 19-by-7-foot painting depicting primitive figures gathered around a forge.

Completed in 1909, the work had been missing from Lane Technical High School for five decades. on the threshold of a massive said Doody, curator of Lane vast collection of mostly Depression- era murals. wanted it so much to be the mural. It just seemed like, how could it not Barry Bauman, an art conservator, shined his flashlight at the bottom right corner of the unrolled painting and used his hands to wipe away some grime from the dark canvas. There, in the lower right corner, was the signature, barely visible: Dorothy Loeb 09.

The painting, rediscovered through a serendipitous mix of luck and coincidence, will be displayed Friday and Saturday at the Corbett vs. Dempsey art gallery on North Ashland Avenue. After restoration, it will be reinstalled at the high school. a rare reward to have something discovered that can be saved and restored for other Bauman said. talking the history of art Doody, who oversaw a restoration of the mural collection beginning in the mid-1990s, believed the Loeb painting had been lost, destroyed or disposed of when Lane Tech moved to its North Center location in 1934.

But in August 2004, as she flipped through some old yearbooks from the period after the move, she spotted the work again and again in photographs. Not only had the painting survived, she realized, but it also could be somewhere in the school, perhaps sitting neglected in a storage room. Doody became a woman on a mission. She transformed a group of students trained to give tours of the artwork into detectives, printing up shirts reading Mural Scene a riff on the popular TV series Crime Scene The students interviewed veteran teachers and talked about the missing painting during tours and school events, but the case remained cold. was so anxious and hoping to find said Yasmeen Nanlawala, 19, a former docent and now a freshman at Denison University in Ohio.

could have been Their big break came on Nov. 23, when friend Connie Kieffer, former chairwoman of the Highland Park High School fine arts department, saw a photocopy of the painting on desk and jumped out of her seat. Kieffer had been helping a friend from Highland Park research the origins of a large mural that looked just like the missing Loeb work. It had been part of an art collection the friend inherited from two artists, one whotaught at Lane Tech during the 1950s. That night, the pair, joined by Bauman and Barbara Cook, head of the alumni association, examined the canvas.

The painting, too large to hang in most homes and not valuable enough to steal, was the one they were looking for. But how it got there remains a mystery. The group theorizes that the artist took it home to preserve it. he took it out of a Kieffer said. never Loeb, who was born in Germany in 1887 to American parents, was one of five School of the Art Institute of Chicago students commissioned to create murals for Lane Tech after the turn of the century.

Many more murals were added during the Depression, bringing the total to 67. contribution depicted workers gathering around a giant forge, seeming to worship the toolmaking process. principal wanted something on the backdrop on the stage that would be inspiration- al to the boys sitting in that Doody said. very symbolic of a technical school and very symbolic of the progressive The mural and its four companion portray workers at a dock, a construction site and a steel mill; the other pays homage to touched on themes that were ahead of their time. it in broader historical context, eight years before the Russian Revolution, in terms of the idea of the worker said gallery owner John Corbett.

With the search completed, the rescue began. I saw it, because it was so dark and black, I thought, is Doody said. Bauman, 57, teaches an art conservation class at Lane Tech and, two years after selling his business, now volunteers to restore paintings for non-profit organizations and museums. With a $7,000 grant for materials from the Field Foundation of Il- linois, Bauman soon will begin restoration work on the mural, which is expected to take about a year. He will stabilize the painting with gelatin adhesives.

Using cotton swabs, he will remove the original varnish. Little bubbles on the surface show it is glued to a second canvas. Bauman will separate them, clean off the old adhesive and replace the backing canvas. He and several others will then put the painting onto a new wood stretcher. Bauman never paints on the original work.

Instead, apply a layer of non-yellowing varnish that acts as a buffer between the work and Bau- touch-ups. Those include filling in areas of lost paint with a white ground material called gesso and matching colors. only talking about little chips of Bauman said. little chips of paint put in the right spot make a whole For Doody, the discovery gives her a particular thrill as a researcher and educator. She said it is a lesson for all her students.

Doody said, you just keep digging and digging, and really open to possibilities that are out of the this is just know where going to take Tribune photo by Antonio Perez Art conservator Barry Bauman and former students of his Lane Tech restoration class, Bob Bronkowski, 19, and Justine Dombrowski, 18, display Dorothy newly found 1909 mural of workers around a forge. The mural used to hang at Lane Tech. Mural will restore a bit of history painting from Lane Tech that celebrates workers is found after being lost for decades.