Art: Surgery on 'Gross Clinic' restored its historical place

French philosopher Simone Weil observed that "the past, once destroyed, never returns. Its destruction is perhaps the greatest of all crimes."

That snippet of insight might apply to moving the Barnes Foundation, but fortunately not to Thomas Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic.

Since it was exhibited in the Centennial exposition of 1876 (not in the art section but in a mock-up of an Army hospital), the painting has undergone five major conservation interventions. Given that several of these effaced history, one hesitates to describe them all as "restorations."

The fifth such intervention, just completed, not only restored the masterpiece to something close to how it looked when it left the artist's studio, it also proved that Weil's aphorism isn't absolute. History might have been compromised years ago, but to a large extent it has been revived in one of America's greatest paintings.

An exhibition in the Perelman Building of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the restoration took place, serves as a coming-out party for the rehabilitated canvas. The project was carried out by the picture's joint owners, the Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The restoration completes a reversal of physical decline that began in 1961, when The Gross Clinic was rescued from near-death.

In 1940, a well-meaning consultant had fastened two sheets of plywood to the back of the canvas to "stabilize" it. Twenty years later, the plywood had warped, threatening to tear the painting apart.

The plywood was laboriously removed in the nick of time, but The Gross Clinic still wasn't whole. Earlier conservators had stripped away some of the thin, dark overpainting that Eakins had applied to achieve tonal harmony. The painting had become brighter in some passages; it was out of balance.

Correcting this condition was a delicate undertaking, but the result has been worth the time and effort. We not only see the picture in a new light, we learn something about how Eakins thought about painting and how he translated that into technique.

You might wonder how a museum can make even a modestly scaled exhibition out of one painting. Curator Kathleen A. Foster has done so by creating edifying context, both for the painting's history and subject and for the technical processes that restored its integrity.

The painting depicts a surgical procedure being demonstrated by Dr. Samuel Gross, a legendary professor at Jefferson Medical College, now part of Thomas Jefferson University.