Muddy Paper / Paper is Clean Mud
Paper is clean mud.
Mud is nothing.
Paper is nothing.
Words are mud
falling from my mouth.
Don’t track mud onto the carpet.
Sandy Kinnee
January 2009
Thank you Jacqueline Kennedy, for helping rescue Italian art. Thank you also, for sending my wife-to-be to Florence and Venice.
My wife was a young Art History graduate student at Columbia University while terrible floods inundated Florence. She was just into her degree program and had not yet decided to focus on Toulouse-Lautrec for her dissertation. No she was far from that bend in her road. She couldn’t even see it from where she stood. She’d just been craning her neck and looking up at Italian art when the offer came from the Committee to Rescue Italian Art (aka CRIA), landed in her lap. I won’t recite to you the story of what she did or where or who she met or about her collection of Gucci bags; not least of which included a "Jackie". I’ll just say it was significant that she accepted the proposal and headed to Tuscany. Beyond that, it’s her tale to write one day.
Instead I’ll tell you the things that strike me as interesting.
The purpose of Jackie Kennedy’s CRIA was to save, repair, and restore art that had been damaged by the floods. As it turned out, when Gale and all of the other young art historians reached Italy there was more money and manpower than was needed. Young art historians were not trained art conservators. There were only so many affected artworks anyway.
So instead of fixing paintings the young art historians were put to work not in museums or galleries or chapels, but libraries. There, they were given the task of scraping dried mud from index cards in the card catalog.
Fortunately other diversions would rescue them from this tedious task. But as I said that is her tale to tell. For me, scraping mud off of paper is another task lost in time. The index cards, no doubt, were made with clay as an ingredient. Kaolin, used also in porcelain, helps fill the microscopic spaces between the fibers and helps create a smoother writing surface.
The whiteness of the kaolin and the smoothness it imparts to the paper is a desirable attribute. Additionally, Clay is an inexpensive additive that somewhat reduces the amount of pulp needed to make a sheet of paper. It is filler and smoother at once.
To me, once the paper pulp and mud mix together, it’s one. The young art historians disliked scraping the mud off the cards and quit as quickly as possible. I guess I wouldn’t scrape the mud off either, I’d like the piece of index card and the mud to become the new piece it wanted to be.
When I think of Italian art I am sometimes reminded of Muddy Paper.
Sandy Kinnee
January 2009