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A painting made by artist Georgia O'Keeffe is back on display after being restored due to tarantula damage.
While that might seem a bit ridiculous, the job put into the 1948 piece entitled "Spring" is being considered one of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's biggest restoration projects ever. Around 1,250 hours and $145,000 were put into restoring "Spring" back to its original form. Experts are attributing the damage done to the piece to water damage caused after a tarantula tunneled through O'Keeffe's roof after she had completed it. It also appeared to be varnished, an outdated practice that made the restoration process difficult.
"The damage is consistent with it being stacked against another painting," said The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's head of conservation Dale Kronkright. "It's clear at some point that it was sanded. It was almost as if the paint had been pulled off."
The painting is described by the museum as representative of a turning point in the painter's life. As its website describes, "'Spring' is one of the few paintings made during the three-year period that the artist suspended her yearly sojourns to New Mexico, staying in New York to settle her husband Alfred Stieglitz's estate following his death in 1946."
The completed "Spring" will be on display at the museum through October 10, 2022. It will then be transferred to the San Diego Museum of Art at some point in 2023.
"Spring" was last seen by the public in 2019.
The painting combines such O'Keeffe trademarks as desert primroses, a large vertebra and the northern New Mexico mountain peak named Pedernal. Measuring about 4 by 7 feet (1.2 by 2.1 meters), it was the largest canvas the artist had painted up to that point.
"The primrose is associated with mourning; the bones are connected to death. It's interpreted as kind of a memorial to Alfred Stieglitz," said O'Keeffe Museum Curator Ariel Plotek.
Plotek said the fact that O'Keeffe kept the painting for several decades shows it was important to her.
In letters to her New York gallerist, Edith Halpert, O'Keeffe wrote that she didn't know if anyone else would like it.
After the water damage, O'Keeffe sent "Spring" to her personal conservator in New York, calling it "unmanageable and hard to clean." It was restretched and cleaned. Ultraviolet light showed large sponge marks on the painting, likely attempts by the artist to clean it, Kronkright said.
The museum acquired the painting when it opened in 1997.
A $75,000 Bank of America grant funded part of the restoration work, while the museum's operating budget paid for the rest.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
