The Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center Paper Lab recently completed treatment on a collection of nearly 400 works on paper by the American artist John P. Falter, perhaps best known for his Americana-style cover art for The Saturday Evening Post.
Falter was born in Plattsmouth, Nebraska in 1910, moved to Falls City at a young age, and later studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Art Students League of New York. Falter’s works illustrated popular magazines of the mid 20th-Century including Harper’s, and Life Magazine, as well as 129 covers of the Saturday Evening Post. He died in 1982 in Philadelphia, at the age of 72.
Within the Nebraska State Historical Society’s sizable Falter collection is a large graphite drawing on tracing paper, which may have been a preparatory sketch for a painting. The scene depicts a photographer from Omaha taking a portrait of a Native American man. Surrounding them are other figures wrapped in blankets, and a horse-drawn wagon.
The drawing arrived at the Ford Center rolled up. It had multiple tears, paper losses, and applications of tape, making it difficult to unroll without risking further damage.
Due to the fragile state of the tracing paper, the Paper Lab developed a treatment plan to relax and stabilize the piece, so it could be stored flat and viewed safely.
First, the drawing was surface cleaned to remove dirt and debris that had accumulated over time. Graphite media that had transferred onto the back side of the paper while it was rolled up was reduced as well.
The tape was removed using scalpel blades and a solvent chamber to help soften the underlying adhesive, which reduced the risk of tearing the paper while taking away the tape.
Next, the Paper Lab used a humidity chamber to gently introduce aqueous moisture into the paper and help it relax out of its rolled-up shape. The humidified drawing was placed between absorbent blotting papers and dried under weights to flatten.
Tears in the drawing were mended with light-weight repair paper coated with solvent-activated adhesive. Unlike most other items in the Falter collection, which were repaired using water-soluble adhesives, the tracing paper wrinkled when exposed to water. For this reason, the Paper Lab chose to use an acrylic adhesive reactivated by acetone to minimize wrinkling in the paper.
Finally, the Paper Lab repaired losses in the drawing where portions of the original tracing paper had been lost. To do this, fills were shaped from dyed papers, coated with solvent-activated adhesives, to match the outlines of the loss areas. These paper fills helped to visually obscure the losses in the paper, letting the viewer focus on the subject of the drawing, and also strengthened the paper, making it less prone to catching and tearing.
The drawing has been rehoused in an archival folder and returned to the Nebraska State Historical Society Collections, where it will live in a stable environment protected from further damage. All of the nearly 400 Falter collection items were examined, cleaned, and rehoused in archival folders and storage boxes.
*We would like to add a special note of thanks to our summer intern, Arthur Fowler, for their work on the John Falter collection during their summer internship at the Ford Center!
