Rescuing MoMA's Submerged "Swimming Pool"

In a previous post, I lamented the long-time disappearance from the Museum of Modern Art's galleries of Matisse's late masterpiece, The Swimming Pool, a nine-panel mural in two parts (each 7 1/2 feet long), consisting of gouache-on-paper cutouts, pasted on white painted paper mounted on burlap.

Yesterday I caught up with my favorite MoMA curator, Matisse expert John Elderfield, at the contemporary-art press preview. Here's what he told me about the Matisse:

The burlap on which it's done has darkened very significantly. It's a complicated issue because when you look at photographs of what it was like in his [Matisse's] apartment, it's clear that the burlap which it's on isn't the burlap that was on the wall of the apartment. I think what happened is that when the apartment was dismantled, they took the elements off the wall and put them on separate panels of burlap. They gave it a new background from the one it was before....

Sometimes these big things are ones which you tend to keep pushing away a little bit. I'm grateful to you for reminding me that this is something I've got to deal with this year.