Herbert Lank (Former Director of the Hamilton Kerr Institute, 1976 -1980)
Herbert Lank was born in Berlin in 1925, the only child of Werner and Annie Schönlank. His father ran a successful advertising business until 1933, when his unconcealed dislike of the Nazi party led friends to suggest that he and his family would be advised to leave Germany. After a few years in Paris, the family finally settled in London in June 1937.
During the war he attended art school. In 1946 he was called upon to help to mend a compressor belonging to an old school friend of his father, a fellow émigré with whom Schönlank played tennis. His name was Helmut Ruhemann, the former chief restorer at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, whose visit to England in 1933 was a result of the worsening political situation in Germany. His reputation had preceded him, and he went to work as a restorer for the National Gallery under Kenneth Clark’s directorship. According to Lank, when Ruhemann discovered that he had no clear idea what he wanted to do, he offered to take him on as an apprentice “to clean his brushes”. The element of self-deprecation in the account was typical. Lank joined the staff as an assistant restorer.
Throughout his career he not only retained a large measure of respect for his mentor, but with his less combative nature and his reasoned arguments he did a great deal to promulgate standard procedures derived from Ruhemann’s principles. He went further, however, in his own more sensitive approach to old master paintings, which he treated as elderly patients in need of tender care.
One of the practices that earned him increasing respect was to keep retouching to the minimum required to make a painting legible, using tempera or other reversible media. He also recognised the importance of varnishes and the impact they had on the appearance of a painting. In the case of Monet, for instance, he found documentary evidence to show that some of his canvases were deliberately left unvarnished. Thanks to his research, the fashion for a uniformly “glossy finish” has faded to the point of extinction.
By the time Lank resigned from his post at the National Gallery in 1953 his reputation was sufficiently secure to enable him to attract both private and institutional clients throughout the country. They included the National Trust and the owners of some 28 country houses as well as 15 museums and galleries, among them the Wallace Collection in London and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
When Michael Jaffé, the director of the Fitzwilliam, persuaded the University of Cambridge to establish an institute for the conservation of easel paintings in 1974, there was one obvious candidate to become the first director. The Hamilton Kerr Institute opened in 1976 in the Old Mill House in Whittlesford, seven miles south of Cambridge, with Herbert and Nancy Lank as residents in an improbable country-house setting, which amused them by its incongruity but which they succeeded in turning into a centre as sociable as it was professional. Curators and conservators from near and far would gather there as weekend guests to exchange views in the studios and around the dinner table. It earned Lank the sobriquet “the restorer’s restorer”.
In recruiting students to the diploma course offered by the institute, Lank set greater store on aptitude than prior knowledge. He favoured candidates whose education, like his own, had exposed them to both arts and sciences. As students they would progress from learning about the techniques involved in painting by practising them, on panel and canvas, to working under supervision on paintings that came to the institute for treatment. For many the most memorable part of their training was at the feet of the master.
As one recalled, “you would sit and watch him clean or retouch a painting saying that this was the only way to learn”, adding that “he would often swear quietly to himself when retouching — but always in French. ‘Zut!’ or ‘Merde!’ would be heard in the otherwise silent room.”
In 1980 Lank moved from Whittlesford to establish the institute’s London Studio. He continued to teach at the Old Mill House on one or two days a week until he retired from the university in 1992, but his base was in the London Studio, where he was joined by a succession of interns.
There he retained a watching brief on the institute as its reputation continued to grow under successive directors. With its facilities for advanced technical analysis and its expanding archives, it became a destination for interns, conservators and technical art historians from all over the world.
Today, Lank’s former students and assistants populate conservation departments around the world. They include the heads of conservation at the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the senior conservator at the Royal Collection Trust. In the words of another of his followers, “he was the kernel of a whole ‘family’ of conservators, and an influence that has spread throughout the world”.
Herbert Lank, art restorer, was born on October 11, 1925. He died on September 11, 2020, aged 94.
Adapted from ‘Herbert Lank obituary’, The Times, Wednesday 6th January 2021, https://www.thetimes.com/culture/art/article/herbert-lank-obituary-cp3pm2wzv
The Herbert Lank Student Bursary is awarded annually to an HKI student.