Climate box

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A climate box is used to transport works of art as gently as possible. Ideally, a work of art should be transported "from nail to nail" without being impaired.

properties

Climate boxes have a special wall structure to stabilize their indoor climate for a reasonable period of time. They are supposed to protect the art work against temperature and humidity fluctuations as well as against mechanical damage. To do this, they must be watertight and airtight. The extent to which this happens depends on the sensitivity of the art object. The almost constant temperature and humidity in the climate box prevents:

In the case of very valuable works of art, custom-made air-conditioning boxes are made for transport in order to meet the curatorial and restoration requirements exactly and to be able to control them at any time.

No climate boxes are:

  • Picture or object boxes. These are transport boxes for larger pictures, paintings or large-format graphics and photographs. These transport containers only protect the transported goods against mechanical damage, but not against climatic fluctuations;
  • Transport frame. They serve as a protective device when transporting or storing paintings or other flat art objects. They also only protect against mechanical damage, but not against climatic fluctuations.

history

On the one hand, since lending between museums began in the second half of the 19th century , it was known that works of art suffered from transport and that fluctuations in temperature and humidity could be very detrimental to their preservation. An attempt by the International Museum Office in Rome in 1930 to restrict lending was unsuccessful. On the contrary: after the Second World War , loan traffic increased dramatically. State of the art up to the 1960s were "double boxes", an inner box that contained the work of art and an outer box that held the inner box. The space was filled with packaging material. In the case of overseas transports, the outer box was coated with zinc or tin sheet and welded airtight. In 1963, a working group “The control of environment during the transport of works of art” was set up at the International Council of Museums . The working group's rapporteur published a book on this that was considered to be a standard work and advocated climate boxes. In the 1970s, the idea also began to take hold in Germany. In 1973 Karl-Heinz Weber from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (then: German Democratic Republic ) designed an “air-conditioned painting transport box”, in 1975 a working group was set up within the German Restorers Association eV (DRV), also known as the “box committee”, which operates in the Federal Republic Germany campaigned for the dissemination of the transport of works of art in climate boxes.

A historical air conditioning box from 1974 is still in the collection of the Hessen Kassel Museum Landscape . At that time, a transport box was mainly made of plywood , the insulation was made of Styrofoam , and hygroscopic buffer material was also used to fill the remaining cavities between the work of art and the transport container. While the first air-conditioning boxes were still being made in the museum's workshops, the process was soon adopted by the shipping industry. At the end of the 1970s , the forwarding company Hasenkamp was the first company in Germany to bring a “climate box” onto the market. Others soon followed.

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ 2001 merged with the Association of Restorers .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Homepage of a manufacturer .
  2. ↑ Wermescher, p. 102.
  3. ↑ Wermescher, p. 103.
  4. ^ Nathan Stolow: Controlled Environment for Works of Art in Transit . Butterworth & Co Publishers Ltd. 1966. ISBN 978-0408160506
  5. ↑ Wermescher, p. 104.
  6. ↑ Wermescher, pp. 102, 104.
  7. ↑ Wermescher, pp. 102, 105.
  8. ↑ Wermescher, pp. 104f.
  9. ↑ Wermescher, pp. 106f.