Chemical Artist

An immortal work of art may be as much to the credit of scientist ROBERT L. FELLER '41 as it is to the genius of the artist.

Dr. Feller is an expert on the chemistry of art. As senior fellow he heads the National Gallery of Art Research Project at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh. His work began there in 1950 on the nation's longest continuing research effort for the development of new materials and techniques for the artist and the museum conservator.

"I think an artist has to understand his materials in order to use them," he says. "In a sense, mine is a teaching type of job."

The Mellon Institute has recently merged with Carnegie Institute of Technology and is now part of Carnegie-Mellon University. While Dr. Feller does no classroom lecturing; he educates artists and experts via three yearly publications.

He describes another part of his work as analogous to a medical researcher's. "I don't restore pictures. All I can do is ask the restorers, 'What do you want to do?' Like a medical research person, I would advise the doctor - he'd treat the patient."

In this context he is an expert's expert. Recognizing this, Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy's Committee to Rescue Italian Art (CRIA) and the National Gallery of Art sent him to Florence last year after the floods to advise workers restoring frescoes. Repairs were being done in cold, unheated buildings and a special polymer emulsion was required for these conditions. Dr. Feller's tests in the Mellon Institute's cold rooms resulted in his discovering several compositions which could be used in temperatures even below freezing.

Dr. Feller also served as chemist-consultant to an American committee which established a repair center for some of the two million books which were affected by the Florentine floods.

His education and experience have consistently pursued parallel interests in science and art. At Dartmouth he was a chemistry major and art editor of Jacko. (He even did some fashion sketches for a Sunday Supplement on the "in" thing for Dartmouth dates - bobby socks and "ultrasmart" white jackets.) And while earning his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Rutgers, he contributed cartoons and drawings to campus magazines.

In 1961 he spent a year and a half as a visiting scientist at the newly established Conservation Center at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.

Though not a public figure, Dr. Feller enjoys an international reputation. He travels about a quarter of the time - including Europe almost annually - advising museums on illumination and the preservation of silk, photographs, and prints. He has published and lectured extensively on varnishes, resins, solvents, and deteriorating effects of light.

It's understandable that he can't devote as much time as he'd like to his own hobby of painting, and he now manages about one watercolor a year.

"I'm like Churchill," he says of his painting habits. "I go and sit under an umbrella. That means you have to go out and plan a picnic or something."

And lately Dr. Feller can't seem to sandwich it in.