Re-Master of Arts

Helmut Zitzwitz can bring paintings from death’s door to the showroom floor.

By W. Dyer Halpern

Patooie!

You might not want to believe it, but Helmut Zitzwitz, art restorer extra-ordinaire, has just spit on a painting! “Saliva is a very interesting chemical; its chemical makeup is right between acidity and alkaline,” says Zitzwitz who, 150 his wife Barbara, owns the Hudson River Gallery & Conservators (www.hudsonrivergallery-conservators.com). “It can stop the process of the chemicals to remove varnish, while cleaning the painting.”

As Zitzwitz explains the benefits of truly “homemade” chemicals, he sits at a square table in the back of his third-floor office in the newly renovated Station Plaza building in Yonkers. His silver hair and grizzled face—lined from 75 years of holding a near-constant smile—is covered in a pair of black magnifying goggles. He’s just spent hours mixing Xylene, Toluene, and other strangely spelled chemicals together which he now dabs, “one square inch at a time,” removing decades-old yellow varnish from a decades-old painting. But removing old varnish is just one step in the art restoration process that the New York Times once referred to as the “right touch.”

“Every oil painting should be looked at every sixty to eighty years by someone you trust,” says Zitzwitz, who grew up in Nazi Germany in a family so divided that, during World War II, one member fought for the Germans (after being drafted) and another against them. Zitzwitz explains that the biggest problem faced by art restorers is undoing the damage to paintings caused by antiquated products, such as bee’s wax, that used to secure art to its backing.

After fleeing Berlin for Milwaukee in 1950 (but before working for both the U.S. Department of State, the United States Army, and for the steel industry, where he sold products to big shots such as Lee Iacocca), Zitzwitz spent his free time volunteering and taking courses at the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. But it wasn’t until the early ’80s that Zitzwitz resigned from the steel industry. He bought an art-supply store in Riverdale.

By pure chance, needing to have one of his own paintings restored, he met an art restorer by the name of Gustav Berger. “We just looked him up in the phone book.” Little did Zitzwitz know that Berger had just revolutionized the art-restoration industry by developing the BEVA processes (Berger Ethylene Vinyl and Acetate) that could be used to attach paintings to linen back-grounds with-out seeping into the oil like bee’s wax, the adhesive of choice for centuries. Berger encouraged Zitzwitz to enter the art restoration business. Through workshops and personal assistance, Berger trained Zitzwitz and intro- duced him to big players in the industry. “We would go to lectures at the Smithsonian meant only for sixteen people. I’d be the only person there without two doctorates.”

Twenty years later, Zitzwitz works on paintings whose values reach seven figures, most notable among them a million-dollar painting by John Singer Sargent.

The cost to restore a small painting  can range from $700 for a small painting to $4,000 for a badly damaged large painting. Zitzwitz also does work on paper drawings and etchings when requested. And when he’s not fixing paintings, he and his wife create various art exhibitions.

His gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm, or by appointment.