Cecile Webster, Conservation Technician, Books, Conservation and Science

I hear this from people every time I mention her name. And just as impressive, her skills in the field were developed after a career in chemistry and medical research. 

At the Art Institute, Cecile has the critical task of keeping the books in our collection safe and secure. Always curious, inventive, and generous with both her knowledge and her time, she is my down-the-hall buddy, trusted colleague, friend, inspiration, and mentor, and I’m thrilled to introduce you to her.

James Iska: It’s great to be talking with you today. We’ve known each other for however many years you’ve worked here, because I’ve been here longer than you.

Cecile Webster: Twenty-seven this year, I think.

James: We have a lot in common. We’ve both worked here forever, we both care for art objects, and we both work on the lower level of the museum. 

Cecile: We’re work neighbors. 

James: Just around the corner.

So tell me how you came to be at the Art Institute.

Cecile: I spent my first career as a research chemist at a hospital in Chicago. However I’ve always enjoyed doing things with my hands—making things, fixing things, building things. When I retired, I took some bookbinding classes with the Art Institute’s former library collections conservator, Barbara Korbel. There was an opening here in what was then called Library Conservation, and I was hired to help take care of the museum’s books and archival collections. Today the Book Conservation team is part of the museum’s Conservation and Science department.

Working at the Art Institute opened up a whole new world to me. I didn’t even know people conserved books before I had this opportunity. But if you know how to bind a book, then you can fix it when it breaks.

James: Do you take books apart and put them back together, essentially?

Cecile: People often think that, but the repairs we do here aren’t quite so involved. We aim to intervene as little as possible and make sure any repairs we make are reversible. This allows future conservators to undo our work and update the treatment when better methods are discovered. 

James: So what does a typical repair look like?

Cecile: For older books, most often it’s the cover that needs attention. We can repair a cover or even replace it so long as the pages aren’t brittle. Brittle pages don’t support mending, so when we encounter them, we make a custom enclosure for the book—a box—to prevent further damage but still allow access to its pages. 

James: And are the books you work with mostly made by hand? 

Cecile: Many of our oldest books are. Books bound hundreds of years ago actually function better than those commercially produced today. They are just not made as well as they used to be. Often commercially made books will have a flat-back structure. If you look at the spine, it’s perfectly flat; it’s not rounded as the spines of older books are. This does not make for a very functional book—the weight of the pages is often on a single piece of pasted paper that runs down the front and the back, and that’s all that’s holding it together. So frequently, the text block will fall out of the cover. 

James: Speaking of handmade books, we have an exhibition up now, Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds, that features these amazing, delightfully surprising books that Mary Reynolds made. She has an important tie to our libraries, too.

Cecile: Yes. The Research Center is home to the Mary Reynolds Collection. The collection contains her book bindings and many other items related to Reynolds and her work, including objects by those in her artistic circle in Europe, like Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brancusi. We have the letters that she and her brother exchanged over the years, and I had the task of organizing them very early in my career.

James: Oh, really?

Cecile: Yes—her brother, Frank Brookes Hubachek, gave her archive to the Art Institute when she passed away in 1950. He was on the board of the museum then, and we were very fortunate to get this collection. Her book bindings are works of art!

Books from the Mary Reynolds Collection

James: She was a fascinating person, too. So how did your team prepare her books for the exhibition?

Cecile: Because the Reynolds Collection has been in the care of Book Conservation for so many years, most of the necessary treatments had long since been completed. But we worked with a colleague in Textile Conservation, Megan Creamer, on the restoration of some of the threads visible on the spine of Reynolds’s binding for Jean Cocteau’s Maison de Santé. And in collaboration with the exhibition’s curator, Caitlin Haskell, we created custom cradles that allow the books, some of which are quite delicate, to be displayed upright and open, so visitors can view the covers and the creative endpapers in their entirety.

James: Would you say the majority of your work now deals with exhibitions?

Cecile: When I first started, I was mostly repairing books and constructing custom enclosures, and there were very few books in exhibitions. Now we might have hundreds of books on display at the museum each year, as well as many others out on loan to other institutions, so the exhibition aspect takes up much more time. 

In addition to conserving the books and determining if and how these books can be displayed, we’re responsible for monitoring the environmental conditions of the displays, which includes temperature, humidity, and light exposure. We have to be very sure that the light levels are safe.

James: I was just thinking about how our offices have no windows, which is great for protecting books and photographs from light. But are you ever just dying to bust out and see the sun?

Cecile: No, it’s fine. I don’t know what’s going on outside until I leave. And then I see whether or not the world is still there, and if it is, I go home. If it’s not, I don’t know what I’d do.

James: Face the zombie apocalypse.

Cecile: Right.

James:  I want to be sure I ask about your papermaking.

Cecile: Oh, that’s another thing I do. I had the opportunity to take a class in hand papermaking at the School of the Art Institute when I first started working at the museum. We used Columbia College’s facilities, because they had beaters and drying racks and presses and so forth. I took every papermaking class they offered until the teacher, Marilyn Sward, retired. I then asked the director of the center if there were some way I could keep making paper, and he gave me the opportunity to monitor their graduate studio. I had a wall of paper samples there made from plants. They called it “Cecile’s Garden.” Today I still make paper from plants—directly from the plants. I have neighbors who collect their iris and daffodil stems for me.

James: You’ve said daffodil stems are really awesome.

Cecile: Daffodil paper is shiny and translucent. I used to see a plant as a beautiful plant, but now I look at a plant and say to myself, “I wonder what kind of paper that would make.” 

James: I have it on good authority that you are pretty well known as a papermaker.

Cecile: I think so. I’m probably more well known as a papermaker than a conservator. I became secretary and then president of Friends of Dard Hunter, which was the international papermaking society, now called North American Hand Paper Makers. I’ve done woodworking too.

James: Oh really?

Cecile: Yes. And I bake. I’m a serial hobbyist.

James: So do you have a favorite artwork in the museum’s collection? What kind of art do you like? 

Cecile: What comes to mind first is Remedios Varo. That’s my kind of art.

James: We called her recent show here Science Fictions. Do you react to art that is somewhat scientific?

Cecile: Not really. I like what I like, and I don’t know why I like it. My highest compliment is when I want to own a piece of art, because I like a lot of things, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to own them. 

James: My highest compliment is when I say, “God, I wish I had made that.”

Cecile: Now see, I never thought of that, because I’ve never thought of myself as having artistic talent. I cannot draw. Do not play Pictionary with me—even I don’t know what I’m drawing! I can do things with my hands, but I can’t draw, and I can’t paint.

James: What’s your favorite place in the museum?

Cecile: Right here. The Franke Reading Room.

James: Of course.

Cecile: I love being in here, especially after the latest reinstallation of modern and contemporary paintings. The Ryerson and Burnham Libraries and the museum’s archives are world class. Caring for their books and other items has always felt like such an important thing to do for our curators, researchers, and the wider community. This place is such a valuable resource. 

James: Yes. People come from all over to do research at our libraries. I’ve taken advantage of the stacks myself. I’m lucky to work so close to all of our books and, of course, to you. 

Cecile: Close, yeah. Too close! If we had a window—

James: If we had a window …

Cecile: We could wave to each other.

—Cecile Webster, conservation technician, Books, Conservation and Science; and James Iska, assistant conservator, Photography and Media, Conservation and Science