She says she also needs the space for her collection of artist materials.

“We’re limited in sharing the kinds of studies we do in modern [art].”

Finding the Modern

Mancusi-Ungaro took a winding route to Harvard’s modern art collection.

“I didn’t really awaken to the love of what I did until I began to treat modern art,” Mancusi-Ungaro says.

Having spent years working on Old Master paintings at Harvard, among other places, she followed her husband to Texas.

While in Texas, Mancusi-Ungaro was called on for assistance by Dominique De Menil, a wealthy art collector who was starting a museum—the Menil Collection—in Texas.

Among her projects was the 1979 restoration of the Rothko Chapel, which took her to New York for research and eventually to Ray Kelly, Rothko’s former painting assistant for the chapel, for advice.

“The Rothko chapel is really what started my interest in modern,...and working with artists or artists’ assistants.”

And from there her career took off, as she explains, “Whenever a major problem came up, I would be called.”

In 1998, an important Barnett Newman painting was slashed in a museum in Amsterdam—the second Newman painting to be knifed by the same person. Mancusi-Ungaro was called within a few hours.

“I’ll never forget it, the phone rang and the hair just stood up on my arms,” she says.

Mancusi-Ungaro was part of an international committee that oversaw what she calls the “most meticulous restoration,” and a “precedent-setting” three year operation.

She also has been a conservator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in California and the Yale Center for British Art, served as a consultant to museums worldwide and is also known for her writings on Jackson Pollock.

As part of an exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), she and Jim Cottington of MoMA, tried to recreate the drip-and-splatter technique that Pollock invented.