Atlanta Cyclorama needs restoration, maybe much more, some contend

Earlier this year a team of Atlanta movers and shakers flew to Pennsylvania to visit the newly renovated cyclorama painting at the Gettysburg National Military Park.

“It opened my eyes,” said A.J. Robinson, president of Central Atlanta Progress.

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Sara Hopkins/Special

The Atlanta Cyclorama is a patchwork of paint as characters and scenes have been added and subtracted.

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Sara Hopkins/Special

Keith Lauer, director of the Atlanta Cyclorama, admits the panoramic Civil War painting has seen better days when it comes to drawing crowds. Many experts, but not all, say it needs repairs and maybe a new display. There’s also talk of moving it from Grant Park to a downtown location.

• More photos of Atlanta's Cyclorama (and Gettysburg's, too)

• Blog: Cyclorama: site to see, or a site for sore eyes?

TALE OF TWO TABLEAUX
• Atlanta Cyclorama:
9 a.m. - 4:30 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. 800 Cherokee Ave., Atlanta. 404-624-1071, 404-658-7625; www.atlantacyclorama.org
• Gettysburg Cyclorama:
The restored cyclorama opens to the public Friday, Sept. 26. Gettysburg National Military Park, Gettysburg, PA 866-889-1243; www.gettysburgfoundation.org

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What Robinson and his colleagues saw was an in-the-round painting as big as eight Sistine Chapel ceilings, a sweeping representation of the Battle of Gettysburg that was in the final stages of an arduous five-year, $15 million restoration.

Over that period of time, conservators disassembled the painting’s 27 panels, removed up to four layers of over-painting, laboriously rewove the Belgian linen fabric in places where there were holes, removed (with scalpels) the glue crusted on the reverse side, and added 5,278 square feet of sky.

The restored painting was then installed in a brand-new $103 million visitor’s center with a viewing platform, a canopy and diorama, producing the same sort of shocking verisimilitude that audiences experienced when it was first unveiled in 1884.

Said David Olin, director of the Gettysburg restoration, “People go up there now and see that painting and they have vertigo. Which means that it’s working.”

The Atlanta delegation not only admired the Gettysburg creation, it began to rethink Atlanta’s own cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta, the only other surviving example of this gargantuan art form on display in this country.

Atlanta’s painting, of the July 22, 1864, clash between Union and Confederate soldiers centered near the Troup Hurt house in downtown Atlanta, was last renovated extensively from 1979 to 1982. Some viewers believe the 42-by-358-foot painting is overdue for an overhaul, especially with the sparkling Gettysburg restoration as a reference.

“The time has come for [Atlanta’s painting] to be conserved again,” said Sal Cilella, CEO of the Atlanta Historical Society. “I’m afraid if something isn’t done in the next five to seven years, the patient could get seriously ill.”

‘There is no comparison’

Robinson and Cilella were joined on the Gettysburg trip by Jamil Zanaildin, president of the Georgia Humanities Council; Atlanta History Center military historian Gordon Jones; Thomas Hills (CFO in the governor’s office), and Zoo Atlanta CEO Dennis Kelly. Most were impressed.

“This is the way to see it,” Zanaildin said of Gettysburg’s in-the-round presentation, calling Atlanta’s rotating viewing gallery a “mistaken design.”

Zanaildin and his colleagues stress that Atlanta’s painting is just as significant as the Gettysburg panorama. But the fact that the Atlanta painting draws one-tenth the number of visitors as the Gettysburg attraction demonstrates that both the Battle of Atlanta’s marketing — and its surface — need refurbishing.

“We’re not realizing the full potential of that painting,” said Robinson. “There is no comparison. What has been done in Gettysburg, in terms of restoration work, the facility they’ve built — it’s night and day.”

The new face of the Gettysburg painting, which opens to the public at the end of this month, has prompted some tourism executives, downtown advocates and historians to envision ambitious plans for the Atlanta work.

They are discussing not just a major restoration, which could cost upward of $15 million, but also a relocation, a new building and a new interpretation.

The Battle of Atlanta was not just a seminal event in the Civil War, they point out, but a turning point for the city. This painting, they say, is a portrait of modern Atlanta being born.

19th-century high tech

The original artists probably didn’t have such an interpretation in mind.

Like the Gettysburg painting, the Atlanta Cyclorama was assembled in the 1880s by a team of painters intent not on creating art but on generating ticket sales. Cycloramas were the IMAX movies of the late 19th century. They traveled from city to city and were showcased in temporary structures where patrons would pay 10 cents to see the latest sensation.

In the 1890s, when the Battle of Atlanta opened in a drum-shaped wood-frame structure in Grant Park — historian Wilbur Kurtz called the building a “fire-trap” — 10,000 visitors showed up the first week, according to director Keith Lauer. “I wish I had those kind of numbers now,” he added.

After receiving the painting as a gift from businessman G.V. Gress, the city built a new “fireproof” building for it adjacent to the Atlanta zoo. That building opened in 1921. Kurtz, an authority on the Atlanta campaign and technical consultant on the movie version of “Gone With the Wind,” coordinated improvements to the display during the 1930s. Kurtz commanded a team of Depression-era artisans who created the diorama that encircles the base of the painting, and he personally painted in (or out) many details of the work to make it conform to his knowledge of the actual battle.

By the late 1970s, the painting had fallen into disrepair. Maynard Jackson, the mayor at the time, got the City Council to approve a $15 million bond issue for significant changes. Noted conservator Gustav Berger directed the preservation of the painting. His team of 15 helpers removed the lead and arsenic coating on the back, glued a fiberglass fabric backing on the Belgian linen fabric, and sealed the painted surface with varnish.

The improvements included installing a rotating audience gallery, allowing viewers to sit and spin (slowly) as the painting seemed to creep past.

‘Like a shower curtain’

The road to hell, it’s said, is paved with good intentions, and some contemporary conservators insist that good intentions have caused hellish problems for the Atlanta painting.

David Olin of Olin Conservation Inc. directed the $15 million Gettysburg renovation. In 2006, at the request of the Atlanta History Center, he also completed a study of the Atlanta Cyclorama.

Both paintings were hung incorrectly, Olin said recently. Hung correctly, a cyclorama painting adopts a bowed-out, or hyperbolic shape. The surface of such a painting is convex in the vertical dimension, and concave in the horizontal, like the inside perimeter of an inner tube. That shape is maintained by a certain loose tension: the painting is hung from a ring at the top and held by a ring at the bottom.

Both the Gettysburg and Atlanta paintings were instead “hung like a shower curtain,” said Olin.

That lack of curvature, plus the unyielding fiberglass backing, froze the Atlanta painting in the wrong position, he said. Instead of breathing, the painting is cracking, he said. “The paint is falling off the painting.”

Techniques used in the 1970s and ’80s were the best techniques known at the time, Olin added, but they turned out to be wrongheaded. Conservators, including Berger, “had no idea of the intricacies involved in conserving a cyclorama painting.”

Another bone of contention: The rotating seats for the audience hide half of the painting at a time as they turn. In Gettysburg, the entire painting is visible from the viewing platform. For Olin, that peripheral view is crucial in creating the illusion of a real view into a real battlefield.

If it ain’t broke …

Tom Ferguson was part of Berger’s team from 1979 to 1982 and since then has continued to clean and care for the Atlanta Cyclorama painting. He differs in his assessment of its health.

“The proof is in the pudding, and the painting looks good,” he said. “It seems excellent. It’s amazingly resilient.”

Dianne Harnell Cohen, the city’s commissioner of parks, recreation and cultural affairs, said the “exhibit” is well-run and well cared for. “The city is certainly not ignoring it; it is one of only two in the country and is a cherished asset.”

The city wouldn’t rule out a new home for the cyclorama, said Cohen. “We are open to suggestions that make sense in terms of enhancing the cyclorama and being good stewards,” she said.

Robinson, of Central Atlanta Progress, is among those who’d like to see the cyclorama downtown, to take advantage of a new wave of tourists drawn by the Georgia Aquarium and, eventually,

by the new civil rights museum.

But tradition is hard to break, and for many Atlantans, a trip to the cyclorama as a school child has cemented that locale as an Atlanta landmark.

“This is where it should stay,” Sherry Collier, an employee at the cyclorama, said after narrating a midafternoon show that drew nine visitors. (The gallery holds 200.) “It’s always been here.”

Visitor Jim Jackson, of Druid Hills, agreed. “This is a great place to bring a visitor or a guest,” said Jackson, who was taking a Milwaukee friend on a “native Atlanta tour.”

“I was last here 10 or 12 years ago, and it looks just the same.”

122 YEARS OF ILLUSTRATING WAR
A brief history of the Atlanta Cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta:
1886: Completed by American Panorama Co., Milwaukee
1887: First displayed in Detroit.
1890: Paul Atkinson of Madison buys the “Atlanta” for $2,500 and displays it in Chattanooga.
1892: Atkinson moves the “Atlanta” to a wooden building on Edgewood Avenue in downtown Atlanta.
1893: Atkinson sells the painting to a Florida businessman.
January 1893: A freak snowstorm caves in the Edgewood structure’s roof.
August 1893: The “Atlanta” is sold at auction for $1,100 to collect rent due to the Edgewood property’s landlord. Later that year the painting moves to a wooden structure in Grant Park.
1898: Atlanta businessman George V. Gress gives the cyclorama to the city.
1921: A new “fireproof” cyclorama building opens in Grant Park, with a rotunda that is several feet too short in circumference for the complete painting. Historian Wilbur Kurtz wrote that the city utilized a “Procrustean” solution: lopping off several feet of the painting to make it fit.
1979-82: The cyclorama undergoes a $15 million renovation, which includes building a rotating gallery for the audience.
2008: Restoration of Gettysburg Cyclorama prompts calls for new restoration and possible relocation of Atlanta painting.