This year's recipients of the College Art Association/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation are Harry Cooper and Ron Spronk. They are being honored for their collaboration on Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings, published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title organized by the Fogg Art Museum and the Straus Center for Conservation of the Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Harry Cooper is Associate Curator of Modern Art at the Fogg Museum and a Mondrian scholar. Ron Spronk is Associate Research Curator at the Straus Center for Conservation at the Fogg Art Museum with a specialty in early Netherlandish paintings and their technical examination. Working in close collaboration, Cooper and Spronk have studied Piet Mondrian's "transatlantic paintings," works that he painted in Europe and England and reworked, in many cases extensively, after coming to the United States in 1940, shortly after a bomb fell near his apartment in Hampstead.

Via a process of careful examination of the paintings, aided by the tools of x-radiography, magnification, and infrared imaging, the two authors examined Mondrian's working methods, delving deeply into his creative process. They reveal an artist painstakingly scraping away bits and pieces of paintings that had been completed and exhibited years earlier in order to subtract old elements and add new ones, sometimes slightly altering the width or position of a line, sometimes radically altering the composition. Through detailed technical examination, the authors have illuminated the process by which Mondrian arrived at new aesthetic discoveries and drew fresh inspiration from his New York experience.

This collaboration richly illustrates the ways in which detailed observation of artworks and use of technical examination methods derived for the field of conservation can enhance traditional art historical approaches, leading to a deeper understanding of artworks and their creators. For a special online version of the exhibit, visit www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/mondrian/index.html.