We like a good mystery. Tom is
fascinated with the "forensic files" television program and I love
reading mysteries. Now, a real-life exhibit opening in October at the
Smithsonian appeals to both of us. Dollhouse death scenes, tools to train crime
scene detectives, are being restored for exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery. Here's a Baltimore Sun article about this interesting exhibit...
Scenes of the crime, preserved in miniature
Dollhouse death scenes, tools to train crime scene detectives, are being restored for exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s
Renwick Gallery
By Yvonne Wenger
The Baltimore Sun
Using a tiny paintbrush,
Ariel O’Connor carefully applied a compound to preserve the charred wall
of a dollhouse featuring a grisly scene: The skull of a body lying in a
bed inside peers out, beseeching the viewer to determine whether this
was murder.
The dollhouse is
one in a series of model whodunits used to train generations of police
detectives in crime scene investigation. It is being cleaned, repaired
and stabilized to be showcased at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s
Renwick Gallery beginning in October. It is the first time the
collection, built about 70 years ago, will be on public display.
“The
location of everything in here is important and could be a clue,” said
O’Connor, a Smithsonian conservator who is spending three months at the
office of the chief medical examiner in Baltimore working on the
tableaus. The “attention to detail is unbelievable,” she said. “You can
see the craftsmanship on such a miniature scale.”
 |
| Ariel
O'Connor, an objects conservator for the Smithsonian American Art
Museum, is seen through the open wall of the “Burned Cabin” nutshell
diorama as she brushes solvent on one of the sides. The dioramas are to
be exhibited at the Smithsonian. (Barbara Haddock Taylor/Baltimore Sun ) |
The
exhibition, “Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell
Studies of Unexplained Death,” will be on display from Oct. 20 to Jan.
28. Visitors will be given flashlights and magnifying glasses to inspect
the 19 dioramas, including “Pink Bathroom,” which depicts a widow found
dead in her apartment by the building’s janitor. They will also be
given access to the crime scene reports that investigators would receive
during training. The solutions, however, will remain secret.
Lee
was a wealthy Chicago heiress who helped establish a forensic pathology
program at Harvard University, earning her the title “godmother of
forensic science.” She meticulously built the dollhouses beginning in
the 1940s to portray homicides, suicides, and accidental and
inexplicable deaths.
They
have been housed at the medical examiner’s office in Baltimore since
1966 after Harvard sought to discard them. Maryland’s medical examiner
at the time, Russell S. Fisher, brought them here, where they have been
teaching tools ever since.
Nora
Atkinson, the Smithsonian curator overseeing this exhibit, said the
dollhouses also tell the story of a woman who revolutionized the
male-dominated field of crime scene investigation. Not allowed to attend
college, Lee got married at 19 and had three children, but later
divorced. Years later, as her interest in forensics grew, she endowed a
legal medicine department at Harvard in 1931, establishing herself in
the new field.
Lee died in 1962 at age 83.
The
Smithsonian approached the medical examiner with the request to put the
dioramas on exhibit after Atkinson found details about them while
researching another artist.
Bruce
Goldfarb, spokesman for the examiner’s office, said allowing them to go
on public display came with the opportunity to have the Smithsonian
undertake the expensive process of conserving Lee’s work. A less
exhaustive conservation effort was undertaken in the early 1990s.
Goldfarb
said the project is desperately needed. The dioramas have been
deteriorating, bulbs have burned out, pieces have come loose and fabrics
are wearing. Some crimes can’t be interpreted as Lee intended them
because of aging. For example: Fake blood on the widow’s face in “Pink
Bathroom” has turned purple, wrongly suggesting decomposition or
asphyxiation.
“They are at a
point now that things were cracking and crumbling and had they not been
attended to very quickly, things would have broken to the point that
would have been irreparable,” he said. “They came at just the right
time.”
A Smithsonian
spokeswoman said the museum did not have a tally for the cost of the
conservation work, which is taking about three months. The museum also
did not provide the amount of the exhibition’s overall budget.
When
the exhibit is over, the nutshells will return to Baltimore to be used
for the annual Frances Glessner Lee Seminar in Homicide Investigation
next spring, Goldfarb said.
The
dioramas offer valuable training lessons even with today’s technology,
he said. “There is no other way to learn to see; it’s about training to
observe,” Goldfarb said. “These three-dimensional representations do
something that can’t be done by any other medium. … They are like a real
crime scene, as detailed and overwhelming.”
Lee,
who built the miniature models at her New Hampshire estate, based the
scenes on real crimes in New England using witness statements, police
reports and her own embellishments. The goal was to train homicide
investigators to “convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the
truth in a nutshell.”
There
were 20 nutshells originally, some single rooms, some entire houses. The
bulk, 18, have been at the medical examiner’s office. One was ruined
years ago in transit. The last one was discovered in the attic of Lee’s
estate and has been on long-term loan to the Bethlehem, N.H., Heritage
Society.
Lee spent $6,000 to
$8,000 to build each one, roughly the cost to construct an actual house
at the time. She used real tobacco to roll miniature cigarettes,
knitted tiny stockings for her porcelain dolls and hand-painted a design
on the floor of a bedroom scene to hide a clue.
In
“Barn,” a porcelain doll is displayed with its feet crashed through a
wooden crate and hanging from a rope — the barn hoist — with a noose
around its neck. The elaborate scene also shows the doll, a man, dressed
in a blue shirt, trousers and suspenders. There’s a wooden saw horse
and hay stuffed into a loft behind him. The scene is viewed through a
pair of open wooden barn doors.
The
diorama depicts a fictitious farmer, “Eben Wallace,” found dead on July
15, 1939. His wife, “Imelda Wallace,” told police in an eight-sentence
statement that her husband was hard to get along with and would
sometimes go to the barn to threaten suicide. He would stand on a bucket
with a noose around his neck until she would persuade him to get down.
On the day of his death, she had been using the bucket at the pump. Her
husband had stood instead on the wooden crate.
Was it murder or suicide?
During
a recent visit to the medical examiner’s office, O’Connor, the
Smithsonian conservator, had removed the back of the barn for
reconditioning. To figure out what materials the doll is made from and
whether it has lead shot in its legs to give it weight, she plans to run
the tiny body through an X-ray.
Loose
pieces from a wood pile were lined up next to a miniature ax — complete
with a rusted blade — and a water pump, all for O’Connor and partner
Haddon Dine to work on. Visible on the back of the barn is a
hand-colored photograph of New Hampshire’s White Mountains that Lee
placed behind a faux window to create a scenic backdrop.
A
major part of the conservation project is new light installation. A
Smithsonian lighting expert produced circuit boards to develop tiny,
low-heat LED electronics and glass bulbs; the old bulbs give off heat,
accelerating the destabilization of the models.
To
restore the pieces as Lee intended them, O’Connor depends on her
carefully trained eye. She looks for clues, just like a crime scene
investigator: glue residue that reveals the original placement of a can
of spaghetti or an ultraviolet light that exposes faded pencil markings.
“I
didn’t know the parallels between the field of forensics science and
the field of art conservation,” O’Connor said. “The way we approach
conservation treatments is quite similar to how detectives would
approach crime scenes. We start with documentation and understanding
exactly how things are.
“Before we touch anything, we want to know where everything is.”
ywenger@baltsun.com
twitter.com/yvonnewenger
