Lisa Rosen, Basquiat, and How to Clean a Painting with Spit

Yes, really.

I’ve since been told there are ways to clean an oil painting with products that avoid the acids of the mouth. But in the spring of 2022, Lisa Rosen had been at this for decades, came highly recommended, responded to my email, and was already working near the loft. So as far as I was concerned, the stars aligned during the time I was still in Soho. I could get two paintings cleaned before taking them home to Vermont, where getting paintings cleaned might have been vastly less expensive or completely impossible, and I presumed the latter.

Lisa Rosen began studying art restoration as a teenager. She spent 16 years in Rome, though, at some point, she came back to NYC, where, in the late 70s, she was embedded in the downtown art and club scene (in the gritty era of the post-punk Mudd Club). She also spent years as a runway model. That history was evident as she walked her lanky elegance down the full length of the loft to where my mother’s studio faced Crosby Street and where, two doors down, Jean-Michel Basquiat had lived, worked, and shot heroin in the early 80s (while I hid in my room and watched “Little House on the Prairie,” wanting out of there, dreaming of fields of grass).

In my last post, I mentioned that my father, Lennart Anderson, painted a picture of me as a teenager that ended up covered with specks of mold after spending years in our unheated camp in Maine. I should have rescued that portrait sooner, but it took me a long time to like it and the miserable 15-year-old it depicts. So, it was an act of respect for him and personal growth for me to invest in Lisa Rosen’s care and saliva.

It’s painstaking, expensive work. The deal I cut with her was to clean two small pictures but also show me how.

Here is a video clip of that lesson harvested from my phone. I hope to take up this meditative hobby someday. I have many paintings that could use it.

(I love seeing my father’s work in my mother’s studio; it brings my worlds together.)

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After the loft was emptied, after boxes of books, photos, dining chairs, and hundreds of works of art were trucked to Vermont, Kim and I attended the Basquiat exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal. Focused on music, the show recreated lower Manhattan from the ‘70s and ‘80s. It was surreal to be back in Soho via Montreal, to find time and geography bending and folding. And to again find Lisa Rosen.

We attended the Basquiat exhibit on its last weekend in February of 2023. Some rooms were packed like a subway car. Moving through it, abandoning the app and virtual reality tour because it wasn’t always possible to get in front of the paintings, I found myself pushed to the perimeter, studying a display of Polaroids documenting Basquiat’s social world. And there was Lisa, a blur of her younger self, looking hazy with full lips and glazed eyes beneath the plate of glass. The effect was to feel time fold again, pulling recent history into an unconscious past. By the time Kim and I left the building, my head was swimming in the ocean, and I was happy to climb into the car with my partner of 30+ years and drive home to our little house among the fields of grass.

[Need a painting restored? Visit Lisa Rosen’s webpage.]

Two Houses is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and Time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson.