Julie Arslanoglu

Metropolitan Museum of Art · Department of Scientific Research

Ivory is a highly prized material in many cultures since it can be carved into intricate designs and have a highly polished surface. Due to its popularity, the animals from which ivory can be sourced are under threat of extinction. Identification of ivory species is not only important for CITES compliance, it can also provide information about the...

Thrust (1959) is an iconic example of Adolph Gottlieb’s series of “Bursts” (1956-1974). The painting is grand in scale and consists of an aggressive thrash of black, gestural strokes beneath a crimson, haloed disc, on a white background. Gottlieb said that given the limited palette, his color choices were critical in conveying the emotional quality...

Native mass spectrometry (nMS) has found widespread success in measuring native-like protein structures in the gas-phase and, when combined with ion mobility (IM), is capable of measuring protein collision cross sections (CCS) and stabilities. These methods are well validated, but often rely on samples that are abundantly available through repeated...

Little is known about structural alterations of proteins within the polymeric films of paints. For the first time, hydrogen‑deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS) was implemented to explore the conformational alterations of proteins resulting from their interaction with inorganic pigments within the early stages of the paint film formation....

Carmen Herrera, born on May 30th, 1915, is a Cuban American abstract minimalist artist, whose first solo show was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2016-2017. On this occasion, a scientific study of five paintings from the artist's time in Paris (1948-1953) revealed her pioneering use of solvent-based acrylic paints in post-w...

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, owns twenty-five works on paper by the 18th-century English artist Thomas Gainsborough. Scholarly publications over the past 20 years, as well as Gainsborough’s own writings, have highlighted his proclivity toward innovative methods and experimentation. In particular, a letter that the artist wrote in 1773 rev...

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, owns one of the largest motorized works made by the renowned American artist Alexander Calder, titled Half-Circle, Quarter-Circle, and Sphere. Created in 1932, and acquired by the Whitney in 1969, this seminal work was featured in an iconic exhibition held in 2017 and entitled Calder: Hypermobility. Pri...

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, owns one of the largest motorized works made by the renowned American artist Alexander Calder, titled Half-Circle, Quarter-Circle, and Sphere . Created in 1932, and acquired by the Whitney in 1969, this seminal work was featured in an iconic exhibition held in 2017 and entitled Calder: Hypermobility . P...

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, owns one of the largest motorized works made by the renowned American artist Alexander Calder, titled Half-Circle, Quarter-Circle, and Sphere . Created in 1932, and acquired by the Whitney in 1969, this seminal work was featured in an iconic exhibition held in 2017 and entitled Calder: Hypermobility . P...

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, owns one of the largest motorized works made by the renowned American artist Alexander Calder, titled Half-Circle, Quarter-Circle, and Sphere . Created in 1932, and acquired by the Whitney in 1969, this seminal work was featured in an iconic exhibition held in 2017 and entitled Calder: Hypermobility . P...

The pigment lead white ((PbCO3)2·Pb(OH)2) was analyzed by LDI-MS/MS and LDI-Orbitrap-MS/MS for the first time. The elucidation of formulae from a suite of isotopically complex cluster ions was obtained from low- and high-resolution full- and tandem-mass spectra in concert with both deductive and inductive reasoning. The unique isotopic pattern of l...

Material analysis of cultural artifacts can uncover aspects of the creative process and help determine the origin and authenticity of works of art. Technical studies on abstract expressionist paintings revealed a luminescence signature from titanium white paints whose pigments were manufactured by coprecipitation with calcium or barium sulfate. We...

The Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera (born 1915) was the subject of a partial retrospective, titled Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in the fall of 2016. On this occasion, it was noted that the artist had listed the binding media for all the paintings in the exhibit as acrylic even though the...

This paper reports the discrimination of Acacia gums from the two most widely used and commercially significant species, A. senegal and A. seyal, using an innovative strategy based on matrix assisted laser desorption ionization-time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) after enzymatic digestion of the polysaccharide component. MALDI-TOF MS/MS...

We describe an integrated and straightforward new analytical protocol that identifies plant gums from various sample sources including cultural heritage. Our approach is based on the identification of saccharidic fingerprints using mass spectrometry following controlled enzymatic hydrolysis. We developed an enzyme cocktail suitable for plant gums o...

Ancient Egyptian painted artworks are usually understudied from an analytical point of view, due to their extremely fragile nature. Attention typically focuses on pigments since identification is possible with non-invasive techniques, while limited information is available in the literature regarding the organic binding media. Here successful deter...

The peculiar ionization of anthraquinones, including the artistic dyes alizarin and purpurin, is examined. When alizarin (MW = 240) is ionized by either LDI or MALDI it exhibits a dominant ion of m/z 242 [M + 2H]⁺ with a far greater abundance than expected from the ¹³C isotopic contribution from the [M + H]⁺ ion at m/z 241. For the first time, MS/M...

This essay takes Pollock’s painting Pasiphaë as a comparative for Mural. Both paintings were begun in 1943 and were significantly larger in scale than the artist’s previous works. Using technical analysis to study Pasiphaë, Duvernois, Arslanoglu, and Centeno explore the similarities and differences between Pollock’s painting materials and technique...

Alberto Burri (1915-1995) was a pioneering Italian painter and sculptor. Born in Città di Castello, a small town in the region of Umbria, he earned a medical degree from the University of Perugia. While serving in the Ethiopian campaign and in World War II, first as a frontline soldier and then as a physician, he was captured and sent to a prisoner...

A systematic study on the influence of pigments and sample aging on casein identification was performed on 30 reconstructed paints. The protein in all the paints was extracted into solution for analysis. The amount of protein that can be retrieved for solution-based analysis in each of the reconstructed paints was studied with a well-developed Nano...

Methods combining immunology and surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) have been developed for the simultaneous detection, identification, and localization of proteinaceous binding media found in artworks. However, complex surface topographies and heterogeneous compositions of art samples represent significant challenges for the general optimiza...

ELISA has been used extensively in scientific research and medical diagnostics since its invention in the 1960s. The application of ELISA to identify proteinaceous materials used in works from cultural heritage is a recent development and presents an important area of further investigation. This study introduces an optimized ELISA with a horse radi...

The 2010 exhibition "Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art" presented the unparalleled opportunity to examine the working methods and materials of Pablo Picasso's paintings in the museum's collection,34 works in total, covering a span of over 60 years. All paintings were comprehensively examined and studied using infrared reflectography and x-r...

Artists’ acrylic paint surfaces can accumulate surface grime. Aqueous surface cleaning of these paints can be particularly problematic because they swell upon exposure to water and because of the presence of water extractable additives. Research to determine the parameters of water penetration and swelling as well as the role of the water soluble a...

There are several analytical techniques currently in use in conservation science to identify proteins in artworks. However, as is often the case, the determination of the exact location of a protein in a complex layer structure is challenging due to difficulty in separating layers. Localization of the protein in a cross-section has been demonstrate...

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The search for stable varnishes which will saturate and provide a desired finish for a variety of painted and decorative surfaces is ongoing. Varnish blends were investigated, composed of ratios from 2% to 98%, of Laropal A81 (a highly stable and commercially available low molecular weight urea‐aldehyde resin) in Paraloid B‐72, in order to capitali...