01What It Records
Before a work leaves a gallery wall, before it is wrapped, before the handler picks it up, someone looks at it carefully and writes down what they see. A hairline scratch along the lower right edge. Crazing in a corner of the varnish. A small in-painting over an older loss. Canvas tension, framing condition, the state of the hanging hardware. All of it, described in plain language and mapped onto a diagram of the work's four faces. Photographs accompany the text. Then the same examiner, or another one, does the whole thing again when the work arrives.
That document is the condition report, and it is the most consequential piece of paper in the trade. Not the invoice, not the consignment agreement, not the insurance certificate — the condition report. Every other document records an intention or a value. The condition report records reality.
02Why It Carries So Much Weight
The transit of art is surprisingly violent. A travel frame offers protection, and a proper museum crate offers more, but vibration, pressure changes, humidity swings and rough handling all leave marks. The question, when damage is found, is always: when did this happen? Without a pre-transit report and a post-transit report, there is no answer. With them, responsibility can usually be placed — on the shipper, the art handler, the venue, the borrower — and an insurance claim has somewhere to stand.
This is why nail-to-nail coverage, the insurance that follows a work from the moment it leaves one wall until it hangs on another, depends on the condition report as its evidentiary foundation. The policy exists to pay for damage; the condition report is the proof that the damage occurred in transit rather than before it. Without a clean departure report, a claim is nearly impossible to settle fairly. Galleries that skip the document to save time are, in effect, self-insuring for every journey they make.
The report matters equally at the point of return. When a gallery lends a work to an institution, the loan agreement specifies condition reporting at both ends, usually conducted by a conservator or registrar. If a work comes back with a mark that was not on the departure report, the receiving institution is liable. This is not a matter of goodwill; it is the mechanism.
03Who Does It and How
At the highest level — major loans between museums, works by blue-chip artists moving between fairs — the examination is done by a conservator, someone with the vocabulary and the eye to describe damage in terms a court or an insurer could act on. Smaller galleries and private dealers often use their registrars or senior handlers, people trained to be systematic even if not formally credentialled. The standard requires consistency: the same methodology, the same lighting, the same diagram format, every time.
The written description uses art-world shorthand that has settled into near-universal use. Abrasion, cleavage, flaking, foxing, planar distortion, retouching — each term has a precise meaning, and precision is the whole point. "Small mark, top left" is useless in a dispute. "Abrasion approximately 3mm, upper left quadrant, approximately 12cm from left edge, through paint layer to ground" is not.
Photographs back the text up but do not replace it. A photograph can miss a crack that raking light would reveal, can flatten a bulge, can misrepresent colour under different lamps. The written examination, done methodically under consistent raking and direct light, remains the record of authority.
Galleries sometimes treat condition reporting as administrative overhead — something the registrar handles, paper for the file. The market treats it differently. A clean condition history across a body of work is part of what a careful buyer is paying for, and a gap in that history — a period when reports were not made — is a provenance problem in slow motion. The document that seemed like paperwork turns out to have been the work's biography.
Consignment is an independent publication about how the art market operates. It is not a gallery, dealer, auction house, fair or advisory service.