Bespoke lighting effects are returning the original colours to five faded masterpieces by artist Mark Rothko at Harvard Art Museums
LIGHT and art have an uneasy relationship. Good lighting makes art come alive, but too much light can damage or destroy pigments, degrading vital colours.
Harvard University thought a lot about lighting during its six-year, $350-million renovation of its landmark art museums. Italian architect Renzo Piano, famed for his use of light, was hired to install a glass "lantern" above the museums' central courtyard, effectively providing a ceiling. Layers of glass and shades adjust and direct the light, maintaining temperature and humidity.
The glass panels are a work of art in themselves, hovering above the courtyard's classic columns. For artificial lighting throughout the museum, conservators chose novel bulbs that use ultraviolet LEDs rather than the standard blue ones, and different blends of light-emitting phosphors that better approximate natural light when operated at the low intensity needed to avoid damaging fragile pigments.
The interaction of light with art is central to a special exhibition to mark the museum's reopening on 16 November. It features five large murals that abstract expressionist Mark Rothko painted for Harvard in the early 1960s. The artist installed them in a 10th-floor penthouse dining room on campus in January 1964, and had curtains installed to cover the floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides of the room to produce the low-level uniform lighting needed for the effect he sought.
But people using the dining room pulled the curtains back to enjoy the view, and the paintings went downhill fast. By 1967, the rich purplish crimson that originally dominated the panels was visibly fading where it was exposed to the sun, and in 1979 the murals were put into storage.
Rothko mixed his own paints. Later researchers traced the fading to the instability of lithol red, the key component of Rothko's crimson. Repainting wasn't an option: it is contrary to current art conservation practice.
However, a team from Harvard and the MIT Media Lab realised that light could be used to restore the appearance of the lost colours without touching the canvas. The idea was to illuminate each mural with a pattern of light that would project the missing aspects of the lost colours onto the original canvases, returning them to their original hues without disturbing the paintings' textures.
But measuring the change was challenging. The only photos showing the original colours were taken with Ektachrome film that had itself changed colour over time, so the team had to correct for that first. Optical and computer techniques were then used to compare the restored photos with the faded paintings to produce patterns of light that compensated for the damage, returning the original colours to the murals without further harm.
The results are impressive. The five Rothko murals are big, each 2.7 metres high and of different widths. The varied shades of red that run through the set dominate the large windowless room where they are installed. Wide, dark vertical and horizontal stripes create frames within the murals. The double-width fourth panel particularly caught my eye: a gateway to another world.
When I blocked light from the overhead projector with my notebook, the shadow showed how much the original colour had faded. Then my host, conservation specialist Jens Stenger, now at Yale University, turned off the projectors so I could appreciate the full transformation.
Where the projector had shown the shade of crimson Rothko had made by blending ultramarine blue with lithol red, only the blue remained. Where Rothko had made pink by painting red onto titanium dioxide white, only white remained. Those projected colours turn the sadly discoloured murals into a tribute to Rothko's talent that can't be seen in ordinary light.
Mark Rothko's Harvard Murals: A special exhibition , from 16 November to 26 July 2015, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts
This article appeared in print under the headline "How light saved art"
Jeff Hecht is a consultant for New Scientist
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