Restoring Rothko

Here at FCG we are very concerned with preservation of your priceless artwork and memories. The idea behind custom framing is twofold: display your project in such a way that you can enjoy it everyday, and also make sure that it is preserved for future generations. We don’t want to do anything that will harm your project. Same goes for works of art in museums across the country. The modern art world has faced a lot of problems recently trying to manage restoration and preservation of works of art improperly cared for or created from materials that don’t age well. It brings up an argument: do you display the art unrestored, in its natural state, or do you alter the art to look like the original? Do you leave it alone, or fix it? What if you could do both? I stumbled across an article about the non-destructive restoration of several Mark Rothko paintings and thought it was interesting enough to share.

Several Rothko paintings, commissioned for Harvard University, felt the effects of time, direct sunlight, and years of basement storage. Their colors are not exactly what they once were….but they were not about to paint over a famous artist’s work.So, according to the article,

“The [team of conservators at Harvard's Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art and Straus Center for Conservation & Technical Studies] used X-rays and spectrometers to distinguish paint layers and identify the pigments in Rothko's paints, as well as enhancements of the original Ektachrome photographs taken of the murals when they were installed. Scanning all that information into a computer, they then began creating custom-made software that will use a digital projector as a light source to augment those now missing colors on the original canvases.”

So essentially they are projecting the original colors back onto the canvas, restoring the vibrant, colorful red hues without actually harming or changing the paintings in any way. I have no idea what kind of UV is involved in these light projections, but I’m sure the smart people at Harvard have taken that into consideration. Here is the article in its entirety.

I couldn’t find any pictures of the paintings involved, but here are two well-known Rothko’s. Mark Rothko is best known for his color field paintings loosely tied with the Abstract Expressionist movement.

~Tracy~