Paper short abstract:

Analyzing a high-tech restoration of Mark Rothko paintings at the Harvard Art Museums, I argue that a physics understanding of light and color reconfigured the kinds of materials that matter in art’s display.

Paper long abstract:

How are present-day techniques and interpretations used to recover the historical and aesthetic integrity of deteriorated artworks? Conservation scientists and art restorers grapple with art's materials as well as with art history's understandings of aesthetics. Reporting on the recent restoration of faded paintings by postwar American artist Mark Rothko at the Harvard Art Museums, I show how the latest technoscientific interventions are transforming what art looks like and from which kinds of matter art can derive its significance. In this case, I analyze how physics was enrolled to develop a restoration technique the museum calls "inpainting with light," adopting the conventional restoration practice of filling in missing areas of an artifact. Instead of using pigment to reverse color loss, however, scientists calculated, pixel-by-pixel, compensation images that were cast from digital projectors onto the paintings' surfaces. They claimed that sunlight's effects, which caused the color fading in the first place, could be counteracted by computer-generated, technoscientific light made safe for art. The exhibition itself called into question the boundary between art and its restoration. This paper demonstrates how these scientists' contributions to restoration practice were seen by the museum to have redistributed art's authenticity, not only among the "original" materials of the canvases and pigments but also within the light they "added back." I draw upon New Materialisms to think through what the materiality of art and light becomes, as Rothko's Harvard Murals (re)emerge as an enduring legacy of the past and as a high-tech innovation.