Paper short abstract:

Exploring a high-tech restoration of Mark Rothko paintings at the Harvard Art Museums, I analyze the different knowledge claims over the faded artworks' original red color and how to recover it.

Paper long abstract:

Reporting on the restoration of faded paintings by postwar American artist Mark Rothko at the Harvard Art Museums, I show how a physics understanding of light and color was used to recover the artworks' original red color. In collaboration with curators and conservators, scientists developed a new restoration technique the museum called "inpainting with light," adopting the conventional restoration practice of filling in the missing areas of an artifact. Sunlight had faded the paintings' original "wine red" into pale blue. Instead of using pigment to reverse this color loss, however, the scientists calculated, pixel by pixel, compensation images that were cast from digital projectors onto the paintings' surfaces. By enrolling light as the medium for color rather than paint, the museum's practitioners claimed, they were able to restore the paintings "without touching" them. This paper considers how these scientists' contributions to restoration practice redistributed art's authentic color through the added materiality of light. It also explores the expert narratives that were both legitimated and ignored in order to reach a consensus over what these paintings' original red color was—narratives that range from eyewitness accounts to calculations of fading photographic dyes.