"This new presentation of Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals features innovative, noninvasive digital projection as a conservation approach. The exhibition returns this mural series to public view and scholarship while also encouraging study and debate of the technology."
"The technique employs a camera-projector system that includes custom-made software developed and applied by a team of art historians, conservation scientists, conservators, and scientists at the Harvard Art Museums and the MIT Media Lab. The digital projection technology restores the appearance of the murals’ original rich colors, which had faded while on display in the 1960s and ’70s in a penthouse dining room of Harvard University’s Holyoke Center (now the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Campus Center), the space for which they were commissioned. Deemed unsuitable for exhibition, the murals entered storage in 1979 and since then have rarely been seen by the public."
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| Panel 4, Mark Rothko, Harvard Mural |
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| Panel Two, Mark Rothko, Harvard Mural |
I am truly grateful that the conservationists have wisely decided to leave the paintings alone. I am however, slightly uneasy at the possibilities that going forward the solution to paints fading is to simply fire up the pixels. It is deeply disturbing that the paintings were carelessly exposed to degenerative lighting conditions in the first place. But, it is good to note that the conservationists understood that Rothko's somewhat unconventional technique of painting with pigment loaded into the rabbit skin sizing without a separating layer of varnish could not be touched.
Here's from the NYTimes, August 1988
"Although a quarter-century has passed since they were first displayed, the five murals Mark Rothko painted for Harvard remain a source of controversy and embarrassment at the university. Fingers have been pointed toward various factions in the Harvard administration and at the artist himself, but no matter where blame rests, the reasons for distress can clearly be seen: What Rothko donated to the university to cover the walls of a penthouse dining room intended for ceremonial functions has been irreparably damaged by overexposure to the sun. Lush crimson-toned paintings have faded to a variety of unrelated blue colors; they cannot be restored,
The murals, which have also been ripped, spattered with food and marred by graffiti, were retired to storage nine years ago from the room in the Holyoke Center where they had been hung, their battered canvases a lingering humiliation to the university that had requested them. Plans to clean the panels and to install three of them in the school's Arthur M. Sackler Museum got far enough that the building's architect, James Stirling, included a niche for them in his plan."
I highlight the additional crimes committed to these paintings over and above damage from exposure to light, ". . .ripped, spattered with food. . .marred by graffiti."
