Every afternoon at four o’clock, people gather on the third floor of the Harvard Art Museums to watch them turn off the Rothkos.
The Rothkos are the series of murals that Mark Rothko painted, more than fifty years ago, on commission from Harvard, and the story of their demise and rebirth has been reported in several places. The work consists of five separate canvases, which were installed, in 1964, in the penthouse of the newly constructed Holyoke Center, a ten-story Harvard office building on Massachusetts Avenue across from the Yard. The canvases are each eight and a half feet high, and they hung on the east and west walls of the penthouse. There were picture windows, with spectacular views, on the other walls. The room (it no longer exists) was built to be used as a dining room on special occasions.
Although Rothko set conditions on the installation—for example, he wanted fibreglass curtains installed to protect the paintings from exposure to too much light—the murals quickly began to deteriorate. People liked the spectacular views, so the curtains were rarely closed, and there were no guards around to warn diners about splashing food and drink on the canvases, or bumping their chairs into them when they got up to use the restroom. It was a working dining room, not an art gallery or a chapel.
Concerns about the condition of the murals started to be raised soon after Rothko’s death, in 1970. By the end of the nineteen-seventies, the penthouse was being rented out as a “party function room.” Tears and dents began showing up on the paintings; a person named Alan C. sought immortality by inscribing his name on one of them; the colors faded. Harvard is famously decentralized, so no one knew who was ultimately responsible for looking after the murals. It wasn’t until 1979 that they were finally taken down and put into storage. They had lost most of their original color.
Rothko’s work is pretty much all about the color, so the murals, in their faded condition, seemed to be dead. Because of the methods and materials Rothko used (a long and interesting story), it was impossible to restore them by conventional means. So a solution was borrowed from a technique known as “compensating illumination,” which was pioneered by the art conservator Raymond Lafontaine. Five digital projectors have been programmed to light the canvases so that the original colors reappear. At four o’clock every day, the projectors are turned off one by one, and the colors revert to (mostly) muddy blacks and grays. You can still see the bones of the murals, the formal architecture—Rothko’s floating blocks, made to resemble portals in these pieces—but the glow is gone. As one observer put it, when the lights go off, comedy turns into tragedy.
It’s interesting that this is so interesting. When the museum staged events with discussions of the virtually restored murals, hundreds of people turned up. The “back from the dead” aspect of the phenomenon is captivating: you are seeing, or you feel that you are seeing, something that once was believed to have vanished forever. You also (this is why people come to watch the projectors turned off) get to see the Rothkos both as they were and, almost simultaneously, as they are. You experience a transformation that took many years in a few seconds.
Mainly, I think, the restoration story gets people hooked because it raises ancient and endlessly fascinating philosophy-of-art questions. In this respect, the restored murals are really a new work, a work of conceptual art. To look at them is to have thoughts about the nature of art.
When I was a student, I went to a class taught by the art historian Meyer Schapiro. There were lots of people in the room; I think it was supposed to be his last class. (This was at Columbia, where Schapiro had been, as a student and a professor, since 1920.) He devoted the entire opening lecture to forgeries. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to hear him talk about paintings, not fakes. I didn’t go back.
Which shows how clueless I was, even then. Forgery is important because it exposes the ideological character of aesthetic experience. We’re actually not, or not only, or never entirely, responding to an art object via its physical attributes. What we’re seeing is not just what we see. We bring with us a lot of non-sensory values—one of which is authenticity.
We’re not absolutists about it. Authenticity is a relative term. Most people don’t undergo mild epistemological queasiness while they’re looking at a conventionally restored Rothko. We look at restored art in museums all the time, and we rarely worry that it’s insufficiently authentic. In the case of the Harvard Rothkos, though, the fact that the faded painting and the faked painting are in front of us at the same time somehow makes for a discordant aesthetic experience. It’s as though, at four o’clock every day, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes turned into the ordinary Brillo cartons of which they were designed to be simulacra. You would no longer be sure what you were looking at.
No one seems to think that compensating illumination is evil. After all, the works are still Rothkos, and they’re physically unaltered. Some people have complained—the artist Terry Winters made this point at one of the museum’s Rothko events—that light that’s projected onto a canvas has a different effect from light that emanates from the canvas. But for most viewers, the difference is not pronounced.
If that’s the case, though, that people don’t notice a difference between an illumination and a painting, you have to ask whether the museum couldn’t illuminate blank canvases and make them look like Rothkos, or Rembrandts, or anything it liked. How would the experience be different? The projector technology reproduces Schapiro’s forgery problem.
One issue that seems not to have been raised, at least in the discussions I’ve witnessed, is that the murals are site-specific pieces. That’s really what’s missing from the virtual restorations. James Breslin’s biography of Rothko tells us that he was conflicted about getting a commission from Harvard. Breslin says that when Harvard’s president, Nathan Pusey, visited Rothko’s studio, in Manhattan, to vet the artist, Rothko deliberately wore workman’s clothes to the meeting. Rothko had a high-modernist view of the artist as an outsider and of art as a spiritual experience. He disliked bigwigs and prestige factories like Harvard. The thought that the Fellows of the Harvard Corporation would be enjoying dinner in a room filled with his paintings is not something that would have gladdened his heart.
Rothko was not keen on the fact that this was a dining room at all. He would have preferred just a bench for people to sit on while they gazed at the paintings. And he certainly didn’t like the idea that his art was being used as decoration. But he was flattered by the fact that Harvard had recognized him, and he worked hard on the paintings. The background color is crimson.
Harvard’s view of the matter seems to have been, first, that having high-modernist art on display when distinguished colleagues and guests were around would make Harvard look like a cultivated place with advanced tastes, and, second, that art should be hung in places where people actually live. That was the spirit of the Holyoke Center, a building that is held in disesteem by the entire universe. Minus at least one: I love the building, just as I love Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center and Harvard’s Science Center, both designed in the same period and with the same idea about the use of space in mind. (Holyoke and the Science Center were designed by Josep Lluís Sert.)
I think university buildings should be multi-purpose, minimally designed spaces, the kind of places you could clean out with a hose. Laboratories and studios, not Hilton Garden Inns. In that kind of building, art is simply part of the furnishing. You put it up, you take it down, you might get some chalk on it. Site-specific art is part of the site, and sites change as people use them. Sometimes, sites die.
The room in the Harvard Art Museums where the Rothkos now hang is a copy of the old penthouse dining room in Holyoke, with identical dimensions down to the spacing of the two doorways in one of the walls. Except that there are no views of Boston and the Charles River. For the people who saw the murals back in the nineteen-sixties, that must have been a spectacle—Rothkos on two sides and the views the others. That’s what the Rothko mural experience was intended to be. We’ll never get it back.
