“CONSERVATORS SHINE NEW LIGHT ON
IRREPLACEABLE ART”
by Jared Bowen
[This segment was broadcast on PBS NewsHour [now PBS News Hour] on 26 December 2014. A series of paintings created by Mark Rothko for Harvard University was thought irreparably damaged by years of sun exposure and removed from view. Thirty-five years later, the paintings have returned, thanks to art historians and curators using digital projection, which offers viewers the appearance of restoration for works too fragile to touch. The segment was produced by Boston’s WGBH.]
JUDY WOODRUFF: Now: an art restoration breakthrough.
An international team of art historians and curators have developed a new technique to restore works of art without ever touching them. It’s being used for the first time on a Mark Rothko mural.
Jared Bowen from WGBH in Boston has this report.
JARED BOWEN: Even in 1960, it was a coup, when Harvard University landed Mark Rothko [1903-70; born in Dvinsk, Russian Empire, now part of Latvia] to paint a series of murals for its new penthouse dining room. Rothko was already considered one of the country’s greatest artist[s], and this was to be among his biggest commissions.
NARAYAN KHANDEKAR, Senior Conservation Scientist, Harvard Art Museums: He really wanted you to be up close and surrounded by his work so that you could feel the — feel the painting.
JARED BOWEN: Rothko paint[ed] panels to envelop the space. They and the studies and sketches he produced in planning them are now on view in the newly renovated Harvard Art Museum’s first special exhibition [16 November 2014-26 July 2015, Special Exhibitions Gallery].
They were robustly read [red?], says curator Mary Schneider Enriquez.
MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ, Associate Curator, Harvard Art Museum: He had been focusing on these kind[s] of purples and crimson, as we like to say, of course, at Harvard. [Harvard’s school color is crimson and it is also the university’s frequent nickname.]
The ground of crimson or purple is then set off with these extraordinary contrasts of this red that is just incredible. As you look at any of his paintings, the play of color and contrast blending and then working against and with each other has always been essential to his work.
JARED BOWEN: The panels were officially installed in 1964, but were in steep competition with the room’s Harvard Yard views. The penthouse shades were rarely drawn and the light-sensitive murals suffered substantial damage.
NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: As the sun would traverse the sky, the paintings became faded, and in an uneven way because of the geometry of the room, so some parts were shadowed. Some parts received more sunlight. The paintings changed. And so what started off as a unified whole slowly drifted apart.
JARED BOWEN: By 1979, Harvard realized the murals were irreparably damaged and removed them from their dining room perch. And the series, one of only three ever painted by Rothko, was placed into storage and, aside from a few exhibitions, had largely disappeared from public view and memory.
MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ: It’s been an extremely sad thing that this extraordinary work of art has not been included in the art history of Rothko. So it’s been a real priority for all of us to bring these works back to our — back to a place in which we can study them and recognize the achievement in th[ese] extraordinary paintings.
JARED BOWEN: Thirty-five years after removal, Rothko’s murals are once again on view, hung in the same configuration in a room with the same dimensions and against walls painted the same olive mustard Rothko himself chose.
MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ: This really brings them back and puts them in the middle of his entire history in a major way.
JARED BOWEN: But they had to be hung without touching the canvasses, says conservation scientist Narayan Khandekar. It turns out Rothko mixed his own paint, which inadvertently left the canvases overly susceptible to ruin and far too fragile for physical touch-ups. [See my post “Conserving Modern Art,” 11 December 2018, on Rick On Theater.]
NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: Rothko used this binding medium, glue-size, which is — gives a very porous surface. And if you put any kind of isolating varnish over that, it would saturate the paint. It would change the color relationships. Everything that we do as a conservation approach also has to be reversible.
JARED BOWEN: How to restore the Rothkos to their original glory without ever touching them? To achieve that, Harvard collaborated with art historians and conservation teams from MIT and the University of Basel in Switzerland. They devised a software program that replicates Rothko’s original paintings pixel by pixel, color by color.
NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: We were able to have access to an alternate panel that had been shipped up to Cambridge, but not installed, and which had unfaded sections on it, and were able to use those to make the final adjustments on the digital image of what the paintings looked like.
JARED BOWEN: The digital recreation is projected with nonthreatening low light onto the canvas.
NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: It’s about 2.07 million pixels. So, we have to calculate the color and the intensity for each of these pixels and then shine it in exactly the right spot.
The color that’s on the painting, plus the compensation image, gives the viewer the impression of what the paintings looked like in 1964. We’re very, very confident that we’re as close as can be for this project.
JARED BOWEN: The technology is a game-changer, museum officials say, but it also raises questions about whether conservation in the digital age fundamentally changes the art. Rothko’s color is back, but no longer by his own hand.
MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ: One of the key questions is, where is the line between what is the original work of art and the art that has the projection system on it? I mean, have we changed what he has done? No, we haven’t changed his canvases.
JARED BOWEN: But they have changed the possibility that damaged masterpieces the world over can once again see the light of day with the elaborately configured light of a projector.
I’m Jared Bowen for the “NewsHour” in Boston.
[Jared Bowen is the Host and Executive Arts Editor at public media company GBH. (GBH is the trade name of the WGBH Educational Foundation, a public broadcasting group based in Boston, Massachusetts, and some of its public media outlets)
[He is host of the daily radio program/podcast The Culture Show, is a regular guest host on Boston Public Radio, and a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. He’s also the moderator of the sold-out Boston Speakers Series at Symphony Hall.]
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“HITCHCOCK’S FASCINATION WITH DANCE”
by Sarah Kaufman
[Sarah Kaufman’s report on the restoration of Hitchcock’s first known directorial work on a feature film ran in the Washington Post on 4 August 2013 (sec. E [“Arts”]).]
Of Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic obsessions, the moving body is one of the most remarkable. He lingered on bodies in motion with a choreographer’s eye to show us panic, passion and the fragile nature of sanity. Now, in a newly restored version of Hitchcock’s first film, a 1925 silent movie called “The Pleasure Garden,” we can see the roots of that fascination. It all started with dancers.
“The Pleasure Garden,” which will be screened Sunday [4 August 2013] at the National Gallery of Art, is a tale of greed, betrayal and murder centered on a pair of chorus girls. One remains a backup dancer but the other becomes a star, because she shows more leg. Their friendship frays as Jill [Carmelita Geraghty (1901-66)], the starlet, throws off her fiance to be a prince’s mistress, while hard-working, naive Patsy [Virginia Valli (1896-1968)] marries a schemer with loose morals and a looser grip on reality.
The action sweeps from London to Lake Como and on to Dakar, where Patsy finds herself in a battle for her life that had me holding my breath. I think I was gasping. And I was just watching a press screener on my computer, with no music. (The National Gallery will have live accompaniment [a new score was commissioned for the restoration by British composer Daniel Patrick Cohen (b. 1988)].)
Hitchcock [1899-1980], master of suspense — even in the infancy of his career.
On top of that, he delivers the sisterly camaraderie, ephemeral glamour, drudgery and creepiness of London’s nightclub scene — and the strong backbone surviving in it demands, as seen in the film’s plucky heroine — with verve and a surprising depth of insight.
“What every chorus girl knows,” reads one of the inter-titles, and next we see a dancer elbow-deep in soapsuds, washing her tights.
Yet it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the British filmmaker had a soft spot for dancers. Think of his nonverbal finesse, his precise and fluid way of blocking scenes and isolating gestures, as in a work of dance-theater. He put his actors in motion with a kinetic charge that was simple, direct and emotionally powerful — Cary Grant running for his life in “North by Northwest” [1959], and earlier in the film, striding down a hall in a way that told us what kind of man he was. And recall the dizzying grace of Grant and Ingrid Bergman’s slow-dance kiss in “Notorious” [1946] as the camera swirls around them.
“The Pleasure Garden” was restored by the British Film Institute National Archive in a three-year project to refurbish the nine silent Hitchcock movies that still exist. Produced between 1925 and 1929, they suffered varying degrees of damage over the years. Now cleaned and pieced back to near-original form, the films have been on an international tour. “The Hitchcock 9” has been presented here by the AFI Silver Theatre [Silver Spring, Maryland] and the National Gallery. “The Pleasure Garden” is last in the series.
Of the nine, “The Pleasure Garden” has a double significance. It proves, astonishingly, that the seeds of many Hitchcockisms were planted at the start: his love of motion, but also his fondness for voyeurism, staircases, binoculars, ominous beverages and dirty jokes. Here, right off the bat, Hitchcock is Hitchcock, almost fully formed. At 26.
The very fact that we can marvel at the director’s early ease is a result of “The Pleasure Garden’s” second point of interest: This film was in the worst shape, and is now the crowning glory of the restoration project.
It is “the standout example of how restoration can affect the viewing of the film,” Kieron Webb, the BFI’s film conservation manager, said in a recent phone interview. The film had previously been known only in incomplete copies, with what appeared to be two different versions in circulation, Webb said, and both were missing footage. With the restoration, an extra 20 minutes was added. Missing bits of one section were found on a Dutch print; a lost scene was added from an original nitrate print preserved at Southern Methodist University [University Park, Texas]. The tints and tones were corrected to better match the setting and mood. Finally, the film was cleaned of dirt and mold, and scratches and tears were digitally repaired.
If you see “The Pleasure Garden,” though, you won’t be thinking about the hundreds of hours technicians spent sprucing it up. You’ll be making mental notes of the symbols and images that Hitchcock returned to later in his career. The film opens with a snaking line of dancers clattering down a spiral staircase (“Vertigo” [1958] alert!) into the bowels of the theater, taking us down to an underworld where it’s not artistry that counts, but how much skin you show.
Hitchcock may have been thinking of [Edgar] Degas [French Impressionist painter and sculptor; 1834-1917], whose top-hatted dandies peering at ballerinas didn’t have art on their minds either. The next scene is like something out of a Degas painting: A long tracking shot takes us across a row of finely dressed gentlemen in the audience leering at the dancers with predatory enthusiasm. One gent is peering through binoculars, and we see, “Rear Window”-style [1954], exactly the extent of the flesh he’s ogling.
At one point, Patsy is having tea, and the camera zooms in on her cup, where a couple of tea leaves are floating. It calls to mind that eerie glass of milk, glowing supernaturally in Cary Grant’s hand as he carried it up to Joan Fontaine in “Suspicion” [1941], and the frame-filling shot of the coffee cup that is poisoning Bergman in “Notorious.”
But what’s so special about the tea? Webb explains it’s a Britishism that would have resonated with audiences at the time. The leaves represent “an omen about a stranger approaching,” he said, and at that moment Patsy meets the handsome villain who will talk her into marrying him.
Thanks to the BFI’s restoration, we’re treated to a sly little shot pertaining to that marriage that had been lost. It was discovered at SMU, and it offers a telling bit of Hitchcock’s humor. Remember, this is a man who liked to punctuate a love scene with a bawdy punch line — the train entering a tunnel after a kiss in “North by Northwest,” fireworks exploding after a cuddle in “To Catch a Thief” [1955]. So as the pretty young dancer wakes up from her wedding night, beaming, the director gives us a close-up of a bitten apple.
Not subtle, but then again, kid Hitchcock was scarcely out of his teens.
[Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, author, journalist, and educator. For more than 30 years, she has focused on the union of art and everyday living. As the chief dance critic and senior arts writer of the Washington Post from 1996-2022, she wrote about the performing arts, pop culture, sports, science and personal expression.
[Kaufman’s work has been featured on national radio and television, including NBC News, CNBC, the PBS NewsHour, and On Point with Tom Ashbrook.
[The screenplay for The Pleasure Garden was written by Eliot Stannard (1888-1944), based on the 1925 novel of the same name by Oliver Sandys (pseudonym of Marguerite Florence Laura Jarvis; 1886-1964). The movie was a British-German production, shot in Italy and Germany in 1925. It was released briefly in the United Kingdom in 1926, but withdrawn and rereleased officially in 1927, becoming a huge hit.
[The restored Pleasure Garden, with the new score, has not been released on video due to a lack of funding to record it adequately. Available DVD releases contain a poor quality and badly edited version of the film, and there are bootlegged copies on the market as well. As of 2021, The Pleasure Garden has become the first Hitchcock film to enter the public domain.
[“The Hitchcock 9” restoration
was started in 2012 and took three years to complete. The other eight films were: Blackmail (1929), Champagne (1928), Downhill
(1927), Easy Virtue (1927), The Farmer’s Wife (1927), The Lodger (1927), The
Manxman (1929), and The Ring (1927).]
