In 1962, the American painter Mark Rothko donated five wall-sized paintings to Harvard University that he created for a penthouse dining room in the newly constructed Holyoke Center near Harvard Square. Soon after installation, the paintings faded from exposure to sunlight and were damaged by neglect. For decades, conservators tried to diagnose what made the paintings deteriorate and how to restore the “fugitive” color they deemed essential for their legibility.

In 2014, a technological restoration of the paintings was completed and exhibited at the Harvard Art Museums. Color-compensating images were projected onto the paintings’ surfaces to restore their original appearance. By turning the projectors off for one hour before the exhibit closed each day, the Museum dramatized the artwork’s before-and-after transformation. Visitors were invited to decide for themselves whether the experimental procedure successfully restored the Murals’ “inner light.” The spectacle also gave the exhibition a haunting mood that sparked debate about the authenticity of the remediated artwork.

While Harvard’s intervention restored the paintings’ colors, it also proved to be a misrecognition of Rothko’s larger enterprise as a painter. I document how Rothko made his theatrical paintings to destabilize the modern ways of knowing that Harvard’s conservators and curators upheld.

Rothko’s images present a visual aporia that directs a spectator’s attention toward the artwork’s presence as a moral and rhetorical act of disappearance. Seeing thus becomes an aspect of staging a conceptual paradox designed to evoke a unitary feeling that Rothko associated with pre-Socratic forms of myth and religious experience.

My book project is a microhistory of a single work of art located at one of America’s most culturally influential academic institutions. Across six decades, I retrace the biography of the Harvard Murals while analyzing their aesthetic, epistemological, and phenomenological transformation. I describe how Rothko made his paintings to perform as an aporetic experience, and how that experience was converted into a project of scientific scrutiny.

The artwork’s negative identity was made positive in performative acts of semblance that stimulated new interest in its technological revitalization, while yielding ambivalent feelings about Rothko’s ghostly presence in the theatrical display. The Murals are now inseparable from Harvard’s use of them to authorize a vision of the future where Rothko’s art becomes a stage for the epistemic reproduction of his work’s most contradictory and elusive qualities.

Seeing a Rothko for the first time in 1962 (clip from an episode of Mad Men).

Seeing the Rothkos restored with light (video from the Harvard Art Museums).