How science can save art.

• Author: Berns, Roy S.
• Position: Science & Technology - Georges Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

PERHAPS THE BEST-KNOWN work of the French artist Georges Seurat is "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" (1884). The immense canvas, nearly 7' x 10', has iconic significance as an example of pointillism, though, in fact, it is transitional in brushwork, displaying typical impressionist brushwork and pointillistic daubs. "Pointillism" derives from the French word point, meaning stitch and was used by critics of this style of painting, likening it to needlepoint with its small areas of color and crudeness of shading.

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"La Grande Jatte" was reworked several times. In 1886, Seurat reshaped the dresses of several of the characters, notably enlarging the bustle of the foreground woman with the umbrella, and added pointillistic touches of colors throughout the canvas. For simplicity, we will refer to these daubs, dots, and dashes as dots. In 1888, the artist enlarged the painting with a new stretcher to facilitate a painted border using the pointillistic style.

Within the art conservation community, it long has been known that "La Grande Jatte" does not have the appearance that the artist originally intended. Like any painting, the work has changed with the passage of time--the oil medium Seurat used has darkened and yellowed, and the coarse linen support he employed also has darkened. As first was noted in 1892 by the art critic and friend of Seurat, Felix Feneon, there was an unexpected and rapid deterioration of a number of colors used in the painting. Seurat's second campaign palette contained zinc yellow, a very bright lemon-yellow pigment. A contemporary conservator determined that this particular batch of yellow paint was quite unstable, changing color from bright yellow to ocher. Wherever this zinc yellow was used, the colors darkened. Dots that were intended to represent points of light, essentially specular reflections or glints from the sun, turned to "holes," to quote Feneon. Luminous yellows, oranges, and yellowish-greens quickly became browns and olives. The reasons for the dramatic darkening still are under investigation.

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Since 1999, I have been active in applying the principles of color technology to art conservation. I have become very interested in faded paintings, which, unfortunately for art lovers, are all too common. My interest is in simulating a painting's appearance before the fading occurred by recoloring digital images. For example, Vincent van Gogh used an intense magenta pigment, geranium red lake, which nearly has faded into history. Determined not to...