When art-viewers look at Georges Seurat’s painting, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” they see only a fraction of the bright blues and illuminating greens that once were. The post-impressionist hues, famous for the way they capture life-like light, faded to shades of yellow within five years after being brushed on the canvas. The mystery of how the paint faded has never been solved.
But a Northwestern student who has always wanted to be an astronaut and a professor of civil and environmental engineering are unravelling the mystery with the help of a plastic Snapware container.
With backgrounds in science and engineering, McCormick Prof. Kimberly Gray and Weinberg junior Nirav Shah seeman unlikely pair to be examining flecks of paint from The Art Institute of Chicago’s famous pointillist work. But Gray and Shah have personal ties to art, and the knowledge of chemistry and environmental chambers scientists and engineers hold is exactly what the Art Institute is looking for.
Gray and Shah are working under an art conservation and scientific research program with the Art Institute and Argonne National Laboratory. The collaboration received a three-year, $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in January.
“It’s kind of surreal,” Shah said. “I remember learning about it in grade school and here I am working on it. In a way, it hasn’t sunk in yet. When I talk to friends and family and I show it to them, they’re like, ‘No way. You’re working on that?’ “
Francesca Casadio, a conservation scientist at the Art Institute, approached Gray to obtain a xenon lamp that would simulate the lighting conditions of the painting when it began to fade more than 120 years ago. Casadio used paint samples from the original work to create new paint samples identical in chemical composition. It is believed that the painting faded because of exposure to the sun, and the Art Institute wants to expose the new paint samples to light, Gray said.
But this portion of the collaboration only received $5,000. The xenon lamps were too expensive and the paint samples didn’t change when exposed to the light. It was left to Gray and Shah to discover a different way to recreate sunlight and observe the paint chips.
“We thought, ‘Well, let’s do what’s simple,’ ” Gray said as Shah pulled out a small, clear Snapware container.
The pair will use the container as an environmental chamber to stabilize variables such as moisture and acidity, Shah said. That way, light can be tested alone.
Shah began working with Gray because he worked with NASA last summer building environmental chambers to grow plants under certain lighting conditions, he said.
But the project isn’t as simple as a Snapware container. Researchers who have looked at the painting before haven’t been able to create a light that is “brilliant enough and has the right energy,” Gray said. Samples have been exposed for more than one year before, with no results, she said. The pair is still trying to find lights that are both as strong as the sun and speed up the fading process.
A discovery may help explain this painting’s history and aid the restoration of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, Gray said.
“It would be an interesting historical footnote,” Gray said. “When we tend to look at these paintings today, they look nothing like what they did when the were painted. Maybe you can protect them in the future.”
Neither Gray nor Shah plan to make a career out of art research and restoration. Although Shah said he appreciates art, he plans to go to medical school and possibly follow up with his dreams of becoming an astronaut, he said. But the opportunity has allowed Gray to become closer to realizing her previous aspiration of becoming an art historian, she said.
“I loved art history as an undergrad, but it was clear that I would be a much better (scientist or engineer). Or maybe it was ‘how am I going to make a living out of this?’ ” Gray said, laughing. “No, I just wasn’t as successful.”
Reach Margaret Matray at [email protected].
