CAROL MANCUSI-UNGARO, director of Harvard’s Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, helps to preserve paintings at the Straus Center.

Spill a cup of coffee on a Jackson Pollock canvas, or leave your Mark Rothko painting in the shower, and you might have to give Carol Mancusi-Ungaro a call.

The founding director of Harvard’s Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art—located in the climate-controlled Straus Center for Conservation on the top floor of the Fogg Art Museum—Mancusi-Ungaro is an artist for modern artists.

Three days a week, Mondays through Wednesdays, she serves as the chief conservator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the location of her permanent residence.

But on Thursday, she flies to Boston to work in her small Fogg office—which used to be part of a library until she took on the position in April 2001. For the two days a week she works in Cambridge, she lives in Kirkland House.

Her job isn’t an easy one—Harvard’s center is at the cutting edge of its field, and Mancusi-Ungaro is just about the only employee.

“Most of the work I do is precedent-setting, because it just hasn’t happened before,” she says. “I’m working all the time.”

Among her varied duties: repair damaged paintings, restore old works, lecture on modern art and its “technical” aspects and—her personal project—create a huge library of documentation on the materials and methods of contemporary artists.

Melancholy Monochrome

Mancusi-Ungaro stands next to a 1980 Brice Marden painting (or rather a part of it, for the piece is in several panels) marked by three solid color fields of orange and blue.

In the middle of the panel, the blue appears slightly washed away and streaked with white—the result of water damage from a storage room flood at the Whitney.

Marden was devastated by the damage, and he—along with the Whitney—immediately called Mancusi-Ungaro, who interviewed him for an hour-and-a-half about how he created the work before she tackled how best to repair it.

She points to a few—almost imperceptible—white specks on the canvas, places where she and her team have removed paint samples for analysis.

The next room shows how scientific methods have greatly aided modern art restoration—advanced equipment enables the Straus staff to perform scanning electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction.

Thanks to Photoshop, the staff can see an enlarged version of a microscopic view of a tiny sample from the removed paint that has been mounted in resin.

Narayan Khandekar, a senior conservation scientist at the Straus Center—he has a Ph.D. in chemistry and is also trained as an artist—points out the layered colors of the paint speck. It turns out that the solid blue is actually many layers of different blues, with a white layer on top—a layer that he guesses is lime from the concrete that the flood water ran through.