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{shortcode-21cc3534b02e5a90dd1b6e61be0fe28423896a7e}s we traverse the fourth floor of the Harvard Art Museums, expansive shelves of pigment jars on our right showcase a rainbow of colors, from ultramarine blue to “the blackest black.” To our left, workstations are equipped with bulky microscopes used to identify textiles and examine pigment composition.
Narayan Khandekar, director of the art museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, inhabits this floor. A senior art conservationist from Australia, Khandekar thrives on the intersection of art and science. His publications regularly apply scientific techniques to artworks, dissecting the works of Jackson Pollock and the pigments used by Aboriginal artists in bark paintings.
In one study on decorative paintings, his paper was technically titled “Characterization of calcium sulfate grounds and fillings of applied tin‐relief brocades by Raman spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy.”
In another project, Khandekar and a team of conservationists developed a digital projection technique to restore the vibrant colors of a faded Mark Rothko mural. The mural, which once hung in the penthouse of what is now the Smith Campus Center, had faded over time. Khandekar’s 2014 exhibition at the HAM revived the work’s striking colors by projecting colors that restored the appearance of plum and crimson paints in a non-invasive way.
Khandekar’s ability to inspect artworks through their scientific techniques stems from his unique academic background. Before transitioning to art conservation, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, then a Ph.D. in organic geochemistry.
“What I found is that I really loved art, and so even though I found a vocation in chemistry, I really wanted to be able to combine chemistry and art, and so studying conservation was the way for me to do that,” he says.
Khandekar’s interdisciplinary perspective has also prompted him to examine certain curatorial conventions.
“I came into the art world from a chemistry background,” he says. “And I noticed a long time ago, in the mid ’80s, there were a lot of Italian words being used to describe art.”
His outsider perspective, he says, allowed him to notice and question these practices, leading to research on the usage of appropriate terminology for diverse art forms.
“You go to India, and they’re talking about ‘terra cottas’ in museums,” Khandekar points out. In his research, he traced this trend to the influence of the British Empire, which disseminated Italian terms — like “terra cotta” and “gesso” — all over the world.
These Italian words are still used to talk about a variety of art today, and Khandekar thinks it’s important to push back against this “received wisdom.”
Rather, he argues, “We should look into the language of the artists themselves and use their language to describe the art that they’re making.” He believes it is the responsibility of all who discuss art to do so thoughtfully — “to think about the words that they use,” he says.
In part, he hopes that a greater variety of perspectives among conservationists might facilitate more thoughtful discourse. For example, Khandekar helped facilitate one-year fellowships aimed at bringing a more diverse cohort to the conservation field.
“It was used to address a strong imbalance in the field of conservation, where the population in the field didn’t reflect the greater population of the country,” he says.
Beyond welcoming new voices to the field, Khandekar also channels his efforts towards bringing conservation research to a wider audience.
“It’s super important to get that work out there into the world, so that people know what we’re doing and our results, our studies, don’t just sit in files in cabinets,” Khandekar says. His department routinely publishes seven to eight articles each year, “which is a lot in this field, and we’re proud of that,” he says.
For Khandekar, art is integral to all manner of human experience.
“It’s easy to overlook how core art is to us as a species,” he says.
He points to the caves at Lascaux, filled with prehistoric cave paintings made around 20,000 years ago. “If you think that shelter and food is what their main focus was, the next thing that was in that was art,” he says. “And so if you think that art is not important, I would suggest that you think again.”
This, to Khandekar, gets at the crux of what is so essential about art conservation. “If we want to remember who we are as people, we need to look after our art. If we do that, we stay in touch with where we started, and that tells us where we’re going.”
Khandekar walks us through the Forbes Pigment Collection, where cabinets are lined with pigments with varied histories. He shows us the aptly-named mummy brown (allegedly made from ground mummified remains), the infamous Vantablack, and its counterpart, Stuart Semple’s vengefully produced “pinkest pink.” Ahead lies an easel formerly owned by Edward Forbes, who started the pigment collection.
These artifacts sit in the midst of the modern space of an analytical laboratory floor.
According to Khandekar, art — like science — often stems from an innate curiosity that goes back to the earliest stages of humanity. His journey to art conservation was sparked by that same curiosity.
“I was curious,” he says, “so I wanted to satisfy that curiosity, and I still haven’t. I still spend every day trying to understand what it is that’s special about art. And you learn and you keep learning for the rest of your life.”
