LATIMES.COM A
constituent dyes. And it’s all se-
cret.”
This secret is called Saturn
Yellow.
It is the trademarked name of a
fluorescent chartreuse — think
caution tape or a high-voltage sign
— that conservators say is among
the most photochemically com-
plex paints ever made by the Day-
Glo Color Corp. of Cleveland.
Day-Glo still makes Saturn
Yellow, although conservators say
the modern formula is signifi-
cantly different from the one used
by trailblazing modern artists in
the 1950s and ’60s.
Korbela said she hoped to get
the company’s help in restoring
the work — to secure a copy of the
formula, or samples of dry pig-
ment for conservators to test —
but after months of trying unsuc-
cessfully to reach them, she gave
up.
But it didn’t quash her ambi-
tion. Rather, it set in motion a
laborious effort to reverse-engi-
neer the hue’s midcentury formu-
lation, and her nearly two-year
quest has drawn interest from
prominent figures in art conserva-
tion.
“It’s not just to treat this one
painting that happens to belong to
LACMA. ... I think the outcomes
will be a lot more significant,” said
Margaret Holben Ellis, chair of the
Conservation Institute at the New
York University Institute of Fine
Arts. “There’s a lot of Day-Glo out
there. It’s in every kind of artwork
imaginable.”
The company said its current
paints work well for restoration
purposes but that it would not
divulge proprietary information.
Tom DiPietro, Day-Glo’s vice
president of research, put it this
way: “It’d be like giving you the
formula for Coke.”
But after The Times described
the LACMA team’s efforts, the
company agreed to provide Korbe-
la’s team with pigment samples
and a data sheet with some limited
details about their composition.
The future of some well-known
works of modern art could hang on
Korbela’s research, experts said. If
the Day-Glo shades can’t be repli-
cated, many fear that renowned
works such as “F-111,” James
Rosenquist’s 86-foot long protest
piece, and Andy Warhol’s “Flow-
ers” could literally disappear.
“These paintings contain a
glowing ghost that cannot be
captured on a photograph,” said
Stefanie De Winter, a Belgium-
based conservator who is an ex-
pert on fluorescent art. “I think
that if we wait for another 50 years,
they will be milky-colored ruins,
which will have lost their original
effect and meaning.”
As novelist and merry prank-
ster Ken Kesey told the Daily
Telegraph in 1999: “Nothing looks
worse than faded-out DayGlo.”
Nothing.
b
You’ve seen the work of the
Day-Glo Color Corp. even if you
don’t know you’ve seen it. The
company’s shades are a packaging
staple, the secret sauce that gives
a Tide box its sparkle. Its pig-
ments have long been popular in
public art, from murals in Miami
to the protest graffiti painted on
the Berlin Wall.
What makes the company’s
colors so revolutionary is that they
radiate in sunlight, while ordinary
“neon” pigments glow only with
black lights in the dark. This
atomic innovation is what drew
artists and industrial designers to
the medium. Day-Glo paints are
intrinsically technical, a truly
Space Age material.
“Nothing like this exists in
nature — these are man-made
colors,” said Ellis, who is president
of the American Institute for Con-
servation, a nonprofit based in
Washington. “They look very alien,
and that’s one reason Frank Stella
liked them.”
More often than not, the colors
are used as highlights, but the
9-foot-tall “Bampur” is 100% fluo-
rescent paint. Viewing it for more
than a minute is ocular agony, the
visual equivalent of an overdose.
“When I started out with ‘Bam-
pur,’ [a colleague] was giving me
different gray cards to rest my eyes
on,” Korbela said. At times, she
said, examining the painting at
10-times magnification was un-
bearable.
The pain of looking at “Bam-
pur” is a function of photo-physics
— electron-level exchanges of
energy that convert invisible ener-
gy to visible light, creating colors
so vibrant they scream.
“It’s literally electrons jumping
from high to low energy levels,”
Korbela said. That’s how all colors
work — it’s just that the electrons
in fluorescent pigments have more
skips in their step.
This subatomic dance is what
gives fluorescents their astral
glow. They shimmer on the hori-
zon of visible light, close to the
limit of the human eye and far
beyond where most cameras can
see.
“You’re seeing something that
cannot be captured, and you don’t
know why it looks the way it looks,
but you know it looks different,”
Ellis said. “Your eye is seeingsomething that you don’t under-
stand. That’s why they’re so effec-
tive.”b
Day-Glo’s original paints were
formulated in Berkeley in the
1930s, and were widely used by the
U.S. military in World War II on
aircraft and in uniforms. Its pig-
ments are up to four times
brighter than traditional shades
and can be seen faster and from
farther away.
In postwar America, Day-Glo
quickly transitioned from the
military to the counterculture, and
through culture to art.
“In the mid- to late 1950s, Stella
turned away from oil paints and
started using mediums like
acrylic, enamel, epoxy paints and
also fluorescents,” said Katia
Zavistovski, who curated the
LACMA exhibit. “There’s still
little understanding of how that
fluorescent paint changes over
time.”
What’s long been understood is
this: The old shades of Day-Glofade quickly. Pop artist Keith
Haring was so distressed by this
phenomenon that in the early
1980s he painted over a Day-Glo
mural he’d finished just months
earlier.
The ’60s-era chartreuse is
particularly delicate, conservators
say. But what makes Korbela’s
quest especially urgent is a fungal
infestation in “Bampur’s” canvas,
one she has since identified in
several other Stella works.
“We wanted to in-paint the
little fungal speckles” to disguise
the pattern made by the mold,
Korbela said. Little did she know
how difficult that would prove to
be.
The first problem is this that
Saturn Yellow is a mix of both
conventional color and fluorescent
dye. Both types of pigment lose
their brightness, but in different
ways. While color fades, fluores-
cence is more correctly said to
“extinguish” — its ability to trans-
form invisible energy to visible
light exhausted through pro-
longed exposure.
Finding a color match for each
of these complex components is acritical step in the process of devel-
oping a usable paint. But it’s just
the first step.
“When you want to retouch the
painting, you must artificially age
the pigment,” De Winter said.
Recent fluorescent pigments
have a reformulated composition
and don’t extinguish as quickly as
the older ones, “which makes it
impossible to match them with the
old paint layer,” she added.
So Korbela spent months
degrading samples of fluorescent
paints that are currently on the
market — a process she will begin
anew with the dry pigments the
company recently agreed to sup-
ply.
“I basically started to artifi-
cially age them,” she said, using
the same bands of ultraviolet
radiation that give you a sunburn.
The UV chamber in LACMA’s
basement laboratory looks like a
large toaster oven and functions
much like the light machines used
to harden gel polish at nail salons.
The next step will be to tease
the chemical mystery of Saturn
Yellow from the polyvinyl alcohol
primer that lies beneath it, a proc-
ess so complicated the team can
attempt it only with help from the
wider Los Angeles art world.
Korbela will take tiny yellow
samples — dribbles collected from
the edge of the “Bampur” canvas
— to the lab at the Getty Conser-
vation Institute. There they will be
tested using a gas chromatic mass
spectrometer — a machine that
more commonly looks at chemical
weapons and stardust. The next
stop will be UCLA, where the
samples can be analyzed using an
electron microscope and other
sophisticated devices to produce
images at the subatomic level.
“It’s very, very rare that there is
the funding for that,” Korbela said
of her science. “That’s so cutting
edge it’s only happening at a cou-
ple of institutions.”
When she began chasing Sat-
urn Yellow, Korbela still worked
full time at LACMA, splitting her
days between Stella’s pieces and
works by Yayoi Kusama, Joan
Mitchell, John Singer Sargent,
Rufino Tamayo and Pablo
Picasso.
Now she runs her own conser-
vation company, LA Art Labs, and
must wait for grants and squeeze
in tests on the side — a process
that will probably take months.
Even after all of that, the hunt
for vintage Saturn Yellow might
not be over.
“We will have to do more analy-
sis to find those perfect matches,”
Korbela said. “It’s a field that’s
very much still in its baby shoes.”
The team plans to apply for a
National Leadership Grant from
the Institute of Museum and Li-
brary Services, which seeks proj-
ects that “address critical needs of
the museum field.” But once they
crack “Bampur’s” chemical ge-
nome, “we will have a lock-and-key
principle solution for thousands of
paintings,” the conservator said.
Still, actually applying it to
Stella’s painting presents another
challenge.
The perfect mixture, if it can be
achieved, would then have to be
applied to the painting with a
brush made from just one or two
hairs.
“If it’s too dense a layer, [the
paint particles] will cast shadows
on each other, and appear darker,”
Korbela said.
All of which raises the question:
Why labor for years to preserve an
effect that is fundamentally un-
pleasant? Couldn’t viewers still
appreciate “Bampur” if it didn’t
hurt when they looked?
“Absolutely not,” said De Win-
ter, the Day-Glo scholar. “When
you cancel out the Day-Glo of the
paintings you would lose the self-
referential quality, the often-
disturbing eye-catching effect”
and other elements the artist
considered integral to his work.
Ellis was even more pointed.
“There’s many works of art
done in Day-Glo hanging in our
museums that no longer glow,” the
expert said. “They’re still great
works of art, but they lose their
pow factor. If it loses that ability to
hurt your eyes, it’s no longer effec-
tive.”Conservator races to reinvent a color
CONSERVATORKamila Korbela is working to revive the Day-Glo glory of “Bampur.” Even in
its sixth decade, the painting is so unnaturally bright that extended looks induce headaches.Irfan KhanLos Angeles TimesLAURA MACCARELLI, an assistant conservation scientist, demonstrates a step in pigment
and binder analysis. A spectrometer is used to study the chemical makeup of Saturn Yellow.Irfan KhanLos Angeles Times[Day-Glo,from A1]
‘Nothing like this exists in nature — these are
man-made colors. They look very alien.’
—MARGARETHOLBENELLIS,
president of the American Institute for ConservationPORTLAND, Maine —
Maine moved ahead Friday
on plans to become the first
state to allow voters to rank
candidates in a general pres-
idential election.
Gov. Janet Mills, a Demo-
crat, said she’ll allow a bill to
become law in January with-
out her signature. The legis-
lation requires ranked-
choice voting in presidential
elections and primaries.
Ranked voting won’t be
used in a planned presi-
dential primary in March
2020, Mills’ office said. The
bill won’t go into effect until
90 days after the Legislature
is set to adjourn in April.
But future presidential
primaries would use ranked-
choice voting, according to
the governor’s office.
Maine voters in 2016 ap-
proved ranked voting, but
the system was limited to
federal races and primaries.
Under the system, voters
rank three or more candi-dates on a ballot in order of
preference. If no candidate
gets more than 50%, the last-
place candidate is elimi-
nated.
The second-choice votes
of everyone who ranked that
candidate first are allocated
until someone receives over
50%.
Supporters of the system
who have been trying to
spread it to more states
cheered the expansion of
ranked-choice voting Fri-
day.
“Now Mainers have the
option to vote freely for an in-
dependent or third-party
presidential candidate that
best speaks to them and stillindicate a backup choice be-
tween the major-party can-
didates,” FairVote President
and CEO Rob Richie said.
David Farmer, a spokes-
man for the Committee for
Ranked Choice Voting, said
it’s “too bad” that Mills
didn’t sign the bill into law so
voters could rank candi-
dates in the crowded March
primary.
The governor said Friday
that ranked-choice voting
can empower voters and en-
courage civility.
But she also expressed fi-
nancial and logistical con-
cerns about the legislation,
which she said lacked fund-
ing and raised questionsabout how it could affect the
selection of convention dele-
gates.
The bill says using ran-
ked-choice voting in presi-
dential races would prove a
“minor cost increase.” Sec-
retary of State Matt Dunlap
has estimated a ranked-vot-
ing primary could cost
$100,000.
“By not signing this bill
now, I am giving the Legisla-
ture an opportunity to ap-
propriate funds and to take
any other appropriate ac-
tion in the second regular
session to fully implement
ranked-choice voting in all
aspects of presidential elec-
tions as the Legislature seesfit,” Mills said.
Mills said that even with-
out the bill, parties could
still use “ranked-choice vot-
ing or some similar process”
when selecting delegates.
Maine is set to switch
from presidential caucuses
to a presidential primary
next March.
As the 2020 presidential
primary season nears, a
shrinking number of states
still have caucuses.
Opponents who want to
prevent that primary have
until Sept. 18 to submit
enough signatures. Then,
voters in June would have a
chance to weigh in on the law
approving the change.Maine OKs ranked-choice presidential vote
System of ranking
three or more
candidates applies to
2020 general election,
but not the primary.
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