NPR Transcript:
| Show: | NPR MORNING EDITION | Date: | OCTOBER 14, 1998 |
| Time: | 10:00 | Tran: | 101417NP .210 |
| Type: | PACKAGE | Head: | New Technology for Lighting Art |
| Sect: | News; Domestic | Time: | 10:51 |
BOB EDWARDS, HOST: When the Getty Museum opened in Los Angeles last year, critics praised its designers for using natural light to illuminate its collection. Most museum curators and art critics believe that paintings look best under natural light. But the invention of a new kind of light bulb may contradict that assumption.The Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York is the first gallery to install a new lighting system that, according to its curators, will revolutionize the way people see and enjoy artwork. From member station WXXI in Rochester, Brenda Tromblay reports.
BRENDA TROMBLAY, WXXI REPORTER: Three years ago, curators at the Memorial Art Gallery hired a consultant to advise them about lighting problems. His name is Steven Weintraub and he's been puzzling over the best way to light museums for 20 years. Weintraub says he's been trying to solve the dilemma that faces all museum curators: natural daylight is ideal for illuminating artwork, but when you expose a painting to full daylight it's too damaging.
STEVEN WEINTRAUB, ART CONSULTANT: The problem is, as you reduce the amount of light, oftentimes the art doesn't look so well. And so my interest was how to go ahead and improve the visual experience on the one hand and minimize the damage on the other.
TROMBLAY: While Weintraub was thinking about this problem, an inventor in Rochester named Kevin McGuire was working on a different one. There are basically only two kinds of light bulbs: incandescent bulbs, which are very yellow, and fluorescent bulbs, which are very blue. McGuire wanted to create a way for people to manipulate the color of their light sources as easily as they manipulate the nuances of the sound coming out of their stereos.
KEVIN MCGUIRE, INVENTOR: When you go and turn on your stereo, you just don't settle for what the stereo gives you. You have an equalizer. And that equalizer allows you to change the quality and
the tone of the sound. But on light sources, what happens? You turn on the light source and you take what it gives you. And I said that's not right.
TROMBLAY: And so Kevin McGuire took an ordinary halogen light bulb and modified it, coating the inside with a substance that controls the intensity of the colors coming out of it. He called his
new invention the Solux light bulb and started selling it to jewelers, florists and clothing manufacturers, any business that wanted to illuminate its product under a bulb that simulated natural light.
Then McGuire approached the Memorial Art Gallery and asked if he could light up a painting.
MCGUIRE: I just felt driven to go out to the gallery repeatedly, because I knew what I was doing was right.
TROMBLAY: When the inventor met the art consultant, their collaboration resulted in yet another new experiment. McGuire built what he calls a color bar. He mounted two sets of lights on a tripod and connected the lights to a hand-held switch. By pushing buttons on the switch, the viewer can look at a painting under different intensities of blue or yellow light and decide under which intensity or color temperature the painting looks best. McGuire gave his color bar to the museum's consultant, Steven Weintraub.
WEINTRAUB: When I got one of these and started to experiment with it, I found something that was really startling. By looking at a work of art at a large range of color temperatures, I always seemed to find that I preferred one color temperatures, that is to say one type of quality of light that was neither too warm nor too cool that looked really nice.
TROMBLAY: Weintraub theorized that people would prefer to look at paintings under a light slightly more yellow than natural light. So he took the light bulb and the color bar to art museums around the world. He asked hundreds of curators and lighting specialists to look at paintings under the color bar and judge the best color temperature or the best balance of color in the light between natural daylight and incandescent light.
WEINTRAUB: And what was surprising was that it was a fairly precise color temperature and it seemed to hold true regardless of whether it was a very warm painting, like a Rembrandt type of painting, or a very cool painting, such as an Impressionist type of painting.
SOUNDBITE OF PEOPLE TALKING IN BACKGROUND
TROMBLAY: The Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester is the first art museum in the world to install the Solux light bulbs. They're in the museum's Impressionist gallery.
Candace Adelson is the curator of European art.
CANDACE ALELSON, CURATOR OF EUROPEAN ART, MEMORIAL ART GALLERY:
Before, you almost passed this painting by. It had the same amount of light on it, but it was a different color of light.
TROMBLAY: Adelson rocks up on her toes and points to an early painting by the French painter Claude Monet. It's a picture of three men pulling a dingy onto a shore at sunset. Behind them looms a walled city and a tall lighthouse lit up against the orange and pink sky.
ADELSON: One of the things that happened with this painting when we finally got a light that allowed us to see everything in the painting was that the white light at the top of the lighthouse became a white light. It had been a yellowy light before. And now we know that Monet wanted it to contrast with the yellow in the background of the sunset.
The other thing that you can now see that you couldn't see before is the details of all of the little houses in the city. It was very blurry before.
TROMBLAY: Adelson recommends the entire museum be lit with Solux light bulbs. They cost more than conventional light bulbs, but because they last longer the museum will pay about the same amount to maintain them, and Adelson believes the results are worth it. Other major museums are currently testing them out.
And this month in New York City Steven Weintraub is beginning a federally-funded study to confirm his theory that people share a universal preference for a certain quality of light that's rooted in physiology, not personal taste. Weintraub says that with this special light, you'll start seeing what you've missed all along.
WEINTRAUB: You know how, if you wear glasses and your eyes change over time and you're not aware of it, everything looks fine -- it may be a little blurry, but you're not even aware of that shift,
>you just accept that that's the way it is -- and then all of a sudden when you put the new glasses on how much more wonderful the world looks.
TROMBLAY: Now a large audience in Washington, D.C. will be able to see the new lighting for themselves when they visit the Van Gogh exhibit at the National Gallery. Van Gogh's paintings are illuminated with Solux light bulbs.
For NPR News, I'm Brenda Tromblay in Rochester, New York.
EDWARDS: This is NPR's MORNING EDITION. I'm Bob Edwards.
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