chapter 12
Color Preservation
Kurt Nassau* Lebanon, NJ, USA* (AT&TBell Telephone Laboratories Murray Hill, NJ, USA, retired)
12.1 Introduction
This topic is most frequently the concern of the museum curator faced with the preservation of color. The objects involved include paintings; fabrics; positive and negative photographic images; drawings and documents on paper, parchment, and other substrates; furniture; buildings; and a wide variety of other objects of historical and/or artistic importance.
Preservation is made difficult by the complexity of the materials involved. Consider just water- and oil-based paints. A paint contains one to several colorants that selectively absorb and reflect light, usually pigments (see Chapter 10), although dyes ...
