A FIRE-DAMAGED painting by Claude Monet could be restored to its former
glory, thanks to a technology designed to simulate the ravages of low Earth
orbit on spacecraft.
The painting, one in the French impressionist’s celebrated Water-lilies
series, suffered severe smoke damage in a blaze at New York’s Museum of Modern
Art in 1958. In 1961, MOMA gave the soot-covered artwork to the Center for
Conservation at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where it has been
used as a valuable teaching tool.
But conservators at the institute are talking to space chemists at NASA’s
Glenn Research Center in…
