Paintings by postwar abstract artist Mark Rothko are highly coveted — in May one of his works sold at auction in London for $50 million. But oddly enough, Harvard University has had a handful of Rothkos — faded by sunlight and splattered with food and drink — in storage. Now, new technology has led to a potentially controversial restoration.

Retired Harvard curator and conservator Marjorie Cohn was an apprentice at the Harvard Art Museums around the time Rothko was commissioned to create wall-sized paintings for a new space at the university's Holyoke Center. When the painter arrived with his finished, rolled-up canvases in 1963, Cohn remembers the entire conservation department showed up to stretch the huge plum and crimson-colored paintings onto wooden frames.