I don't have a clue what the vandal wanted to say about art or Rothko by defacing this painting. I've read an interview with him soon after the incident, and I still don't know. It looks like he was given two years in jail for the crime. That's appropriate because that's about the same length of time it took conservators to restore the painting.
The amount of science that goes on behind the scenes at art museums is amazing to me. I was lucky enough to tour the conservation lab at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and it was one of the more impressive 'factory' tours that I've been on, just fabulous stuff going on there.
This video goes through the process that the conservators went through in trying to restore the damaged Rothko. At a very base level, the technique is nothing more than a solubility question. Find something (we can see at 8:39 that the chosen solvent for the black areas was "1 pt (10 mls) EL / 1 pt (10 mls) BA", but I have no ideal what EL and BA are) that dissolves the vandalizing ink but doesn't dissolve the original painting. Apply that solvent carefully, repeat and proceed.
But the art that's involved in that is - to me - as impressive as the original art making.
Restoration can be horribly done when the materials aren't understood, but clearly these conservators are brilliant at their job.
By the by, if you want to learn about the paintings themselves, you could do a lot worse than this video.
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