2025 Poster Session

Gas discharge lamps or “neon” objects are a significant part of modern visual culture. Since the 1920s, stemming from signage and advertising, they initially populated urban landscapes to make their way into the art world shortly thereafter. Made by hand, neon units’ production requires highly skilled artisans, and their lifetime is typically limited to several decades, meaning their replacement is integral to the conservation of artworks containing them. Though this technology is present in art collections worldwide, literature regarding its conservation and care remains scarce.  

The color and brightness of neon shifts gradually over time. The exact rate of this aging depends on many factors, including the length and diameter of tubes, the kind of gas they contain, and whether the tubes are continuously or occasionally activated. This propensity to change over time, combined with the fact that neon units require color-matched replacement when they break or reach their end of life, makes color and brightness measurement a valuable tool for documentation. The noble gases used in neon lamps have full outer electron shells, which make them chemically inert and create a distinctive colored light when ionized by the high voltage that passes through them when activated. However, ionization of the gas takes a period of time to reach a consistent color and brightness; these two values initially shift to varying degrees when a neon unit is turned on. To reliably document these qualities, one first needs to know the point when that variance diminishes.  

The goal of this study is to better understand how long a neon unit should remain on to minimize variations in color and irradiance of the two most common gas combinations used in neon production: neon (Ne) and the argon with mercury (Ar-Hg). We look at the warmup times for four units with two gas and phosphor variations in commonly used tubes (10mm, lead free, colorless glass): an uncoated tube with Ne, an uncoated tube with Ar-Hg, a phosphor-coated tube with Ne, and a phosphor-coated tube with Ar-Hg. Clusters of measurements were taken at regular time intervals with the Gigahertz-Optik MSC15 Spectrometer. We compared trends in averages and standard deviations for irradiance and colorimetry values, as well as spectral power distributions to establish whether variance reliably decreases over time to a value that is below what is perceptible to the human eye, or the just noticeable difference (JND).

This poster summarizes our findings for these test units, as well as historic neon objects, and proposes recommendations for assessing the warmup time of neon artworks. The study is a continuation of a research project on the care of neon-based artworks undertaken at the Getty Conservation Institute, whose initial outcomes were presented during the 51st AIC annual meeting.