Vincent Van Gogh
 
Some years ago the inventive German photographer Matthias Schaller who specializes in what he calls the “indirect portrait” was in the studio of Cy Twombly and happened to glance at the painter’s palette, smeared with pigments of various hues, but mainly a shade of red fairly close to the color of blood. It occurred to Schaller that the palette is arguably as identifiable to an artist as the artist’s work itself, even if created purely by accident. As he puts it, “The palette is an abstract landscape of the painter’s artistic production.”

Schaller has created a series of marvelous photographs of the palettes of famous artists, each of which measures at roughly 190 x 150 cm. The collection, called “Das Meisterstück” (The Masterpiece), has appeared as an exhibition and is available in book form as well—for more information write an email to thepalettebook@gmail.com.

These are all utterly fascinating to gaze at; my favorites are those of Bacon and Kokoschka. They’re all pretty wonderful.
 

Pablo Picasso
 

Claude Monet
 

Salvador Dalí
 

Henri Matisse
 

Piet Mondrian
 

Marc Chagall
 

Max Ludwig Kirchner
 

Edvard Munch
 

J.M.W. Turner
 

Francis Bacon
 

Frida Kahlo
 

Edgar Degas
 

Oskar Kokoschka
 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
 

Georges Seurat
 

Wassily Kandinsky
 

Édouard Manet
 

Eugene Delacroix
 

Cy Twombly

via This Is Colossal