Palettes of Picasso, Matisse, Degas and Van Gogh are works of art unto themselves
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 [email protected].
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