THE ARTIST'S PALETTE

Tools of the trade—and what they reveal.

An art historian and curator, Loske has written several books about her special area of interest, color. In her latest title, she examines 50 painters and their palettes. In many cases, the palettes, which range from polished wood to chunks of cardboard, still exist, and they provide clues about an artist’s method. Most of the book is organized chronologically, starting with artists mixing their paints from powdered pigment and arranging the palette according to a strict tonal scale. The development of premixed paint in metal tubes presaged greater dynamism and more choices of color. Artists who specialized in scenes of fantastic coloring, among them Marc Chagall and Paul Gauguin, understood that the luminosity they were seeking needed subtlety and care, according to the evidence found by Loske. The palettes of Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe reflected restraint, while Claude Monet’s palette recalls his misty, complex images. Francis Bacon, famously messy, used anything on hand as palettes but was extremely precise when it came to the effects he wanted. Some modernist painters, including Helen Frankenthaler, moved away from the palette to apply liquid paint directly to the canvas. Loske includes a wealth of lushly produced plates to illustrate her points, as well as graphics that show the proportional breakdown of paintings by tone and color. It all makes for an illuminating and attractive book. The palette, she writes, is “a totemic object, a small physical manifestation of the creative spirit of the artist.”

An appealing study that uncovers important artistic secrets.