Introduction

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we’re gonna get started hello everyone and welcome to our program collecting color lecture on the forbes pigment

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collection with dr narayan ken decker my name is michael magnussen i’m the public programs and outreach coordinator at the

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art gallery of alberta to start this program i would like to do a land acknowledgement i am currently in the

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aga building which is in treaty 6 territory in edmonton the traditional land of a diverse indigenous peoples

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including the cree flatfoot metis nakota

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we acknowledge and extend gratitude to the many first nations metis and inuit whose footsteps have marked these lands

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for generations and who continue to call this place home today

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we are very excited to have dr narayan ken decker speak about the world famous forbes pigment collection which houses

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thousands of historical and important colors from around the globe before we get started i’d like to mention that we

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have time at the end of the lecture for a short q a if you have any questions please use the q a function in zoom or

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if you’re watching on facebook live you can use the chat function to use to ask your questions

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uh this program is made possible in part through the support of the heart and soul fund by epcor and i would also like

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to thank the canada council for the arts for their contribution to our digital program as well

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now without further delay i would like to introduce uh dr narayan kendecker

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they are the director of the straus center for conservation and technical studies and the director of the center

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for technical studies of modern art at the harvard art museum and lecturer on the history of art and

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architecture harvard university he received his phd in organic chemistry from the university of melbourne and a

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postgraduate diploma in the conservation of easel paintings from the courthold

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institute of art without further delay here is narayan

Presentation

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hi thank you so much michael um what i will do now is just share my

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screen and get the um presentation up and running

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there you go so i i do want to thank michael and helen very much for the invitation and the support that they’ve

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given to um allow me to share some of the work that we do at the harvard art museums with

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you and i just want to mention that um i just

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bring this this to your attention

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and i’ll be talking about the forbes pigment collection it’s a an important part of the work

Forbes Pigment Collection

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that we do and when you come and visit the harvard art museums if you go up to the fourth

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floor what you’ll see is the pigment collection displayed across the courtyard the courtyard has

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glass walls on it above the um the travertine so on the fourth floor and above it’s it’s glass and you can see

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through into the conservation space so this is our storage facility

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and you can see the pigments arranged like that um

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and we’re in a we’re very lucky to have a renovated building by lorenzo piano it

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was opened in 2014 but it didn’t always look like this and when the

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the fog art museum opened it was 126 years ago and

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it looked like this and it was not full of original art it had a lot of copies reproductions

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um electro types um all kinds of um photographs it just

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wasn’t full of original art and edward forbes when he became the director of the

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museum in 1909 decided that what he wanted was to have a museum full of art that he could use

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to teach art to the students he was an amateur painter he’s also part of a very storied boston family

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and [Music] his his family is actually still very much

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in the public eye that um john kerry who was the um

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secretary of state was is related to edward forbes and i don’t know if any of you know pink martini the band but chyna

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forbes is also a relative maya forbes filmmaker also a relative so this

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family has um they’ve been in every sort of corner of um american history from

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the civil war onwards and um he was the director for 35 years so from

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1909 until 1944 this is a photograph of him in front of one of the original

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works of art that he bought for the museum teaching a group of students in the the year that he retired

Edward Forbes Collection

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when he was collecting which was in the early part of the 20th century he um was buying at the same time as

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other important american collectors like the fricks the gardeners melons cress huntington’s the

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morgans and american collectors were known in europe as having

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a lot of wealth but very little hands-on experience with works of art so they were seen as something of an easy mark

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and edward forbes was a very careful buyer and he really bought well actually

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bought very well but every so often he was he was caught out and this is an example of where he was deceived he

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bought the painting what he thought was a beautiful virgin and child you can see it on the left

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after the overpainter being cleaned off you can see that the condition of the painting was not what he had bought

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and um in fact the the flesh areas have been very very badly over cleaned

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and it was examples like this where he thought you know what

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what is there that i can do to understand forgeries because

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forgeries were presented to him um things that have been heavily restored

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or um you know things that it would we’re not as they were meant to be and he he settled on this idea of using

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pigments and it um it is a

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testament to his interest in the way that art is made as an amateur artist that he pursued this this line of

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thinking this what became known as technical art history which is looking at the materials and techniques of artists

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and he wanted to professionalize the raw

Technical Art History

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the field of musiology in america so what what he did was

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create his own laboratory for art and this is the building that he built for that process it was opened in 1927 so

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it’s almost 100 years ago and he and paul sacks

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set up what was known as the museum course which was a very important course for training museum professionals in the

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first part of the 20th century he trained curators administrators and other professional staff

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to work as colleagues to be professional to

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be accountable to be transparent in their decision-making process and

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also to actually openly say that museums are not perfect institutions that they have problems and that they need to

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solve these problems so it was a big change and part of that the professionalization

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was to bring on board staff who wanted to

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share his vision and also to help him explain this murky and often

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sort of mystical world of art con art restoration so he employed the first scientist in

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the u.s museum which was john gaddon’s you can see him on the left george stout on the right was a young

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paintings conservator who um wanted to bring science

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into the practice of conservation and both of these people actually the work that they did took the

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field of conservation a whole step forward and it’s it’s not often that you have

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people who can do that to a field but these these two individuals were able to do that

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one of the the ways they did it was to start the first journal in

Conservation Technical Studies

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conservation technical studies in the field of the fine arts it ran from 1932 to 1942 it was interrupted by the the

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second world war which i think is fair enough um and then it was picked up by the international institute of conservation

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both with um with with both the editors i’m getting some start actually

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in this revamped version and that journal is still running today

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and they in this journal they they published things that allow that

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seem second nature to us but needed to be spelled out and explained so things

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like um condition reports were there and this is you know to show that they weren’t just publishing but

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that they really were doing what they said i’ve um included out of the files a um

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a condition report from 1938 which is right around the time that um this

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article was published so the article was published in 1935 so you can see that they actually

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practiced what they preached and the history of the the science labs

History of the Science Labs

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is also interesting too so you’ve got um science starting to be applied to the

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understanding of a work of art and the the focus of the work was really about the materials and techniques of artists

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understanding what artists used what they what they were using to get the idea out

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of their head into the gallery um how those things change over time and

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what they might have looked like originally these are some of the questions that they asked and answered

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and the fog museums lab was the first museum lab to actually

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focus on fine art the british museum and the rutgen were looking more at

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museum collections so it wasn’t considered fine art at the time although that’s a definition that’s changed

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and just to um put this into perspective a little bit i looked it up the canadian

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conservation institute started in 1957 at the national gallery

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and then in 1972 established its own independent organization and

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that was the first appearance of conservation science in canada so canada was you know right

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there actually as things were evolving with the scientific examination of works of art

Getting Some Star

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now some of the the work that they did was absolutely critical in understanding how

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a work of art is made and it was published in this book painting materials and it has a big section on

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pigments which has often been equal but never been battered it really every time i i need

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to understand something about the history of pigments getting some star is the first book that

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i reach for and it was first published in 1942 the edition on the right

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the dover edition is my copy and you can see how used it is i’m

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i use it almost every day so it’s a um an invaluable resource

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and it includes the big sec a big section on pigments and that’s drawn from their experiences with

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the forbes pigment collection and i’ll um run through some of the the pigments that we have and some of

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the stories and around the pigments and also how they’re used as well

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so these are some of the earlier pigments that the collection is focused mostly on american and

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european pigments that were available that was where the focus in collecting was at the time

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and the pigments themselves are not always particularly old although we were just recently given some

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pigments from lasko so that’s very very old but most of them are from

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the 20th century and from the first half of the 20th century so we’ve got red white from 1908 the

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million which was um from 1910 armenian ball from venice from

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1914 and edward forbes did contact coliman he would visit he’d

Pigments

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go to england and visit cullerman as well and buy materials to add into the

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collection so some of the the pigments that we have here are like an entire ball of

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indian yellow and that is a extraordinary pigment it’s made from the the dried urine of cows

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fit on mango leaves um and it was used widely in india and we found

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out throughout our research into persia as well it’s not used anymore it’s not available

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anymore um there are synthetic substitutes and so the ball is it’s raw

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form the um when it’s purified it um we have some examples here of on

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the watch glass in this in the center we’ve got indian red and i just want to

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mention that indian red comes from india and

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um from the persian gulf it’s an iron oxide red and i know that crayola

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had a crayon called indian red and they stopped using it for one reason or another and there are lots of stories

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about why that was but um in fact it’s a it’s a pigment based

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on the um around the indian sub subcontinent we have um

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pigment mummy which is made up of ground up egyptian mummies predominantly

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the the resin that is used on the binding and you can see some tubes here that

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were bored and what the the pigment looks like and um dragon’s blood this is um

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the sap over rattan palm it’s bright red when it’s fresh and then it darkens

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quite quickly afterwards and it is bought in the these um

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reeds he also bought things like ultramarine which is made from lapis lazuli

Ultramarine

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and this is a material at the time

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so when it was used by artists up until the early 20th century early 19th century sorry it was

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as expensive as gold it um had to be mined in northeastern afghanistan in the

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sari-sang mines it was then carried by people

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down the mountain to the donkeys donkeys could then carry it to kabul and then it was transported down to the coast

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and then across to europe and so it was shipped across to europe and its name means from

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beyond the sea so that’s that’s where it comes from and it’s so it was difficult to get difficult to ship

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and also it then required a lot of processing as well so you needed to get the blue particles out of the

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non-colored mineral as well and you ended up with a variety of

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different qual qualities so you have the highest quality number one and then it gets lighter and lighter until you end

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up with what’s called ultramarine ash and you can see how light that is but

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it’s very good for glazing apparently and there’s an example of ultramarine on

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a botticelli painting that we have in our collection you can see the virgin’s mantle and

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actually it occurred to me that the um the use of ultramarine is incredibly

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expensive pigment is actually replicating a blue dyed material which probably would

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not have been that expensive in its original form so it would have been indigo or wood that would have been

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the um the dye that was used for the fabric that the virgin was was wearing but it’s being replicated in the most

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expensive material available

Studio materials

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we have collections of materials that belong to artists so that we get a sense of how the artist worked in this studio

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so these these are things that come from john singer sergeant’s studio and i like that edward forbes wrote in

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the bottom of the box here this belonged to john singer sergeant ewf

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forbes was the executor of sergeant’s estate and this was his payment we have a lot of um studio materials in the collection

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and this is part of that so we have palettes brushes palette knives watercolor tubes and so on

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um and as the the notoriety of the collection grew other people would give their

Lewis Rubin

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studio material to the the collection as well so this is lewis rubenstein who worked as a fresco artist

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from the 20s until i guess he died in about 1980

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and one of his most well-known paintings is dive bomber and tank where he was the

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studio artist a studio assistant overroster and this is in moma and these pigments

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were used to paint that mural and so you know we’ve got these this connection between

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the stuff that was used to make a work of art and we can work with the people at moba

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and we can you know help them understand their work of art or we can understand that the question of pigments that we

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have as well so there are opportunities for um collections

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between different museums and we just recently um last year we bought a

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group of pigments from georgia o’keeffe’s studio and it was a shared purchase with the

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georgia o’keeffe museum in new mexico and so we’ll be doing some work with

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them as well in 1931 edward forbes traveled to visit his

Edward Forbes

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brother his brother was the u.s ambassador to japan and

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edward forbes gave some lectures but then also visited cullerman in tokyo and in kyoto

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and at that time bought a lot of pigments and these are you know wonderful historical

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um artifacts and we have a very active collector collecting curator

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rachel saunders and she has been helping me understand these pigments but in return we’ve been able

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to use these pigments to help understand what’s going on with the the works of art that she’s been acquiring as well

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and i do harbour this desire to go to japan in 2031 so 100 years later and visit the

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same stores and see if i can buy more materials and add to the collection myself

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but edward forbes would um travel i’d say he would travel himself but he would

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also send relatives out to to do his bidding for him and

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these are some pigments that we had they were in a box that’s pigments

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from persia by mrs schroeder or um bought from persia by mrs schroeder we

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didn’t know who that was and then our director who’s an islamic scholar said eric

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schroeder was a very very well-known um islamic scholar and then when i visited

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the forbes island which is just um just near martha’s vineyard

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i talked to them about this this um notation and they said oh yes yes that’s

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man forbes she’s the niece of edward forbes and so you know it it all sort of

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came together and there are some other other things that are um where he’s asked relatives who’ve been

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traveling to buy pigments and send them back and talking to the family has helped elucidate the um the story behind

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them and it’s it’s been a really great learning experience some things we don’t know enough about

Spanish pigments

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but you know we can sort of piece together bits of it we’ve got um a group of spanish pigments that were

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given by don louis flanders who was a very important collector of medieval art in

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barcelona but he was also in charge of the interior decoration of the

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national palace and it was part of the international expo and you probably know more because of mies van gaal’s um

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barcelona pavilion but the um national palace has got this amazing decoration on the inside

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and you know it’s my hope i don’t know if it’ll realize but these pigments might be related to the interior

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decoration of that that building um the the pigments collection itself is

Variety of pigments

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great because it’s not just white in terms of variety of pigments but it’s also deep as well so each

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colorman has their own formulation of a pigment or their own source or their own

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you know their own way of doing each pigment and so we have lots of examples of pigments but also lots of examples of

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the same pigment by different manufacturers and it it really is a great way to see the variety of color

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and fabrication behind all these um these pigments that are used by artists

Animal pigments

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so we have um different ways of looking at the pigments and i i like dividing up

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their their origins into animals minerals and vegetables and

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we’ll just run through some of the the different pigments that we have in the collection and some of the sources that

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they have and we’ll start off with the animal side of things

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so kermis is a small scale insect that grows on oak trees and it has it produces a red dye

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in its body you can extract that red dye and produce the kermis

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um kermis color and that’s the origin of the word crimson it’s the etymological

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origin of that word um it was very difficult to get hold of very expensive and very rare

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and that changed very significantly when the spanish

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colonized latin america um well they really colonized south america and

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middle middle america and they brought cochineal back with them

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which is a small beetle that grows on a cactus and they were able to extract from that

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a red dye which gives carmen and that was the second

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source of wealth after gold for the the spanish empire and it really you know it tells you how

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important pigments are in just in terms of a country in terms of

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national wealth they’ve played an important part in the role of spain in the world

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and this color is still used now it’s it’s used in clothes it’s used in makeup it’s used in food dyes so it’s something

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that is still very important and um i’ve been in touch with a

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a wahakan um weaver and dyer and he still uses this

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he harvests it from around his village and uses the the dye so it’s something that

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is not just historical it’s still something that’s used very much now tyrion purple is

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another um pigment that comes from a an animal this comes from the murex

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mollusk and it is a pigment that um

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was the only natural source of purple for a very very long time up until the mid 19th century when william perkin was

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able to extract the purple from coal tar but this purple was

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very very resource intensive it required something like ten thousand mollusks to produce a gram of of color and it was

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used on rumors senators robes cleopatra’s barge was dyed with tyrion purple she was

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obsessed with this this cola apparently it’s a um it was reserved for imperial garments so

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it is a very important very status um present

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um pigment and interestingly i’ve only ever found it once on a painting and it’s this virgin

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and child from 1296 it’s in the getty collection that’s by the master saint cecilia

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and it’s used in these banners either side of the virgin and

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the banners say mother of god in in greek and so it’s

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describing the role of the virgin in christian mythology

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and for the artist to be using this incredibly expensive status um conscious

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pigment to describe her role says so much about um

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the role of the virgin and it’s really spelling out with the materials the

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importance in in um of this person in the the their their religious function

Plant pigments

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um some pigments that come from plants uh things like weld it’s a

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um it’s a yellow dye that comes from this plant and it’s it’s not particularly light

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stable it fades quite quite quickly but it was used a lot in dutch paintings for

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example and dutch artists would often paint blue foliage and then use a yellow glaze from

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world to go over the um the blue to make it look green and that it looked

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incredibly rich really beautiful until the world died but the world died

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faded and then um you would start seeing blue

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vegetables blue trees and so on so it explains quite a lot about what

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you were um you know understanding how the painting process explains what

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the pictures might have looked like and then how they’ve changed over time dragon squad we talked about a little

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bit earlier um brazil wood is the bark of the brazil tree and you extract the

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red dye out of it you can use that mata is an ancient

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red dye you can turn it into a pigment so you take the red dye you soak it onto

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something transparent like chalk or alum and then you can use it as a pigment to

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paint with and this matter was grown in edward forbes’s garden in the 1920s and i i

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love that forbes was so into understanding pigments that he was cultivating them himself

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and here are some of the the minerals that i was talking about

Ores

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so we have ores that appeared so um these are both raw umbers

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and you can see the different shades of color and that tells you you know you’ve got what is

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generically described as raw umber but they’re two different colors entirely so it’s it’s nice to have these materials

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as comparisons we’ve got examples of the raw material

Malachite

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here so this is malachite and azurite they often

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appear together um they’re chemically very very closely related just the amount of hydration in the mineral

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itself that causes it to either be blue or green and um

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you grind these up and you need to know exactly what you’re doing if you grind it too fine you lose

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the color if it’s ground too big then it’s very very difficult to paint with

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so it requires a delicate touch to to get the particles the right size so that they can be used and still have the cola

28:32

we’ve got a couple of toxic pigments here alpine and realgar they’re arsenic containing pigments

Alpine Realgar

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is light sensitive so you can see this would have once been yellow all over but then there’s just little bits of it left

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that have resisted losing its colour on exposure to light

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realgar much more stable and we’ve got synthetic pigments as well

Red White

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so these are pigments that are man-made for very specific reasons um

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and yeah these ones are made for painting so red white

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is made by taking buckles off a grid of

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lead metal it’s put into a container and

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suspended over vinegar and that will turn the lead metal into a lead acetate

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and then around the container it’s buried in dung and so

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the dung produces carbon dioxide and that displaces the acetate and you end

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up with red carbonate which is this beautiful white um white pigment so out of vinegar

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manure comes this beautiful white pigment that’s been used for century millennia basically

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um and so that’s it’s just nice having a sample of this before it’s been ground

29:58

up into a white powder lipton yellow is an interesting pigment

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it’s um it’s a synthetic pigment made from lead tin and it’s it’s a byproduct of glazing or glass making

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and it was a pigment that was used predominantly up until 1750 and then it disappeared

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and it was forgotten about it um had a lapse in its production and it was

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rediscovered in 1940 at the donor institute and so

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knowing the history of this pigment actually gives you information so if you have a painting that contains lead in

30:33

yellow it means that um you know it could not have been made between

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1750-ish and 1940 so that that helps you understand something about the

30:47

the period in which the painting was made it’s also interesting for me because

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this pigment was rediscovered at the time that getting stout’s first

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edition was being written and it didn’t appear in the first edition so that that’s a

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you know also interesting there are um

Modern Pigments

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many many modern synthetic pigments that we’ve been able to add into the collection so

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the collection had remained fairly stable from about 1945

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from when getting’s retired sorry when forbes retired until we needed to

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get some modern pigments into the collection we’re doing a study of some um the so-called jackson polar paintings

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and we um we needed modern pigment so we um started collecting these very

31:41

actively um a colleague at the tape gave us some and then we’ve been actively adding to it from different

31:47

manufacturers like sun chemical basf and so on so these you know these don’t have the

31:54

same amazing names you know it’s like super maroon surface treated 1090 quinacridone magenta you know these

32:00

different kinds of names but they’re used by artists all the time and they’re used in paints they’re used

32:06

in plastics you see them around you all the time

Understanding Artists

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now we we want to understand how artists make decisions when they make a work of art and the color the layering

32:20

of the color how they mix colors is all part of that and so we want to understand you know

32:26

what pigments we used and you have to do a study with an unknown from a work of art and then compare it to a known

32:33

standard which is what the collection of pigments is for us and when getting was doing his work this

32:40

is how he did it um under a microscope and you would do microchemical tests but we don’t do that anymore

32:47

we use a whole lot of different um instrumentation we use raman

32:52

spectroscopy you can see we’re looking at a rothko drawing here it’s a non-invasive we’re

32:59

not doing anything to the object just clicking the spectrum infrared we’ve got moldy which is a way of

33:07

identifying proteins polarizing microscopy we can look at the individual particles

33:12

scanning electron microscopy look at things up a great magnification x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy we can

33:19

look at the metals that are in the center of the pigments as well as your other

33:25

if we’ve got a metal object we can identify the alloy as well

33:30

and so i just want to show you how we apply the um the technology that we have the the

Jackson Pollock

33:38

even standards and the information that that gives us combined with the instrumentation as

33:44

well so these are free paintings by jackson pollock

33:51

and they well they were supposed to be by jackson pollock they came wrapped in a

33:57

paper that said that they were by pollock the um person who owned them

34:03

had great connections with jackson pollock his parents herbert and mercedes mata were

34:09

very good friends with um jackson pollock and lee krasner and so he found these in his parents um

34:16

parent storage locker and he wanted to understand more about them so we we looked at them

34:22

and what we found actually was that there were pigments that were not available during jackson poet’s lifetime

Jackson Pollock pigments

34:29

so the red that was there was um first synthesized in 1974

34:35

and it’s pigment red um uh 256 i think

34:41

and 254 and it was um

34:48

not available until 1974 as a discovery but it wasn’t available commercially

34:53

until 1986 um when cebu geige patented a

34:58

method that could make it um commercially viable and then it was used

35:04

a lot in automotive applications so ferraris in the 90s were this color

35:12

and then we found other pigments as well pigment yellow 151 which wasn’t available until the late 60s so

35:18

these pigments were you know jackson pollock died in 1956 and

35:24

these pigments were not available for decades after his death so there’s no chance that jackson pollock could have

35:30

had access to them so that was that was interesting the back of this very damaged one

35:37

says jp on the back of it and it’s painted over silver and another colleague um jamie martin looked at the

35:44

silver paint and he was able to say that it’s a titanium coated mica pigment which wasn’t available until 1989.

35:54

and so what we have here is a lot of evidence that points to these

35:59

paintings being made in the 1990s rather than

36:05

much earlier on and it really tell there’s a lot more to this

Solving attribution questions

36:10

story and there’s a publication that we put together with all the information but this helps it helps you understand

36:16

how we use pigments to um solve attribution questions and so

36:23

these paintings had materials that were problematic to an attribute we don’t know who painted them or why

36:29

they were painted most likely 1990s and what we had was amazing provenance there

36:37

were some people who were connoisseurs who could say yes these were by pollock other ones

36:43

said no so that that division was that that consensus was divided actually

36:50

and the materials act said that it was not by bipolar these there were materials that were not

36:56

available to jackson pollock so this is a case where um

37:02

the materials really helped answer some of the serious questions about these paintings

37:10

we looked at um so we’re moving on to looking at some paintings by mark rothko these are murals that

Mark Rothko

37:17

hung in the holyoke center they were in this room here this is a

37:22

building that went up in the 1950s to house the health services at harvard but there

37:28

were also meeting rooms and they were hung in these rooms where there’s a lot of light that would come in through the

37:34

windows hit the paintings and the painting subsequently faded quite badly

37:40

what we wanted to do was understand what they were made of and why they faded so

37:45

that we could care for them better and so we took a cross section so that we could look at the layers of paint as

37:51

they’ve been applied to the the painting so here you’ve got where the canvas would have been

37:57

you’ve got the background color and then the color of the figure the

38:02

orange figure and using raman spectroscopy we were able to identify

38:09

the pigments that were in the the um in the paint but we found that this was pigment red 49 and this was

38:15

pigment red and you know it doesn’t take any

38:21

anyone with a um well it was very easy to see that the um

38:26

this red and this red were two different colors entirely and we needed to understand

38:32

what was going on so we worked with the chemistry school to synthesize pigment

38:38

red 49 and to make it with different um different versions so there’s

38:45

this metal here can be substituted for calcium for sodium for barium for

38:51

strontium and what we did was synthesize all these different versions in the chemistry school

38:57

and we could then look at the spectra and if we just zoom in a little bit

39:03

we can see that different versions calcium barium and sodium all

39:08

there’s a shift here in this peak and so that helps us when we’re looking at the cross-section

39:14

and we can actually go back and identify which salt is used so that we can say that in the background we’ve got the

39:21

calcium salt this is the color that fades and it fades quite quickly this is the

39:27

sodium salt and it’s much more light light stable and so

39:33

if we take that information and look at the painting at a macro level

39:38

we can say that this is pigment red 49 with the calcium in it it’s ultramarine

39:44

and pigment red 48 to make this plum color and then this figure is made up of pigment red with the

39:50

sodium salt and so that that tells us a lot about how mark roscoe was painting the

39:56

decisions he was making with the pigments we’re also able to apply this to um

40:02

other paintings that we have by micro and so we’re doing experiments we did experiments with this

40:07

one we found that it too had pigment red 49 in the background

40:13

and it was very light sensitive and so what we can do is make informed decisions about how to display this so

40:19

that it doesn’t fade um through being overexposed so understanding the pigments helps us

40:26

look after the collection better and i just want to talk about one final

Aboriginal bark paintings

40:33

project we worked on which was uh um a study of aboriginal bark

40:40

paintings from the northern part of australia and the curator and myself visited a

40:47

number of art centers there we went to bathurst island we worked with um

40:52

tiwi arts so there’s steve anderson who runs the arts center gordon papangamiri

40:57

who is one of the senior artists and they took us to

41:02

where they collect pigments to use in the arts center there’s gordon hacking out some white pigment from the the

41:09

cliff face and stephen gilchrist the curator so we with their permission were able to take

41:14

some samples we went round to another location where yellow ochre is

41:20

deposited um you can see here crocodile tracks these were very fresh and we had to wait to

41:26

make sure the crocodile did not come back it was from a 14-foot crocodile according to gordon

41:33

in any case we didn’t get we didn’t see the crocodile but um we were able to get the

41:38

yellow pigment and take it back to the arts arts center and you can see here

41:44

the white and yellow after we’ve finished unloading the the truck we visited um

41:52

um warren gary arts in western australia met with um alan and

41:59

peggy and they talked to us about the pigments that they use there’s alan um showing us where he gets the charcoal

42:06

from from this box box tree or batwing coral tree

42:13

um showing us here on this um dry creek bed where it’s a dreaming site

42:19

an aboriginal dreaming site where they get the white pigments that they use and then they can mix this white with the

42:24

black to make this unusual in aboriginal painting a very unusual mixture of pigments to make a blue when they’re

42:31

depicting water so it was great talking to them about how they paint we visited yakala

42:38

and again visited where um artists would collect pigments so this

42:43

is dj2 getting some white pigment um we talked with mulken about how she used

42:51

orchid juice so here she is applying orchid mucilage to the back of a bark so that

42:57

she can paint on it nyapanyappa painting with a brush made out of hair

43:02

um on the back grinding the pigments on a cinder block and then mixing it with

43:07

pva to act as a binding medium so we’re able to talk with um the artists about how

43:14

they painted and then we took the samples back we’ve done a lot of work on

43:20

understanding the chemical fingerprint and that work is almost ready for for publication

Recent editions

43:28

and then i just want to mention some of the the um recent editions so we have

43:33

um sorry let me just go back for a second this the work that we did do some of it

43:40

has been published in the exhibition catalog so that was um an execution catalog called everywhen

43:45

and we’re just wrapping up the bulk of the the study to put together into a um

43:52

a journal article for studies in conservation so it’s been a very long project but it’s really an exciting one

43:59

because this is the first study of this scale of bach paintings

44:04

in australia so um something that needed to be done and we’re very glad to have been able to

44:11

start this process so that these incredibly important paintings can be better understood

44:21

um so some modern additions we’ve got things like vantablack so vanta stands

Modern additions

44:28

for vertically arranged nanotube arrays and it’s a um essentially a black of

44:34

nanotubes that’s grown on the surface it’s incredibly light absorbing so that you can’t see any of the crinkles in the

44:41

aluminium so you can see it here it’s very very crinkled go down here you can’t see any of that so that tells you

44:48

that there’s no light bouncing back from the surface it’s a anish kapoor

44:54

is the artist who has the exclusive license for this pigment so there’s been a big kerfuffle about

45:01

that we’ve been in touch with keith edwards who is an expert on historical pigments

45:07

he synthesizes them and he’s been kind enough to share some of his his um

45:13

handy work with us i’m very grateful for that um masu romanian

45:20

discovered by accident in 2009 um yin min blue which is itrium indian

45:26

manganese blue and he shared some of that with us it’s been in the news a lot lately because in

45:32

the uk um a an artist’s paint has been available um

45:38

using yin min blue so that’s it’s come on to the commercial market in the uk

45:44

it’s um in australia there’s um derivant paints have been um

45:49

synthesizing uh um a version of that as well so it’s been available

45:55

um through their matisse color arranged for a while um

46:01

ed faulkner who is you know sort of the guru of modern synthetic pigments found these in his

46:07

garage when he’s tidying it up and decided to send them to us so we’re very grateful for that and um

46:13

befurio gutierrez he’s a um a zapotec weaver and dyer i mentioned him earlier this is some of the

46:19

cochineal that he sent us but he uses these other materials from around his his

46:24

village that um he uses for making these incredibly beautiful um

46:29

woven um fabrics and yeah some of the other projects

Working with designers

46:35

we’ve worked on just you know i never would have guessed that this is where pigments would take me working with

46:40

jonathan olivares who’s a designer he used um the pigments to develop

46:46

a twill weed fabric made by kuvadra and that’s commercially available now um

46:52

these are really beautiful fabrics they use these um pigments that are in the

46:57

collection to create the the 19 colors in the range

Books

47:04

um we’ve written a couple of books or contributed to a couple of books about the demon collection um this is in its

47:11

third printing this is out of press and i’m actually working on a book now about the collection so

47:18

we’ll that will be out when it gets out um and the last thing i wanted to mention is that

Display case

47:25

because the collection is away from the public it’s not

47:30

readily available people are always wanting to get closer and look at it and understand and appreciate it so what we

47:37

have is a display case on the fourth floor where we put a different display every

47:42

year so each year we we rotate what’s in the collection um with what’s in the display case and

47:48

just share that with the public so that they can get a sense of the work that we do and what we’re doing and why we’re

47:54

doing it and so that’s that’s what i wanted to say and

How to make paint

48:01

thank you for your attention and open up for any questions if you have

48:06

questions i’m very happy to answer them yeah thank you so much that was really

48:12

wonderful thank you thank you um yeah so questions are can be asked in

48:17

the q and a portion of zoom or on the chat on facebook we had a question while

48:23

you were speaking so i’m going to ask it now and they were asking how to make pigment into paint basically which i know

48:30

there’s lots of varieties but can you explain uh maybe more of a simple version of that

48:36

yeah so there are two things that make paint there’s the pigment which gives the paint its color

48:42

and then you have to hold the pigment in place and you use a binding medium and that

48:48

binding medium gives the paint its drying properties its map gloss properties its um flow properties

48:56

and you need to mix them together so what you can you know the simplest form is to have a a slab of stone um something like

49:04

porphyry you would put the pigment down you put the binding medium in and then you have a molar and then you just grind it

49:10

together and you’ll end up with a paint that you can use and the binding

49:16

medium can be all sorts of things it could be egg so you can use egg yolk you can use

49:22

whole egg it could be wax it can be oil it can be um jello you know i mean that’s

49:29

essentially distemper which is um collagen from bones and hooves and skin

49:35

and things it can be synthetic materials as well so it can be acrylic

49:40

resin which is a um a synthetic polymer um yeah so it can be

49:46

whatever you want to you know it’s it’s essentially there to just the binding medium holds the pigment in place and

49:52

you need those two things but then if you want to store paint for a long time if you don’t want it to dry out you

49:58

don’t want it to settle out you start adding more and more and more things and so when you buy a tube of paint now or a

50:04

pot of paint there’s a lot of other stuff in there there’s anti-fungal things there’s anti-frauculence there’s

50:11

things to stop it from settling out there you know there’s a whole range of other things as well

50:17

so quite complicated chemically and the people who make it will not share what’s in there because

50:23

that’s all their research and their livelihoods so you know it’s a voyage of discovery finding out

50:30

what’s in real paint fair enough um uh i have a question i’ve been noticing

50:36

uh through your presentation lots of the different files have are very distinct why is it important to keep the pigment

50:44

in the original container or is it important so it’s it’s

More information is better

50:49

interesting because the original container sometimes has a lot of information embedded in it so the labels can have a

50:56

lot of information the um you know it

51:02

they’re also i mean they’re quite interesting they’re beautiful those things change over time so it also gives you a sense of

51:09

how things are made presented stored it’s it’s part of

51:16

that package that’s traveled through time so i like keeping

51:22

as much information as possible about every purchase that we make and

51:27

stuff that is older sometimes the container is the only information that we have

51:33

so it’s important to to keep that as well because sometimes we don’t know what

51:40

it’s going to say [Music] at some point we’ll be able to decipher

51:45

something about it you know we’ve got a bunch of russian paint tubes from the 1970s i

51:51

think i can’t read russian i don’t know what it means so you know at some point we’ll

51:56

be able to go and decipher that and that will give us a greater context

52:02

around what is there rather than just what’s inside the tube so there’s there’s more

52:09

i guess more my my answer is more information is better that’s that’s the simple answer

52:14

yeah definitely fair enough yeah i that’s really interesting to me another thing that’s interesting to me

52:21

is you mentioned very briefly this one paint and it was i believe it was called mummy brown or something of that nature

52:27

and i’m curious to learn a little bit more about the pigments in your collection that you know i can’t imagine that mommy

52:34

brown is still produced today so is there any pigments that are like illegal to produce now or are

52:41

you know no longer welcomed by artists so yeah mummy

Other pigments

52:47

was produced until the early 20th century so i think roberson

52:52

still had bits of mummy in their store room until the

52:58

1920s um and i think when they gave their archive to the hamilton car

53:04

institute there was still a kneecap and a bit of a spine so

53:10

that you know it’s it’s a weird thing to think that people would use that but you know it’s bound up in some other set of

53:18

beliefs other than just the color itself indian yellow is another color that has

53:23

dropped out of production um and the understanding i’m not sure if

53:28

this is the actual truth or not is that it was outlawed by the british government in the early 20th century

53:34

um has been cruel to cows now whether that’s the real story or not i’m not sure but

53:40

it has dropped out of use out of use and out of production um

53:45

tyrion purple is another pigment that um is oh my god i’m seeing some cindy lack

53:52

who i know from the courthold from a very long time ago hi cindy

53:57

um the tyrion purple has it you know it’s so

54:05

labor intensive it’s so smelly you know if you’re making tyrion purple

54:10

it’s it’s a really anti-social thing to be doing

54:16

and there are a few small individuals who make tyrion purple

54:22

i know of someone in israel and i know someone in tunisia but otherwise it’s it’s not available there’s a lab in

54:29

switzerland that makes a synthetic version of it but as it’s it’s not available and pigments come in and out of

54:36

manufacture as well so we were looking at painting by george brock there were um some reds in his paint

54:44

mixtures that we couldn’t identify we didn’t have standards for but they must have been there in paints that were

54:49

available in the um in the you know in the 1930s when he was

54:56

painting but we we they’ve dropped out of production we don’t know what they are and there’s another um example we were

55:03

looking at a sculpture by donald judd and he made this in the mid 60s he was

55:10

using a harley davidson paint and it had an orange pigment in it

55:15

and we looked and looked and walked we couldn’t find what that orange pigment was we identified all the other

55:21

pigments and so you know this must have been a pigment that was available in the 60s

55:26

and has dropped out of production and not available so things come in and out of farm

55:32

production okay very interesting i have a question from linda who is asking what is the

55:39

oldest pigment in the collection so i i think

Lasko pigments

55:44

the pigments from lasko are the oldest and they they were just given to us recently um jennifer um

55:51

mineta gave them to us she visited lasko in about 1980

55:57

and i that had discovered rediscovered the caves um was taking her on a tour

56:03

and just picked up some chunks off the ground and gave them to us so she gave them to us that so they must be i don’t know 17 000

56:09

years old okay fair enough that’s very important so we’ve got we got some other ones from

56:15

thebes that are from i think like the fourth or fifth century bc you know so

56:21

we’ve got some pigments like that historical pigments but most of them are really you

56:26

know sort of in the you know firmly in the the mid 20 yeah early

56:32

first half of the 20th century fair enough very interesting and uh so cindy asks do you ever share small

56:39

quantities of pigment from your collection with other institutions so there’s a

Museum of Fine Arts

56:44

history of having done that um and the museum of fine arts in boston has

56:51

done a great job of tracking the family tree of all these pigments that have been divided up and shared

56:58

and so our collection has been shared with um

57:04

you know what i’m blanking on all the different museums i’m sorry i wrote a list down but i can’t remember and then

57:10

so there’s our group and then edward forbes had his own private collection and

57:17

that went to nyu so there are two sort of core groups and then they’ve been subdivided so

57:24

museums all around the us and then different museums around the world uh um

57:29

have little subsets of these yeah very interesting um

57:34

i’m a bit curious about you talked a little bit about synthetic um

57:40

synthetic paint and like how how does one go from like the original pigment to

57:45

the synthetic is it just like they’re just trying to match the color and that’s all they’re trying to do or how does that work

57:51

so with with ultramarine that was a way of making the pigment more accessible you know instead

57:58

of being as expensive as gold if you could make a synthetic version of it it made it much more available and

58:05

it still would carry the prestige of this very um expensive pigment but it was much

58:11

cheaper and as and it still has that that same attraction so people like um eve klein

58:18

oh sorry yes eve klein um he would use you know

58:23

developed international klein blue and you know that’s synthetic ultramarine so

58:29

you know he’s alluding to this very expensive historic pigment as

58:34

well as you know playing his his um tricks on everyone

58:39

yeah definitely a trickster um yeah so those those things change you know they

58:45

and i think with purple as well you know like um even though chemically it’s not the same william perkin made purple

58:52

available and so the color of late victoriana has got lots and lots of

58:58

purple in it and then it was available cheaply but it still carried the status of this

59:04

imperial color okay very cool i have another question from april and the

59:10

question is can these pigments be used to make stained glass so i guess it’s about like

59:16

are these pigments also able to go into other materials besides just paint

59:21

so stained glass is is a whole other subject yeah nothing about it

Stained Glass

59:28

and i’m happy to admit that so i can’t answer that question um

59:35

i think there you know there are pigments that are related to stained glass so i mentioned red tin yellow that’s related to

59:41

a you know glass manufacturer red tan timing yellow is another one smolt is

59:46

another one which is a cobalt blue glass so there is a connection between

59:51

pigments and stained glass but it’s not and there is a tradition of japanese

59:57

painting using colored glass as well but i i just don’t know enough about it i’m so

1:00:03

sorry i can’t go any further than that okay and then we have time for one more question and this is by elizabeth is

1:00:10

there an artist who stands out for you as having used particularly difficult unstable or unusual pigments

1:00:21

i mean i think i don’t think any artist deliberately sets out to do that i think they

1:00:31

you know they’re painting and then we have to live with the decisions that the artist has made

1:00:36

um i think that you know there are artists like albert pinkham ryder who would work

1:00:42

on a painting for i don’t know 20 30 years and just keep building it and building and building it up and there

1:00:49

are problems with pigments but also the binding media and so on so there are those ones you know

1:00:56

i was talking about mark rothko and his murals that have faded quite badly he wasn’t trying to make something

1:01:02

difficult or or unstable it just happened to be uh an accidental issue that he came up

1:01:09

against where the pigment is stable as a powder so he would have had that in his studio as a

1:01:14

powder and it doesn’t fade we couldn’t fade it and then when you make it into paint it becomes light sensitive so somehow the

1:01:21

energy gets transferred through the binding medium into the pigment and then it degrades and so

1:01:27

you know you we’ve got things like that that are um problems but i

1:01:34

no i can’t i can’t think of anyone who’s being like trying to trying to um

1:01:41

play games with us and i think very nice artists artists who use um

1:01:47

ballpoint pens or you know like commercially available things like that those um fluorescent markers those kinds of

1:01:53

things we know that they’re unstable the artists know that they’re unstable but you know that’s

1:02:00

it’s our job to deal with what the artists create and then we how to look after them and preserve them for as long

1:02:06

as possible yeah that’s great well so it was so nice to have you here talking to us i’m i can

1:02:12

speak on behalf of the audience i’m sure everyone really enjoyed it um so thank you again and uh thank you to our

1:02:18

audience for uh for participating and also paying attention to this lovely lecture uh

1:02:24

narayan do you have anything else you want to say i am just very grateful for the opportunity to share our work and um

1:02:31

thank you michael thank you um helen very um [Music]

1:02:37

i’m very honored to be speaking to your audience thank you yeah well we’re very honored to have you so thank you again

1:02:43

and so um that’s it for us bye everyone

1:02:48

bye

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