An Atlas of Rare Familiar Colour the Harvard Art Museums Forbes Pigment Collection
An Atlas of Rare and Familiar Colour: The Harvard Art Museums' Forbes Pigment Collection / Contributors: Five.Finlay, P.Georgiev, N. Khandekar, C.Labarthe, One thousand.Trinder
299 pages (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0997593532
Published by Atelier Éditions
48 (hardcover) £33 (softcover)
Reviewed by Laurence Cornet
Atelier Éditions recently published An Atlas of Rare and Familiar Colour. Behind the enigmatic title lie a myriad of caper glass bottles and mineral chunks, all role of the Harvard Fine art Museums' Forbes Paint Drove. The items inventoried in this unique reserve are reminders of the surprising history of pigments – the small particles of coloured cloth often mixed with a binder to brand paint in the simplest form. "Cinnabar (Straus.576). A very toxicant. Occurring in many forms, the volcanic substance was sometimes highly avoiding, turning black when exposed to sunlight (and moonlight)", reads a caption next to what would at starting time gaze appear as ordinary pebble.
Following a typological structure arranged by hue, the volume offers a dive into remote geographies and times. Colours appear to be the result of context and culture and, equally such, constantly evolving. Some of the pigments gathered in the collection are impossible to detect anymore, either considering they were made out of the crushing an extinct animal, because the mining of the mineral they are made of is too costly or, considering the supply in raw textile has vanished. And with skilful reason. Pigments come from a variety of sources, nosotros learn. Some of them are mineral derived; others are fabricated of leaves, roots, forest, seeds, insects, molluscs, bones, and even of mummy fragments and the urine of cows exclusively fed a nutrition of mango leaves.
Beyond the history of painting, acutely referenced throughout the book, pigments unfold history itself. We visualize Cro-Magnons mining ochre to depict their world on modernistic-day France's cave walls, and follow the ascension of Industrial Revolution that saw natural pigmentations rendered wholly obsolete by a succession of synthesised chemical compounds. Equally Victoria Finlay, a journalist and color specialist, writes in introduction, this one-of-a-kind atlas takes our mind to "places where scientists invent and miners mine and artists work and have ideas and create illusions. […] And most of all to places where you can know the world more keenly, through a tiny pinch of its dust".
Sometimes, history flirts with legends. Julius Caesar is said to take forbidden the attiring of whatever Roman denizen with Tyrian purple, excepting himself, after encountering Queen Cleopatra's sumptuous Tyrian majestic features whilst in Egypt; and green shades containing arsenic, by slowly melting from wallpapers, are accused of the death of many, among whom Napoleon Bonaparte himself.
While the text is the result of thorough research, the photography too appropriates the codes of investigation. Shot in a 1/3 proportion over a white backdrop, each vial is portrayed as an evidence. These drinking glass containers of various shapes are simple, simply yellowed labels and scripts handwritten in thick ink talk for their age and origins – many of them yet resonate with the voice of 16th century colour-merchants selling their valuable products in Venice. With each photo, we are tempted to re-enact the time of their discovery. And this, especially since each pigment is associated to a strictly formatted explanation evocative of quondam science books, making this Atlas an anachronistic opus.
While photography itself is not the main purpose of the book, information technology's worth noting that all the images were shot past Quebecois lensman Pascale Georgiev, whose practise focuses upon alternate visual narratives drawn from archival and analog materials. Flipping through the book indeed brought back to mind an exhibition that took place in 2010 at the Eye for Photography in Geneva. Titled « The Revenge of the photographic archive », the evidence offered a reflection on how, confronted with the avalanche of photographs produced daily, more than and more than producers of images are becoming archivists-iconographers. Expanding the field of photography towards i that resonates closely with "visual civilization", it included photographs that primarily served as a practical tool – political militancy, anthropology, science and even insurance. Ultimately, it was bringing together photographs that,created for a subject, changed their object over the years, such as Georgiev'southward all the same life shots of pigments whose anecdotal, illustrative, status evolve over the pages, turning from an ordinary status into that of a piece of work of art.
– reviewed for Photomonitor by Laurence Cornet
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An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour: The Harvard Fine art Museums' Forbes Pigment Collection, with contributions by: Victoria Finlay, Pascale Georgiev, Narayan Khandekar, Capucine Labarthe, Kingston Trinder, was published by and is bachelor from Atelier Editions.
Below, two folio spreads:
Source: https://photomonitor.co.uk/book/an-atlas-of-rare-and-familiar-colour-the-harvard-art-museums-forbes-pigment-collection/
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