Collecting Colour

A conservator's tour through one of the world's working pigment archives, told by the scientist responsible for keeping it useful to painters, restorers, and historians alike.

Narayan Khandekar directs the Forbes Pigment Collection at Harvard's Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, an array of more than three thousand natural and synthetic colouring agents assembled over a century of technical art research. Collecting Colour traces the origins of individual pigments and their cultural uses, arguing for pigment as a basic material fact underlying any work of art. The book, designed by Thijs Verbeek and printed with high-pigment ink, grew out of Khandekar's Mondrian Lecture delivered in Rotterdam for the Sikkens Prize awarded to designer Hella Jongerius.

Khandekar also directs the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art and heads the Analytical Laboratory of the Harvard Art Museums. Published by ArtEZ Press as the fourth title in the Sikkens Foundation series, Collecting Colour extends that research past the laboratory into a compact, image-driven volume for a general readership.