Interview: Narayan Khandekar, the keeper of colours at the Harvard Art Museum

Art is not an afterthought, Narayan Khandekar is often fond of saying. The Lascaux caves in France, sometimes called the Sistine Chapel for Prehistoric Art, are his favourite example.

Living on hunted bulls, bison, and reindeer, some early humans still took the time to grind ochre into yellows, browns and reds to paint the walls with pictures of the animals. Some 17,000 years ago and at the edge of survival – not satisfied with simple charcoal sketches – they reached for colour.

Khandekar, one of the world’s leading pigment experts, oversees the Forbes Pigment Collection at the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, the Harvard Art Museum.

This growing collection of over 3,000 pigments is a record of human ingenuity, global trade, scientific discovery, and the ongoing search for new materials.

On a cold grey New England day in April, Scroll spoke to this curator of colours.

Excerpts:

How did the Lascaux ochre sample end up in your collection after all these years?

The Lascaux ochre came to us fairly recently. With the reopening of the Harvard Art Museums in 2014, the pigments became newly visible and got wide media attention: in The New Yorker, CNN Great Big Story video, Tom Scott’s YouTube channel and so on. From the media swirl, an artist in California became aware of our existence.

As a young woman, she was granted rare access to the Lascaux caves long after they closed in 1963. During that group tour, one of the cave’s original discoverers placed a small piece of ochre in her hand – a fragment she kept with her for decades. During the Covid pandemic, she contacted us and mailed it to us. With the museum running on a skeleton crew, the package sat on a desk for days. When staff returned, the Lascaux ochre joined the Forbes Pigment Collection.

The collection is named for Edward Waldo Forbes, who was a pioneer in scientific art conservation. To understand a painting, this director of the Harvard Fogg Art Museum believed one had to understand its components, so he began collecting pigments, which are coloured particles and also the binding media [linseed oil, beeswax, resins] that turn them into paint.

To investigate art in a scientific way, he was the first to employ a scientist in an art museum. [This scientist, Rutherford John Gettens, wrote to his colleague S Paramasivan at the Madras Government Museum in India to discuss problems in conservation.] Until his retirement in 1944, Forbes assembled the core of this collection. We now have a suite of instruments to study paints at a fundamental level.

Do today’s artists limit themselves to what’s available in art‑supply catalogues?

Artists reach for whatever will help them get what’s in their head out into the world. Industrial coatings, car paints, and other materials routinely migrate into art – Richard Hamilton, the Father of British Pop Art, once used Cadillac automotive paint to paint images of Cadillacs.

A Donald Judd sculpture at the Whitney, painted with Harley‑Davidson repair paint called Hi‑Fi Purple, required identifying a violet pigment (PV19) and an orange pigment from the 1960s.

We like to have reference materials for anything that might appear in art. Without a reference sample, conservators can’t identify what an artist used or decide how to care for an artwork. The long view shapes our collection. The museum collects for the artwork that already exists and the ones that haven’t been made yet.

When a pigment like YInMn Blue appears in the world, how quickly does it enter your collection?

YInMn Blue – the first new inorganic blue discovered in two centuries – entered the collection almost as soon as it entered the world. It was created accidentally in 2009 at Oregon State University, in Prof MA Subramanian’s lab when a graduate student heated a mixture of yttrium, indium, and manganese oxides and pulled from the furnace an extraordinary blue. The professor, a material scientist, had not worked with pigments before, but he recognised its possibilities.

When Prussian Blue was invented in 1704, Canaletto [Italian painter] was one of the first to use it to depict the sky in Venice – it was absolutely transfixing. Contemporary artists want to paint with this new blue.

What makes YInMn interesting as a pigment is also its stability. Many historical blues – azurite, smalt, even some ultramarines – fade or darken when exposed to heat or light. Unlike all these blues, YInMn doesn’t fade and it doesn’t degrade. Further, it reflects infrared radiation, which means shelters painted with this pigment stay cooler in the sun – they need less air-conditioning.

The Forbes collection also has the first commercially made acrylic paint using YInMn – it is called Oregon Blue (after the university where it was discovered) and is produced by Derivan Paint in Australia. We also have “Bluetiful”, a crayon which Crayola made as a tribute to this novel blue.

And what about red – is there a new, 21st‑century red on the horizon?

There is always the quest for a perfect red – more than any other colour, artists and chemists keep returning to it.

Ochre is a naturally occurring, iron‑oxide‑based earth pigment, whose colour varies depending on its chemical composition. Red ochre is stable but dull. The brightest reds are toxic: Vermilion is made of ground mercury sulfide; realgar is made of an arsenic sulfide.

Michigan State chemist Donald G Farnum accidentally produced a vivid red residue while attempting an unrelated reaction and published the result in 1974. Later, Ciba Specialty Chemicals patented the pigment – now known as PR254 – and brought it into commercial use. Luxury carmakers Ferrari used this expensive organic red on its cars in the 1990s, as did a few other automakers. The pigment nicknamed Ferrari Red is an organic colorant.

A red pigment that doesn’t fade in sunlight and doesn’t have the heavy metals of older reds – a red equivalent of YInMn Blue – will be valuable. In a warming world, the stakes are higher: materials that can provide passive heat reduction by reflecting the portion of sunlight responsible for heat buildup are increasingly important. Manufacturers of paints are watching these developments closely.

Is the future of pigments high‑tech?

Artists use whatever material speaks to them and that openness is what is driving some of the most interesting new work in colour. Mushroom‑based pigments have emerged as an area of interest, thanks to the work of Portland‑based artist Julie Beeler. In her book, The Mushroom Color Atlas, she lays out methods to transform mushrooms into dyes and pigments of gold, violets, rusts, and other hues extracted entirely from fungi.

And then there are hues rooted in indigenous methods, like in the work of Christina Kim, a California-based designer who researches materials and traditions that carry forward older ways of making colour.

We have a sample of Tyrian Purple, an ancient pigment made from mollusk. In the new purple made from Oaxacan traditions, the mollusk is “milked” to yield colour. Kim collaborates with artisans the world over – including those in India. [In Mumbai, she works with artisans who transform flowers offered at one of India’s busiest temples into dye with texture. The used petals – sorted, folded into cloth, and steamed – make imprints on the fabric. The project is called Temple Blessings.]

There is an entire global network of small‑scale makers who take enormous pride in their paints like A Gallo’s honey-based watercolours from Italy – independent producers who treat pigment-making as a meticulous act of craft. All these pigments, synthetic or natural, reflect how creative people are when they look for colour.

The Forbes Pigment Collection has been in operation for a hundred years. I look back at what was done a century ago. And I wonder about what people, a century from now, will make of our choices.

Vijaysree Venkatraman is a Boston-based science journalist.