According to Bertolt Brecht, “art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it”. The artistic movements created throughout the history of art were numerous, with artists being each time at the forefront of shaping a new artistic reality, each one using his own vocabulary and techniques.
[dropcap size=big]F[/dropcap]aithful companion to the painter’s creative journey is none other than the palette, an integral tool that seems to hide the creator’s secrets and concerns. Those secrets were the ones that the German photographer Matthias Schaller tried to reveal, photographing palettes of famous painters of the 19th and 20th century and then creating the collection Das Meisterstück (The Masterpiece). The concept for this collection was born during Schaller’s visit to Cy Twombly’s studio, where he realized that the artist’s palette was the reflection of his work. Thus, he began looking for these objects in museums and private collections, attempting to study their similarities with the paintings of the respective artists.
[dropcap size=big]T[/dropcap]he palette, then, is an abstract landscape of the painter’s artistic production (M.Schaller), on which the creator’s characteristic hues and brushstrokes are captured. Therefore, Yves Klein’s palette consists of a single colour, his very own characteristic ultramarine (International Klein Blue), while Piet Mondrian’s one reflects the purity of his abstract works by the dominance of white and traces of basic colors. In the one of Joan Miró, the geometric forms with the bold expressive colours play in space, while Wassily Kandinsky creates the famous Circles in a Circle first on the palette, before he captures them in his final painting.
For the rest of the collection’s palettes, click here.
