Introducing The Palette Studio. Upload any image, or pull a painting or movie from the archive. The Studio distills its palette into a series of chromatic studies, each a different way of seeing the colors within. Copy color values, download studies or browse palettes. 🔗👇

Paul Reynard, Banners on canvas. 1974-76.

Mario Kolaric, Fragment series. 2014. Ink on paper.

From 1925, Gunta Stölzl ran the Bauhaus weaving workshop, the only woman ever to become a Bauhaus master. Trained in the color ideas of Itten and Klee, she pushed them into cloth, where color could change through texture and material. Watercolors (1925-31).

Gauguin treated color as something that could be deliberately untrue. He urged painters not to copy nature too literally, but to exaggerate color when it served the picture. In Tahiti this becomes extreme. Pink and red earth, violet shadows, turquoise greens and intense yellows often have as much to do with the composition as the landscape itself. But Gauguin arrived in Tahiti with his ideas about color already shaped by Symbolism and his experiments in Brittany, then pushed what he saw further. Tahiti became partly a real place and partly a color world of his own making!

Gianluca Franzese, Full Circle. 2022. Gold & silver with acrylic glazes on panel.

Otto Treumann designed this stamp in 1969 for the 25th anniversary of Benelux, turning the colors of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg into a single continuous ribbon. The design was mathematically interesting enough that the Dutch magazine Pythagoras used it that same year to explain the Möbius strip, even showing readers how to recreate Treumann’s twisted ribbon with a strip of paper. Stamp shown here alongside Treumann’s sketches for the stamp (gouache and pencil on paper).

Hilma af Klint, Group IXUW, The Dove, No. 14. 1915. Oil on canvas.

Paul Klee, The Idea of Firs. 1917. Watercolor and gouache on paper.

Zanis Waldheims. ca. 1950-70. Pencil and crayon on paper.

William Baxter Closson left a wonderful clue to the color of The Angel. He described her entering “The Great White Light,” so overpowering that she clutches her wings to stop her ascent and turns her face away. The painting is almost swallowed by that light, its blues, cyans, creams & greys pushed so close together that even the figure seems to dissolve into it.

László Moholy-Nagy, Construction. 1922. With color studies.

These patterns are over 3,300 years old, but the colors we see were recorded in the 20th century. Nina de Garis Davies copied the ceiling of the Tomb of Nebamun and Ipuky at full scale, part of an extraordinary effort to preserve Egyptian paintings whose colors were already disappearing. The colors weren’t modern interpretations. Davies carefully matched what survived on the tomb walls, even developing a technique to reproduce their matte color and brushwork as faithfully as possible.

Berenice Sydney is a fascinatingly overlooked figure. She was born in London in 1944 and died at only 39, but left behind an unusually large body of paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture. She exhibited internationally during her lifetime, including at the ICA in London. What is especially interesting about works like Green Sun (1968) is that Sydney repeatedly returned to circles, spirals, radiating lines and movement. Dance was important to her, and these recurring structures often grew from ideas of bodies moving through space rather than from purely geometric abstraction. For these color studies, that makes the palette especially good to pull apart. The painting is built from a surprisingly tight vocabulary of hot reds and oranges against blue, purple, green and near-black, repeated across those radiating forms until color itself becomes part of the movement.

This geometric abstraction was made around 1970, but its visual language goes straight back to his Bauhaus education. Walter Allner studied at Dessau from 1927 to 1930 with Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, and sources specifically identify Albers’s geometric abstraction as a major influence on his later work. By the time he made these screenprints, Allner had spent more than a decade at Fortune, serving as art director from 1962 to 1974 and designing 79 covers. He was unusually interested in computers and worked directly with engineers, including on what RIT describes as the first computer-generated cover of a national magazine. We ran one of his works through a few color studies, pulling its palette apart and putting the same colors through different systems.