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...

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