From Piet Mondrian’s plain white smudge to the vivid flourishes of Egon Schiele, the palettes artists use to create their masterpieces are mysterious, vibrant creations in their own right (Picasso’s palette from 1961 recently fetched £56,250 at auction despite being made of cardboard). Fifty of these small artworks, smeared with their owners’ personalised spectrum of paint, have now been collected in a new book, many of them for the first time. “A palette is both a timeless blank canvas and the ultimate abstract work of art,” says the book’s author, Alexandra Loske, curator of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. “It is the most intimate and personal of tools, and perhaps the closest we will ever come to connecting with a long-dead artist.”
