2024
Alexandra Loske
Dr. Alexandra Loske held the Mondrian Lecture at the award ceremony of the Sikkens Prize 2024 to Pipilotti Rist at the Kunsthal Rotterdam on Monday 7 October. Dr Loske has lectured and been published widely on the history of colour. She is a curator at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and a research associate at the University of Sussex. Her current research focuses on the role of women in the history of colour.
Pioneering Women in Colour History
In her Mondrian Lecture, Dr Alexandra Loske spoke about pioneering women in the history of colour. According to Loske, we associate many milestones in the history of colour with men, such as Isaac Newton, Moses Harris, George Field, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Michel-Eugène Chevreul and many others. Examples of women writing about colour are rare before the twentieth century.
Loske, who has made it her mission to create a ‘library of colourwomen’, introduced some of the women who wrote and published about colour and colour theory in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and explores how they claimed their place in the world of colour.
In particular, the talk focused on how they illustrated their work, including the surprisingly abstract colour blots of English flower painter Mary Gartside (c.1755-1819) and the highly inventive colour grids of New York art teacher Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1842-1939). In the case of Beatrice Irwin (1877-1956), we see a ‘colourwoman’ who combined performance art, poetry and technology, joyfully blurring the boundaries between science and art. All of these women used colour in new, creative and exciting ways.
Pictures of the Mondrian Lecture 2024 by Dr. Alexandra Loske. Pictures by Anne Reitsma.
About Alexandra Loske
Dr Alexandra Loske FSA is a British-German art historian, writer, and museum curator. Originally from the Rhineland, she now lives in East Sussex, England, and is the Curator of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. She read English and Linguistics at Humboldt University, Berlin, and Art History at the University of Sussex, U.K, where she also received her DPhil in Art History. She is a Research Associate at the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, where she is working on the role of women in the history of colour.
Alexandra has authored, edited, and co-authored many books and articles on colour and other subjects, including Colour: A Visual History, and A Cultural History of Color in the Age of Industry. This year (2024), she has published a substantial work with TASCHEN, The Book of Colour Concepts, as well as the first monograph on pioneering colour theorist and artist Mary Gartside (Abstract Visions of Colour). Her latest book, The Artist’s Palette (for Thames & Hudson and Princeton University Press) is being translated in several languages. She is currently writing a book on the Royal Pavilion for Yale University Press (Summer 2025).