The publication
About and method
The kit as it was actually bought — ready-ground colour in closable tubes, laid out in the order the painter works.
Photo: ROMAN ODINTSOV / Pexels
I. Wolk Gallery is a publication about the modern and contemporary era: how the work came to look the way it does, told through material and social cause rather than through a parade of masterpieces.
What this is not
It is not a gallery, a dealer, a museum or a venue, whatever the name suggests. Nothing here is for sale, nothing here is on show, there is no roster and no calendar. The name is the name of the publication and nothing more.
How an entry is built
Every entry is one cause and its consequence: a material, a market or a rule, and what it did to the picture. The cause and the consequence are stated at the head of the piece before the argument is made, so a reader can decide in one line whether the entry is worth their time.
The eight arguments are the publication’s whole structure, and the index prints in full at the top of every page. Nothing on this site hides behind a menu, and there is no page you cannot reach in one click from any other.
On evidence
Dead artists and long-documented works are the subject. Where scholarship disagrees — over an attribution, over how much weight a single invention deserves, over what a claim actually claimed — the entry sets the disagreement out rather than choosing the tidier version. Nothing is ranked as greatest or most important; those are not findings.
Photographs are credited under their captions. Where a picture stands in for a condition rather than illustrating a specific work, the caption says what the picture cannot.
Corrections are welcome, and are the fastest way to improve the register. If an entry states something that the sources do not support, we would rather hear it than keep it. Write to the editors.