In December 2016, anyone trying to purchase a fifty-gram pot of powdered paint called The World's Pinkest Pink had to pass through a legal gauntlet before entering their credit card number. During online checkout, the customer was required to confirm a legally binding declaration: that they were not the British sculptor Sir Anish Kapoor, that they were in no way affiliated with Kapoor, and that to the best of their knowledge, the pigment would never find its way into his hands.
The restriction was retaliation. Earlier that year, Surrey NanoSystems granted Kapoor exclusive artistic rights to Vantablack S-VIS, a sprayable coating made of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes that absorbs 99.965 percent of visible light. To the rest of the art world, fencing off a visual phenomenon felt like creative vandalism. Artist Stuart Semple released his blindingly fluorescent pink for four pounds a pot to mock the monopoly; Kapoor retaliated by obtaining a jar, dipping his middle finger into the powder, and publishing the photo on Instagram with the caption "Up yours."
The internet treated the feud as performance art born of the social media age. In reality, Kapoor was reviving a six-century tradition: the history recorded across our art movements timeline is not a peaceful lineage of shared aesthetics, but a cutthroat sequence of chemical monopolies, guarded trade secrets, and bitter studio ambushes.
The Renaissance Blue Cartel
The contemporary myth is that paint has always been an open commodity. During the Italian Renaissance, color was a brutal financial hierarchy dictated by trade geography. Natural ultramarine came from a single known source on Earth: the Sar-e-Sang lapis lazuli mines in the Hindu Kush mountains of Badakhshan, located in what is now northeastern Afghanistan.
Carried overland by caravan and shipped across the Mediterranean into Venice, raw lapis was ground and laboriously kneaded with beeswax, pine rosin, and lye to extract pure lazurite crystals. By the time it reached a Florentine painter's bench, the pigment cost more than its weight in gold. Patrons drew up strict notarized contracts stipulating that masters like Domenico Ghirlandaio and Pietro Perugino had to use genuine ultramarine at two florins an ounce, explicitly barring them from substituting cheap azurite (which patrons dismissively termed "German blue"). Wealthy commissioners frequently bought the powder directly from trusted apothecaries and rationed it to the artist grain by grain to prevent workshop apprentices from pocketing the excess.
Johannes Vermeer famously bought genuine ultramarine on credit even when his household was sinking into insolvency. When he died in 1675, his widow was left bankrupt, having spent fortunes on blue powder to achieve the luminous headscarf in Girl with a Pearl Earring. Color was never neutral; it was an economic weapon that separated elite commissions from provincial mediocrity.
An Accidental Blue and a Twenty-Year Secret
The first major blow against the natural blue monopoly occurred by mistake in a Berlin laboratory between 1704 and 1706. The pigment maker Johann Jacob Diesbach was attempting to manufacture a batch of Florentine red lake using cochineal insects, alum, and potash. Short on potash, Diesbach borrowed a contaminated container from the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel, who had been distilling animal blood to create an elixir.
When the iron in Dippel's animal oil reacted with potassium ferrocyanide, the mixture turned not crimson, but an electrifying, permanent blue: iron hexacyanoferrate. Diesbach and Dippel immediately recognized the financial jackpot: here was a deep, lightfast blue that cost a fraction of Afghan lapis lazuli. Rather than sharing the discovery, they hoarded the recipe as a private commercial secret for nearly two decades, selling the pigment to European courts at premium margins.
The monopoly finally broke in 1724 when the English physician John Woodward published the reverse-engineered chemical recipe in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The democratization of Prussian blue rippled across global borders: Katsushika Hokusai used imported batches to anchor The Great Wave off Kanagawa in Japan, while nineteenth-century painters in the Impressionism movement relied on synthetic blues to step outside the studio and capture fleeting light on canvas, a legacy celebrated today across impressionism prints.
Varnishing Day 1832: Turner Fires a Gun
Artist material rivalries were not fought solely in corporate contracts or chemical laboratories; they were waged live on gallery walls. At the Royal Academy's 1832 Summer Exhibition, the annual "Varnishing Day" gave academicians three days to touch up their finished paintings while hanging in the gallery before the public opening.
John Constable had spent fifteen years reworking The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, an ambitious, luminous canvas packed with glittering whites, vermilion flags, and golden reflections. Hanging right next to it was J.M.W. Turner's seascape Helvoetsluys, a chilly, monochromatic composition composed entirely of muddy greys and stormy green water. Constable spent the morning frantically layering brilliant colors onto his canvas, surrounded by admirers.
Turner walked into the room, stood silently watching Constable work, picked up his palette, and mixed a single dab of bright red lead. Without speaking to anyone, Turner stepped up to his own dreary grey seascape, slapped the fiery red blob dead in the center of the cold ocean, and walked out of the building.
The intensity of Turner's isolated red mark instantly neutralized Constable's entire composition, making the adjacent Waterloo Bridge look fussy and overworked. Constable was devastated. "He has been here," Constable whispered to the painter Charles Robert Leslie, "and fired a gun." Two days later, just before the exhibition opened, Turner returned and deftly shaped the red blob into a round navigation buoy.
The Patent Myth: Yves Klein and the Soleau Envelope
In 1960, the French artist Yves Klein seemed to achieve what every possessive painter dreamed of: he patented a color. International Klein Blue (IKB), a matte ultramarine so saturated that looking at it induced vertigo, became Klein's personal trademark.
The persistent legend is that Klein owned the blue itself. Under French intellectual property law, however, no human being can patent a wavelength of light. What Klein actually registered on May 19, 1960, with the French patent office (INPI) under Soleau envelope number 63471, was a chemical binder. Working alongside the Parisian art supplier Édouard Adam and chemists from Rhône-Poulenc, Klein discovered that traditional linseed oil dulled dry pigments by flattening their light refraction. They developed a synthetic resin called Rhodopas M, a polyvinyl acetate dissolved in ethyl alcohol that suspended raw synthetic ultramarine crystals without dampening their powdery glow. Klein did not own the color; he owned the chemistry that allowed blue to look raw on canvas.
The Garden Burial of Mummy Brown
Sometimes material obsession took a macabre turn that artists themselves could barely stomach. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European painters prized a pigment called Mummy Brown (or caput mortuum) for its rich transparency in shadows and flesh tones. Manufacturers made it by literally grinding ancient Egyptian human and feline mummies in apothecary mills.
In 1881, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones was having lunch with fellow artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who mentioned visiting a colourman's workshop to inspect a fresh shipment of mummies being prepared for paint production. Burne-Jones, who had assumed the name was merely a poetic brand label, went white with shock. He walked straight to his studio, fetched his tube of Mummy Brown, carried it into his garden in Fulham, and gave the paint a solemn Christian burial in the dirt beneath a daisy root while his young nephew Rudyard Kipling watched.
The Nanotech Enclosure
When Anish Kapoor secured Vantablack, he was not pioneering a fresh commercial abuse; he was operating within this long lineage of material enclosure. The difference is institutional. Where Renaissance patrons guarded lapis through contracts and Klein protected his binder with a patent registry, modern pigment wars are negotiated between military-aerospace contractors and high-end sculptors.
Vantablack was never intended as an artist oil paint. Developed for satellite calibration and stealth applications, the coating requires specialist application chambers heated to hundreds of degrees. Much like the pioneers of Minimalism who stripped away representational distraction to interrogate raw surface and pure void (a focus that still informs modern minimalism prints), Kapoor sought a total optical absence of form. Yet his exclusive artistic licence meant that even if another sculptor had access to the required technology, Surrey NanoSystems was contractually barred from fulfilling the order.
Stuart Semple's counter-attack went beyond satire. By following The World's Pinkest Pink with Black 2.0, Black 3.0, and Black 4.0, Semple developed acrylic-based alternatives that absorb up to 99 percent of light without requiring vacuum chambers or industrial licenses, returning the material to everyday studio tables. When Kapoor posted his middle finger dipped in pink, Semple did not sue for breach of contract. "We are all really disappointed that Anish has managed to get his hands on the world's pinkest pink," Semple told reporters. "He's only got one finger in it. He's still banned from the rest."
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