What Kremer Was For

I met Georg Kremer several times over the years — first in his New York store decades ago, when I was beginning to take seriously the questions that would eventually become my own life’s work. We were both chemists, though by different routes, and we had both been drawn to the same problem from different ends of it: that some of the materials that built the great paintings of the European tradition had simply become unavailable to anyone who wanted to use them today.

Georg got there first, and he got there by a more difficult path. In the early 1970s, when he was a student at Tübingen, a conservator friend asked him whether he could reproduce a particular blue — a color that 16th- and 17th-century painters had used for skies and mountains, that Vermeer had layered into some of his early paintings, and that had become commercially unavailable around 1910. Georg dug through archives, found the recipe, and made it. The pigment was smalt, a glassy cobalt blue. It became the first Kremer pigment, and it set the pattern for the next fifty years of his work.

My own path to the same field was later and smaller. I came to chemistry through industry rather than university — training in the 1980s while employed by chemical companies, no degree, but enough working knowledge to read a structure and run a reaction. I came to historical pigments through painting. And I came to the materials that would eventually define Natural Pigments through my wife Tatiana Zaytseva, who is the company’s co-founder, and without whom none of this would exist. I met Tatiana on my first trip to Russia in 2000. We were married in 2001. Through her, I met Alexander Grigoriev, a Russian geologist whose knowledge of mineral deposits across the former Soviet Union became the source for the pigments I would carry back, in suitcases, on the early trips: cinnabar and orpiment from Ukraine, iron oxides and volkonskoite and malachite from the Urals, glauconite and celadonite from the Baltic states, lapis from Lake Baikal, lapis from Badakhshan via the routes that ran through Russia. The first such trip was in 2001. We did this several times before tightening airport restrictions made it impossible to bring sealed bags of mineral powder onto international flights.

In 2003, I tried these pigments in oil paint. I had been an oil painter before, and I knew what oil paint was supposed to feel like. These pigments did not feel like that. They had different rheology, different drying behavior, different relationships with the oil. I added the standard stabilizers a paint maker is supposed to add, and the unique behavior disappeared. I went looking for published research on the rheology of old masters’ paints and found only two articles. The conclusion was unavoidable: the modern stabilizers added to commercial oil paints had eliminated the unique rheological behavior of natural mineral pigments in oil — and the field had stopped studying it. The decision that followed — to make oil paint without those stabilizers, and to find out what these pigments actually did in oil — became the founding question of Natural Pigments.

What Georg built from his beginning, and what Tatiana and I built from ours, are not the same thing. He has been doing this work for over fifty years; we have been doing it for twenty-five. His company in Aichstetten supplies painters and conservators around the world; we are a small operation in northern California, with a more limited range. But the instinct is the same instinct, and the obligation is the same obligation: to bring back materials that had become unavailable, and to make them available to people who want to use them seriously.

What I want to write about here is what was lost when the New York store closed at the end of November 2025, and where to look now.

What Kremer NYC offered

The New York store carried materials across roughly ten broad categories: historical and modern pigments, dyes and plant colors, fillers and ground materials, paints and binders and adhesives, solvents and chemicals, ready-to-use paints, gold leaf and gilding products, painting surfaces and papers, brushes, and the assorted tools that serious painting and pigment work require. The range was extensive but not exhaustive — even Kremer didn’t carry every specialty material a serious painter or conservator might need. The table below maps each of those categories to the U.S.-based suppliers I think a displaced Kremer customer should know about, including Natural Pigments, where we genuinely fit, as well as other suppliers where they’re stronger.

I have limited the recommendations to U.S.-based suppliers. Kremer Pigmente in Germany continues to operate, and serious customers can still order internationally, but the tariffs and shipping costs that contributed to the New York store’s closure apply to direct orders from Germany. The U.S. focus is the practical one for U.S. customers in 2026.

Where to look now

The table is current as of the article’s publication. Suppliers’ ranges and reputations change; the recommendations above reflect what we know in May 2026.

No single supplier replaces what Kremer NYC was. The displaced customer’s path forward is to learn the landscape, build relationships with two or three suppliers whose ranges together cover your needs, and be patient — the supply chain for serious materials has always required some patience, and the closure of the New York storefront makes that more true, not less.

A different kind of resource

Among the things that were lost when Kremer NYC closed was the possibility of a certain kind of conversation. Georg himself, when he was in the store, was that conversation — a chemist who could explain the structural difference between a natural azurite and a synthetic one, or why a particular oil-grinding technique mattered for a particular pigment. But Georg has long lived and worked in Germany, and the depth of explanation he could offer in person was rare on the New York shop floor. The day-to-day staff was helpful, often very helpful, but the technical conversation that the field’s most serious customers wanted was harder to find at retail.

This is one of the gaps in the displaced customer’s situation that I want to address, because it is one that Natural Pigments aims to fill.

The work that put Tatiana and me into a position to do this began in 2006. That year I joined the ASTM D01.57 subcommittee — Artist Paints and Related Materials —the group that maintains the artist materials standards, including ASTM D 4302 — where I met Joy Luke, Mark Gottsegen, and Ross Merrill, the chief of conservation at the National Gallery of Art. Ross had taken an interest in the stabilizer-free oil paints I had been making in my garage in 2005, and he invited me to give a lecture at the National Gallery. Tatiana and I expected an audience of perhaps forty serious people. The Gallery put us in the East Building Small Auditorium, which seats about 160, and the room was full, with people standing in the back and in the aisles — close to two hundred attendees in all. Most were artists. I came home from that trip with a different sense of the scale of interest in what we were doing, and a list of conservators who would become long-term collaborators — including Marion Mecklenburg at the Smithsonian, whose 28-year study on zinc oxide in oil paint became the foundation of the technical work I have been writing about ever since.

In 2007, we traveled to England. We received a personal tour from Ian Garrett at Winsor & Newton. We consulted the archives of several nineteenth-century artist material manufacturers whose companies are now defunct. From those archives, we recovered methods that we have since incorporated into our production at Natural Pigments. The same trip took us to Tate Britain, where we met Leslie Carlyle, then head of conservation, and Joyce Townsend. Leslie had been deeply involved in the HART project — the research program that systematically reconstructed nineteenth-century painting materials — and was the author of The Artist’s Assistant, the standard reference on British artist material practice in that period. We have remained close colleagues since then. As I write this, I am working with Leslie to make the HART research publicly available on a website for the first time.

What Tatiana and I have built at Natural Pigments grows from that lineage. By the time the New York store closed, Natural Pigments had become the second-largest historical pigment supplier in the United States, after Kremer itself. We make our oil paints in Willits, California, and ship from there, with fulfillment partners in Canada and Germany. We have been teaching technical material to painters since 2013, when we began the Painting Best Practices seminar program; over a thousand painters have now taken those courses, and the Painting Best Practices community on Facebook has grown to 30,000 members. In 2024, we moved the educational program to a membership site with live monthly events. We are currently expanding production of historically reconstructed pigments — including Stack Process Flake White, which we have been making since 2007 — and we are restoring British watercolor formulations from the first half of the nineteenth century, drawing on Ackermann and Winsor & Newton sources, for our Rublev Colours watercolor line. We are developing new wax-resin materials in cooperation with the conservation community.

This is what we can be for a displaced Kremer customer. Not a replacement for what was lost. A different kind of resource for the parts of the work where we genuinely fit.

A closing acknowledgment

There is an account, in a 2019 profile of Georg Kremer in Ursula magazine, of the painter Jack Whitten’s studio in Queens after his death. Whitten, who died in January 2018, had spent his later years obsessively experimenting with Kremer pigments — the iridescent and pearlescent ones that gave his Quantum Wall paintings their strange, shifting surfaces. After he died, his daughter placed some of his ashes in a plain brown box and put it on the shelf, among the jars of pigment. “I put Dad with the pigments,” she said. “I think he’d be happy there.”

I think about that detail. It captures something true about what a place like Kremer NYC was for the people who depended on it. Not just a store. A part of the work itself.

The store is gone, and there is no replacement for what it was. Kremer Pigmente in Germany continues — Georg’s son David is now co-managing director, and the work that began with smalt blue in the early 1970s continues to evolve. There are other suppliers, including Natural Pigments, who carry parts of what Kremer offered. And there is the small specialist community of painters, conservators, and craftspeople who depend on these materials and who, by continuing to buy seriously from the makers who continue to do this work seriously, keep the field from collapsing into mass-market alternatives.

That last point is the one I want to leave you with. Where you spend your money in the next year matters. Spend it where the work is being done well, and the work continues. Spend it carelessly, and a field that has already lost a great deal loses more.

— George O’Hanlon, Technical Director, Natural Pigments