Upon entering Kremer Pigments on 29th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, visitors were greeted by bags and bottles of color: lapis lazuli, vermillion, malachite, a wide variety of ochres and iron oxides, oils from walnut, sunflower. There was even a corner in the back piled high with bags of beeswax that smelled like honey.
In its September 7 newsletter, Kremer announced the closure of its New York City store. After over 30 years of specializing in sourcing and producing raw materials for artists, the family-run German business determined that the city’s rising rent, the United States government’s new tariffs, and the difficulty of having shipments trapped in customs for months made it impractical to continue. Kremer will maintain its business at its original color mill in Aichstetten, Germany, supplying the store there and in Munich, along with its more than 100 retailers worldwide. However, the New York store will sell off merchandise at increasing discounts and eventually close at the end of November, a huge loss for local artists. We will still be able to buy Kremer materials online, but there will no longer be a place in the US to pick up a bottle of Côte d’Azur or Meteorite Brown off the shelf and ponder the possibilities.
“feel free to wander and dream of color,” reads the text in the store’s front window.
Many of my fellow painters and I regard the storied Chelsea pigment shop as a painter’s paradise, but it’s also been an important resource for other fields. Violin- and furniture-makers, textile artists, and interior designers knew Kremer as a rare purveyor of traditional raw materials. Historical pigments were purchased by conservators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and elsewhere. I worked at Kremer briefly in 2015, and often found myself describing the nuances of colors to customers on the phone — calling a yellow more “duckling” than “school bus.” Roger Carmona, manager of the New York location, or another experienced staff member would sometimes step in to provide guidance on layering effects, drying time, and the way climate might warp rabbit skin glue. Paint-making can be a complex equation that requires tactile memory and an understanding of chemistry.
Roger Carmona at Kremer NY
Born in Nicaragua and raised in Miami, Florida, Roger Carmona started managing Kremer NY shortly after earning his BFA degree at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts (SVA) in 2007. Throughout his tenure at Kremer, he earned his MFA from Bard and steadily became one of the most trusted paint experts in New York City. Carmona had studied alongside the late Jack Whitten at SVA and eventually became his pigment dealer at Kremer, keeping him informed of new inventory and sharing material explorations.
When I visited the store last week, I asked Carmona how the closing was going. He likened it to a receiving line at a funeral, with customers offering their condolences as they checked out at the register. Kremer has been inundated with online orders since announcing its closure — too many to fill, he said, as many shelves were already empty. The company’s founder, Dr. Georg Kremer, was visiting from Germany with his wife, Brigitte, to help plan for the closing. Dr. Kremer told me that he approaches his business from his experience as a chemist — using his understanding of the properties and behavior of matter to bring lost historical recipes for pigments back to life. The company began in the 1970s when he developed a smalt blue pigment for a conservator friend who was restoring the ceiling of an English church. He then began developing and sourcing more pigments, from yellow ochre in the Carpathian Mountains to the lapis lazuli of Afghanistan and Chile, growing a collection that now spans more than 1,500 pigments.
Kremer’s original location on Spring Street, which opened in 1989
Kremer NY opened in 1989 in the Lower East Side after Dr. Kremer’s friendship with the artist Harvey Quaytman brought him to the States. Painters like Whitten, Helen Frankenthaler, and Brice Marden became regulars, Dr. Kremer told me. The enthusiasm among artists continued as RH Quaytman followed in her father’s footsteps by incorporating diamond dust and wild indigo into her paintings. Artist Trevor Paglen recently worked with Kremer to create a pigment made from crushed iPhones, and a growing wave of young artists has taken an interest in natural pigments and environmentally focused practices.
Loyal customers are already grieving Kremer’s closure. A week after the announcement, I took the train down from the Hudson Valley to meet my friend Kaitlin Pomerantz, who took the train up from Philadelphia. We met at Kremer and discussed how much the store has meant to us as young artists, and now as professors who manage to convert a few students each year to a passion for paint-making.
As AI and technology permeate art and education, I’ve found that my students increasingly crave the ability to touch and know their materials, to feel their connection to the world. This often manifests in the day-to-day substances they find and bring in to make into paint — rust, turmeric, ashes, dirt. Recently, one of my students at Vassar College brought the synthetic indigo she created in chemistry class to our art class to make paint, reminding me of Dr. Kremer’s early pigments and entry into the art world via science.
Years ago, I found myself stumped by a painting I was working on that explored early American industrialization through machines and mill system plans. I only managed to find direction again by making my own paint. I ordered slate, granite, and indigo pigments from Kremer and went outside my studio building, a repurposed mill, to collect a brick that had fallen off. I crushed the brick to make the pigment, and along with the Kremer materials, the painting began to come together. The lessons offered by Kremer Pigments weren’t just about how to work with color, but how to experience the connection between the physical world and one’s own artistic practice. Carmona often says that paint-making is a lot like cooking, and in my experience, the longtime Kremer staff members are all Michelin-starred chefs.
