You could think of the winter 2019 issue of Ursula magazine—the first issue of our second year in publication—as our alchemy and color issue, a blast of brightness to last the winter. We follow Bob Nickas to see his friend Mario Diacono, one of the most intellectually adventurous dealers of his day, who put his earnings from the art world into amassing a library of ancient volumes devoted to alchemy and occult philosophy, among the best collections now in private hands. We sit in as Jarrett Earnest talks with the trailblazing historian of color Marcia B. Hall, and we accompany Rebecca Bengal deep into the eccentric pigment business of German chemist Georg Kremer, whose colors have transformed the work of important postwar
artists.