I find The Paris Review's literary paint chips feature—“paint samples, suitable for the home, sourced from colors in literature”—totally sublime. Their 28 choices, including the requisite Fitzgerald (“Dock Green") and Hemingway (“Elephant Hills”), suggest Gerhard Richter's color-chart paintings: systematic permutations of chromatic variety, as mundane as industrial paint samples yet as thrilling as exploring every possibility of hue and tone.

Okay fine, I'm also an art nerd. So the literary paint chips got me thinking: what happens when you locate these colors in real abstract art? 

Try Brice Marden, whose earthy palette in For Pearl (above) becomes surprisingly kinky when its shades are renamed “Mediterranean Cock” (John Updike, Rabbit is Rich), “Lipstick Smack” (Frederick Exley, A Fan's Notes), and “Mapp's Silence” (E.F. Benson, Miss Mapp). Didn't expect that from the New York Minimalist's matte monochromes, right?

Most of the lighter shades incorporate well into Agnes Martin's powdery grids, like the sombre stripes of “Rebecca's Smalls” (Daphne du Maurier,Rebecca) and “Rothko's Forearm” (Joy Williams, Breaking and Entering).

Byron Kim's distillation of landscapes into planes of nearly unidentifiable color plays well with this chart. U.N. Building (Looking Downtown) explores the grayish palette of “Elephant Hills”, “Lydia” (Margaret Drabble, The Millstone), “Montdore Mink” (Nancy Mitford, Love in a Cold Climate), and the apropos “City Fingers” (Martin Amis, London Fields).

Think of the possibilities not covered here! Those high-altitude sunsets in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, or Füsun's tear-reddened eyes in Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence. The “dead channel” sky of William Gibson's cyberpunk classic Neuromancer could be a flickery gray-green...if, thanks to Gibson's now-retro vocabulary, we can remember what “screen snow” even looks like.

Images: Gerhard Richter courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art; Brice Marden courtesy Wikipedia; Agnes Martin courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mark Rothko courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Byron Kim courtesy James Cohan Gallery