I went to the new show “Color Chart” at MoMA thinking I’d have a new set of color inspirations to suggest for interiors based on the work of these artists. What I came away with instead were several contradictory thoughts on the usage and history of color in paint...
For most of the history of painting, artists and their assistants mixed their own paints. Palettes were simple, consisting of red and yellow ochre, earth tones, black and white, with maybe a personal favorite thrown in. If a patron was willing to fund it, add vermilion and ultramarine, which incidentally is why Christ always had red robes and the Virgin bright blue. Synthetic pigments gave the Impressionists bright new colors to play with but paint was still something of a cottage industry.
By the time 1950 rolled around, paint was mass-produced and color stocks were standardized, plus the introduction of acrylic paint to the market all meant that artists were left with an unprecedented array of color options to choose from. There are two major themes on display in this exhibition—artists working with industrial paint products, and artists using a paint store color index as a point of reference.
The show is scintillating, with walls everywhere covered in checkerboards of contrasting color. It’s easy to understand why artists were drawn to these new standardized indices—to hold one of these newly minted color charts in your hand with its many new options, one would want to leap into the studio and start experimenting. Appropriately, much of the work feels like pages from a fan deck writ big.
An early Marcel Duchamp piece entitled “Tu M’” contains lozenge shapes representing the first color chips available. Paintings by Gerhard Richter and Jim Dine look literally like large color samples. It’s easy to imagine artist like Ellsworth Kelley cutting up his own color charts to make the small collages that eventually become larger work. Jennifer Bartlett and Damien Hirst offer a contemporary spin on this idea.
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