Return to DG magazine 129 contents

JIM LAMBIE (Scottish, born 1964)
ZOBOP
2006
Vinyl tape
Dimensions variable
Fund for the Twenty-First Century

View Gallery | Visit Website | Print & File [Members]

Anne Paterson

Russian-born artist, Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), used vibrant colour to stimulate emotions. He believed art had spiritual values. Paintings were compositions, alternative music for the senses. Henry Matisse (1869-1954), leader of The Fauves art movement (1904-1908), used non-representational colour and representational form to convey different sensations, for example: to express the sensual colors of surroundings.

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today at MOMA New York
Throughout art history, colour has often been used as a strong symbolic element by artists, driven by an inner necessity to express emotions. However, in the early twentieth century, art underwent momentous change – a move away from the perceived elitist avant-garde tradition. Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today is a fascinating exploration and manifestation of this change. Ann Temkin, Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MOMA), presents works by 44 contemporary artists (including six installations specifically created for the exhibition) who have helped to re-shape our perceptions about the traditional use of colour and form.

ELLSWORTH KELLY (American, born 1923)
Colors for a Large Wall
1951
Oil on canvas, sixty-four panels
7′ 10 1/2″ x 7′ 10 1/2″ (240 x 240 cm)
Gift of the artist

The Marcel Duchamp influence
This radical break with tradition can be said to have been initiated by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) whose painting, ‘Tu ‘m’ (1918) is the first work on the exhibition’s timeline. Duchamp was associated with the art movements of Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism. His revolutionary and confronting philosophy about creating art, his ‘ready-mades’, shocked the art world at the time. He demonstrated that art could be ‘ready-made’: found objects, custom-made or ‘off-the-shelf’, and that it could be merely arbitrary or random – created by chance, and not necessarily by design . The object ‘became’ art, because the artist ‘chose’ it. For example, Duchamp’s work ‘The Fountain’ (1917), was a manufactured urinal which he believed that when placed in an art exhibition space, would change the observer’s perception of it, and encourage interaction and thought. In MOMA’s Color Chart exhibition, Marcel Duchamp’s challenging painting ‘Tu ‘m’ (1981), demands our attention, and then our interaction – in French it translates as ‘You ……. me’. Duchamp purposefully left the verb out so that it could be supplied by the observer, who then becomes a participator.<

ANDY WARHOL (American, 1928-1987)
Green Marilyn
1962
Silkscreen on synthetic polymer paint on canvas
20 x 16″ (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Gift of William C. Seitz and Irma S.
Seitz, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art

Pop Art
This celebration of the ‘everyday’, of popular culture as art, was later to break new ground again as the Pop Art movement took off in America and around the world in the 1950s, and over the next two decades. After World War 2, the commercial colour (paint) chart was developed and the status of paint changed. Colour became ‘ready-made’. Color Chart explores the impact of standardized, mass-produced color on contemporary art . It showcases work from 44 artists highlighting their unique responses to popular culture, random selection and colour . It includes work from key figures of Pop Art such as Andy Warhol (1928-1987) ,Robert Rauschenberg (1925-), Ellsworth Kelly (1923-) and Gerhard Richter (1932-) alongside the work of younger artists such as Sherrie Levine (1947-), Jim Lambie (1964-) and Damien Hirst (1965-).If you can’t make it to New York, there is an online version of the Color Chart exhibition. In the style of the art works themselves, it is wonderfully colourful, it requests our interaction, and it invites our response.

FRANK STELLA (American, born 1936)
Gran Cairo
1962
Alkyd on canvas
85 1/4 x 85 1/4″ (216.5 x 216.5 cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase, with funds from the
friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today
An exhibition which explores the impact of Standardized, Mass-Produced Colour on Contemporary Art with works by 44 Contemporary Artists
March 2 – May 12, 2008
The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery
Museum of Modern Art, New York
View Gallery | Visit Website | Print & File [Members]