In the film Pleasantville (1998) the staid world of a black-and-white 1950s town is upended by the introduction of color. Something similar is happening at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
In the upper section of the lobby, a floor created by the artist Jim Lambie surrounds Auguste Rodin's sculpture of Balzac with concentric strips of brightly hued tape. Up on the sixth floor, a painted-aluminum construction by Donald Judd gives a lift to the gray towers visible through the skylight. Cheerful striped vests, designed by Daniel Buren, peek out from the regulation charcoal jackets of the museum guards.
These and other interventions are part of Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, which opened at the museum on Sunday. Organized by Ann Temkin, a curator in the museum's department of painting and sculpture, Color Chart looks at contemporary artists for whom color functions as a ready-made - something to be bought or appropriated, rather than mixed on a palette. As Frank Stella famously quipped, "I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can."
The show is a rejoinder to the notion of color as the province of formalists, and to the idea that Minimal and Conceptual art comes only in shades of black, white and gray. That Color Chart coincides with Jasper Johns: Gray at the Metropolitan Museum is a happy accident; in that show the pairing of Johns' red, yellow and blue painting False Start and its neutral counterpart Jubilee amounts to a Pleasantville experience in reverse.
Temkin's thesis owes much to the British artist and writer David Batchelor, whose book Chromophobia (2000) is a thorough and witty cultural history of color, including in its thematic discussions Heart of Darkness and the movie version of The Wizard of Oz. Regrettably, photographs from Batchelor's series Found Monochromes of London, a visual diary of white rectangles glimpsed during his daily travels, have been tucked away near the museum's sixth-floor bathrooms.
As Batchelor writes: "The color chart divorces color from conventional theory and turns every color into a ready-made. It promises autonomy for color; in fact, it offers three distinct but related types of autonomy: that of each color from every other color, that of color from the dictates of color theory and that of color from the register of representation." In other words, we are far from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Theory of Colors and from the deceptive relationships of Josef Albers' homages to the square.
This show's first gallery makes the novelty of autonomous color gloriously apparent. A series of signature works by Ellsworth Kelly, from 1951, shows him experimenting with randomly generated patterns of squares cut from store-bought colored paper. One of these collages gave rise to the contemporary masterpiece Colors for a Large Wall, a stunning, nearly 2.4m2 grid composed of 64 separate canvases.
Kelly may be an obvious choice, as are Yves Klein, Andy Warhol and Stella, but the inclusion of Robert Rauschenberg's Rebus (1955) offers a fresh angle on an artist whose color choices are rarely, if ever, analyzed. One of his early "combine" paintings, it includes a horizontal spectrum of cardboard paint samples. More to the point, it contains splashes of colors purchased in unlabeled cans from surplus stock on the Bowery.
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