I finally got up to Moma to see the Color Charts exhibition. The first thought I had when I walked in was how much our experience of color has been influenced by technology. Pixels. It’s as if artists have been reduced to pixels pushers in our use of color. Then it dawned on me that the rectangle (pixel) has become the primary gestalt in the last 60 years. The subtext of the show is definitely about rectangles, grids, and squares, or in the terms of the curator, charts.

What’s interesting is that the title of the show Color Charts: Reinventing Color 1950 to Today seems to imply that artists have been engaged in a radical project of color exploration or that our knowledge of color and the use of color has been greatly expanded. Actually I found the opposite to be the case. With a few exceptions, the artists in the show use color in a rather homogeneous and limited manner. But, I guess that’s the point standardization, mechanization, commercialization. For the most part color is the stuff for conceptual and perceptual games. The stuff of entertainment or decoration. The spice of consumption. An accent.

As a painter, the show reminded me of the importance of color exercises the need to develop and nurture color sensitivity, but that there is a limit to the exercises and that exercises are just that exercises and not works of art. The methods of Johannes Itten and Joseph Albers for the Bauhaus and that have now become standard fare at art schools are helpful in developing color sensitivity, but they are limited. Color cannot be studied in isolation. It is interdependent with our materials. The color of paper and its use in collage is different than the color of pigment and its use in paint. Or the color of pixels and their use in video. Color is a language, a language that great painters master. The use of color is a craft skill developed simultaneously with the other craft skills of painting. The pieces in the show helped stimulate my awareness of color, and when I left and wandered through the other galleries of Moma I felt blown away by the use of color by painters up until 1950. Matisse, Gorky, Mitchell, Diebenkorn, just to name a few. Much more diverse and much more sophisticated and much more sensitive. In their hands color is not just a concept, a game, or a decorative element, but the stuff painterly expression. They give color life and the color gives life to their paintings. Finally, and more importantly, we see that color comes in many shapes and forms, not just rectangles, squares, and grids. It is the language they speak, not just an accent.