Jump forward a few centuries, to the late 1950s. Artist Yves Klein has his very own colour blue, a remarkably intensive shade that relies on that same Ultramarine pigment. International Klein Blue (or in art circles IKB, if you want it for your curtains) was developed as part of Klein’s career-long search for colours that symbolise life. Klein worked with blue extensively in his earlier career, but in 1958 it became the central component, with the colour effectively becoming the art. Klein pursued the colour in his work from monochrome prints through to hyperbolic performances of naked, painted women splashing against walls of canvas, always with the colour as the main drive of the piece.
Klein was working within an era of commodified colour, or more specifically, commodified paint. In the post-war years colour was no longer an association of nature, colour was commercialised and incorporated into lifestyles. You could buy a mix and take it home, thus radicalise your domestic existence. Trading in colours required new marketing, and so saw the mass production of colour charting. The colour spectrum became a standardised menu. Inane classifications like Chaos Red, Manly Tan, Polar White, Pastel White, Lotus White, Eggshell White, Lilly White entered cultural rhetoric.
The stylised charts became recognisable motifs in their own right. Artists leapt on them for their potential in commenting on the stylisation of modern living – the consumer’s breach into the aesthetic realm. It is this reinvention of colour as a buyable product that the MoMA, NY is examining in their current exhibition. Color Chart - Reinventing Color 1950 to Today aims to outline the paradox that arises when the natural beauty of colour is created through random chance, by clinical methodology, or simply plucked from the production line. It features work that obsesses over cataloguing colour, laying them side-by-side. Many of the colour sequences are lifted from other sources, like Sherrie Levine’s Salbura #4, 2007 is from the notebook of Le Corbusier. Bruce Nauman’s 1965 P.P.G Sunproof Drawing No.1, is a photocopied page of a chart of sunproof paints and reduces the colour range to dull greys (now browns), neatly undermining the colour attributes. In 1976 Jan Dibbets recreated a colour spectrum from close-up photographs of cars, outlining both their anonymity and the artist’s colourist skills.