Aileen Kwun
Installation view of Christie's Fall 2018 Auctions. Courtesy of
Christie's.
Artists have long made careers and conceptual arguments from their
use of colors—whether a readymade hue straight from the can, à la Andy Warhol
or Frank Stella, or philosophically stamped and claimed for their individual
use, like Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue or Anish Kapoor’s Vantablack.
But what about the colors used extraneously, on the exhibition
walls of a gallery or museum, that subtly but powerfully affect our viewing
experience? For exhibition designers, curators, and artists, the use of atmospheric
color is a sticking point that’s considered from the very first planning stages
of a show.
“The decisions over color can run up until close to the end; people
obsess over color, and some more than others,” said Betty Fisher, who consults
on exhibition design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and, until recently,
served as its senior design manager for nearly 14 years. “It’s funny—there are
some curators that you’d think would be more neurotic than others, and are
fine; others [who] you wouldn’t expect to obsess over it will stew and call me
in the middle of the night.”
The modernist construct of the “white cube” gallery—in which walls
are austerely stripped of ornament and painted entirely in white, in an attempt
to create a neutral space—may be what first comes to mind with a museum like
MoMA, which is largely credited for institutionalizing the approach. But, as
Fisher said, “If you look back at MoMA’s history, color has always been there.”
The museum’s team takes a careful approach, however, to avoid “skewing
decorative,” she added. “There’s always that balance.”
Installation view of “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, 2018. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.
At MoMA’s recent show “Items: Is Fashion Modern?”—the museum’s
first to focus on clothing in over 70 years, curated by Paola Antonelli (who
“hates white,” said Fisher)—everyday items like blue jeans, girdles, ties, and
hats were displayed against swatches of Wevet, Pitch Black, and Tanner’s Brown,
sourced from the British paint brand Farrow & Ball.
Visitors aren’t likely to recall the swatch or palette of their
recent favorite exhibition, and Fisher argued that if an exhibition design has
done its job, they won’t—even if the gallery walls are colorful, a trend that’s
been seemingly growing in recent years.
Indeed, the use of color in exhibition design is an overlooked
aspect of the art-viewing experience that, once consciously considered, becomes
unavoidable to the eye, like seeing the 3D image of a “Magic Eye” for the first
time. And the design of paint colors is especially rarified, a fact that’s not
lost on Charlotte Cosby, head of creative at Farrow & Ball. “When we start
making color, we’re not really thinking about the end use at all,” she said,
but rather about how to convey and express the current zeitgeist through color.
The artisanal, small-batch producer of chalk and china clay–based paints
happens to be the favorite of decorators and museum curators alike for its
soft, light-absorbing qualities; rich, complex undertones; and precise
pigmentations.
Unlike larger players in the field, like Benjamin Moore or
Sherwin-Williams, which can carry catalogs of thousands of hues, Farrow &
Ball has forged a cult following among interior designers and curators alike
for its carefully edited palette of no more than 132 colors at a time. Older
hues are often cycled out of production to make room for the rare launch of new
hues, brought back from the archive only by special order and request. And the
infrequent release of those new hues is often to the bated breath of its ardent
followers, as it was this fall, when the brand made a bold showing of nine new
colors at London Design Festival.
In the exhibitions circuit, MoMA is a frequent collaborator of the
brand, as is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, MCA Chicago, Musée Rodin, and Christie’s—the latter of which used a range
of evocative display colors in its fall auction previews this year in
residential vignettes, to appeal to private art collectors. Even the Palace of
Versailles recently used the brand’s deeply saturated hues for a new exhibition
wing—the list goes on.
Color can serve as a strategic tool to pace and spatially guide the
user through a show’s contents, as the MoMA did last year in an exhibition
honoring the 150th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s birth, following a
massive acquisition of the architect’s works in 2012. To illustrate Wright’s
prolific output, curator Barry Bergdoll asked a group of scholars to rifle
through the holdings and select the most pertinent works for display across
different themes. “You had, in essence, 12 mini-exhibitions under one roof,”
Fisher said. “The challenge there was: How do you unify, how do you make sense
of the that? And color definitely helped.” Sections painted in Studio Green,
Pale Powder, James White, and Worsted—also sourced from Farrow &
Ball—served as a crucial organizational tool, grouping works together and
leading visitors from one section to the next. “It’s a narrative,” Fisher
added. “It’s telling a story, highlighting important moments.”
Even when a museum does shy from contextual color—as MoMA did for
2008’s “Color Chart,”so as not to compete with the color statements of the
featured post-war artists—the white the museum used was a particular shade. “MoMA
has a white,” said Fisher. An in-house, default white? “Yes, we do. It’s made
by Janovic, called Super White.…That’s been the in-house white for a fairly
long time.” The painstaking choice was said to have been chosen for its matte
flat finish; glossier finishes, after all, risk reflecting a slight tan from
the hardwood gallery floors.
There are no hard and fast rules as to what works best in an
exhibition setting, and Fisher described the process as collaborative and
intuitive. Each museum carries its own preferences, and for these arts
institutions, Farrow & Ball will often offer special colors or create
custom blends.
“A color scheme is not just a wall color and a ceiling color, it’s
about creating a cohesive look that takes every object in a room, including
artwork, into consideration,” said Joa Studholme, who helms a prominent
position as the brand’s official color curator. “Choosing traditional colors
can complement a property’s heritage,” she added, “while rich shades provide a
striking background for art, bringing a theatrical quality to stately homes.”
But colored exhibition walls are “nothing new—if anything,
color-less walls are arguably the new thing, at least of the last 60 to 70
years,” argued curator and graphic designer Prem Krishnamurthy. “In contrast,
most of the important exhibitions that we know from the first half of the 20th
century and earlier considered color as an essential part of the experience,”
he added, noting that they were typically photographed in monochrome. “If we
could go back in time to 1920, I’m sure we’d be astonished by how colorful the
shows were then.”
Interior view of the Rodin Museum. Courtesy of the Rodin Museum.
Krishnamurthy recently designed and co-directed the Fikra Graphic
Design Biennial, which took place last month in a former 1970s bank in Sharjah,
United Arab Emirates, that had been slated for demolition. For a show
emphatically examining the role of graphic design across cultures, disciplines,
and media, the exhibition design itself was as energetic and vibrant as the
international works on hand—with works on plinths or the floor, or projected
onto surfaces, or hung on walls, occasionally punctuated by shades of black,
purple, yellow, and green. At P!, Krishnamurthy’s own former gallery space in
New York’s Chinatown, experimental exhibitions often illustrated the
transformative possibilities of design, with rotating walls, short-term
architectural interventions, bright red floors—and, for a stretch of time, a
bright-green ceiling, at the fortuitous advice of a feng shui advisor.
“For me, color—like any design element—is not something to be
applied arbitrarily, but is rather a larger part of the conceptual structure of
an exhibition,” said Krishnamurthy, whose studio work includes exhibition
designs for arts institutions such as the Jewish Museum, M+, the Yale
University Art Gallery, SALT Istanbul, and many others. “There are a whole
range of light grays, blues, and pinks that can subtly alter a space.”
The craft of choosing colors as a supporting act for curated works
is a careful and perhaps thankless one, in most cases, often overlooked by
viewers—but for Krishnamurthy, Fisher, and others engaged in exhibition design,
the right backdrop can make or break a show. At the end of the day, is the
paint selection process emotional, conceptual, or color-theory based? “All of
the above,” said Fisher, with a laugh.
As Krishnamurthy attested: “Once you move away from white as the
baseline, a whole ’nother world opens up.”
Aileen Kwun
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-secret-paint-colors-renowned-art-museums-love?utm_medium=email&utm_source=15380471-newsletter-editorial-daily-12-11-18&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=st-V
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