Exhibition Review: Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today @ NYC MoMA

I'd been dying to see this exhibit. All I had to hear were the names Ellsworth Kelly and Sol Lewitt for me to hop a plane to New York to catch what I was hoping would be an amazing show.

A trip to New York, Manhattan specifically, would also mean a nice sit with the family and a bit of shopping.

As my usual style, I took in the exhibit early Friday morning by myself, coming into MoMA alongside the crush of school groups and foreign patrons. The neat thing about visiting museums by yourself is the ease of maneuverabiity solo travel provides. Since I was only there to see the Color exhibition, I didn't need to waste time in the lower galleries fighting the crowds. I avoided the slow wait for the elevators and took the escalators to the 6th floor. I basically had the entire exhibit to myself for a few minutes which seems unheard of at MoMA. (Photos were not allowed inside the exhibition but my digital cam is very stealthy and of course I broke the rules.)

I was immediately effected by what I saw. Rooms full of bright swatches of color made me giddy and reel with excitement until I moved in to the pieces for closer inspection. I admit, I'm one of those people who looks for the seams, the lines, the frayed edges, the brush strokes. I get as close as I can to the canvases before the security guards start worrying.


So I did something I rarely do. I compared myself and my own work to those artists I considered my masters. And suddenly I found myself disappointed. While I spend hours and days making every line perfect, every curve just so, and making sure no color bleeds into another or no piece of canvas left only partially done, I saw many works that seemed to do just that and seemed to have been crafted of poorer quality.

I'm not in MoMA, and it'll no doubt be a long time before any work of mine will ever find itself in such an exhibition, but the sense of quality did make me feel something about the show was lacking.

Another issue I had was that the show seemed incomplete. There were pieces that should have been in this show that seemed a no brainer. Where were Sol Lewitt's more daring color band series like those hanging in MoMA out in San Francisco? Where were ANY works by Josef Albers or even Rothko? Those bigger and better influencers on colour were somehow missing so that the show, while enjoyable, seemed lacking to me.

If anything the show was a beautiful reminder of why I do what I do, and why I love it so.

“Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today” continues through May 12 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400 or moma.org.

Wrong wrong wrong!!!!

This pains me to look at. For anyone with my type of Synaesthesia this causes so many issues. No wonder my parents thought I was learning disabled.