![]() “How often do you see pink in architecture or machinery?” asks photographer and performance artist Signe Pierce. She’s nearly swallowed whole by girly, plastic-y excess-a critique of the concentrated post-World War I effort to re-package pink as feminine, led by media giants and department superstores such as Time, Best & Co., Marshall Field, and Halle’s. In 2005, the Korean photographer JeongMee Yoon documented her daughter surrounded by a sea of pink-hued purchases. Yet pink has been equally at home lining the shelves. “It has gained an active and powerful role.” She cites the color’s recent appearance in a number of activist demonstrations, from the pink-colored pussyhats of anti-Trump marches in the U.S. “Pink has now become emancipated from the color of harmlessness, cuteness, sweetness, innocence, and the oppressed,” suggests Nemitz. From the sublime golden hours of Théo van Rysselberghe to Claude Monet’s lilies and Edgar Degas’s dancers, European pinks turned bold shades of musky rose, bright strawberry, and tropical cerise. ![]() Under the umbrella of Japonisme, the 19th-century term for the influence of Japanese aesthetics and culture in the West, pink imbued the French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist movement. Over the next century, the color blossomed in popularity. The lush raucousness of the 18th-century Rococo movement was the perfect setting for pink’s rise to fame in the Western art-historical canon: sun-dappled dresses, enchanted forests, and saucy lovers’ whispers characterize the indulgent oil paintings of Jean-Honoré Fragonard from the 1770s. Praised by proto-psychologists of the late 18th century, pink was recommended as the bedroom color of choice for the business-minded gentleman for a restorative and uplifting home base. Pastel pink was favored by both the men and women of the European bourgeoisie, from the Georgian gowns of Mary, Countess of Howe, to the embroidered silk coats sported by the well-heeled men of Louis XVI’s court. It wasn’t until the 1700s, however, that the color was popularized through the fashion and interior design worlds. John’s White, using it to provide the glowing undertones of religious figures and poised gentry alike. ![]() Italian painter Cennino Cennini described the shade as a blend between Venetian Red and St. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that artists began to explicitly discuss pink as part of their palette. “The reality is, computer-based practices of curating turn out to be as distinctly subjective as human-based ones.” Surprising Olsen, the computer rejected Richard Hawkins’ Special Appearance (2004), “a painting suffused with pink by my eyes,” she says. The works featured in “Pink Art” were selected by an algorithm that identified “pink” works from the museum’s collection. So, even a computer can have a hard time identifying the shade. “It’s an extra-spectral color, which means other colors must be mixed to generate it.” The diversity of pink hues is the result of adding or subtracting yellow and blue tones from a wide spectrum of colors. “When we see pink, we’re not seeing actual wavelengths of pink light,” explains Christina Olsen, the outgoing director of the WCMA and curator of its current exhibition. ![]() Though anchored in the primary color red, pink isn’t part of the electromagnetic spectrum. In 2004, Nemitz conducted a workshop in which she asked students from Tokyo to select a shade they felt encompassed the color “pink.” The swatches proved entirely different across cultures, with the Japanese participants favoring the cooler shades to the European penchant for warmer tones.Īn ongoing exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), “Pink Art,” serves to further highlight this subjectivity. In contemporary Japanese culture, says Nemitz, pink is perceived as a masculine and mournful color that represents “young warriors who fall in battle while in the full bloom of life.” In Germany, pink is “rosa”-a hue that’s “bright, soft, peaceful, sweet, and harmless,” she explains. Pink’s cultural significance can also vary widely between countries. “In Japan, at least seven different terms are used for pink shades,” says Bauhaus-Universität Weimar fine art professor Barbara Nemitz, co-author of Pink: The Exposed Color in Contemporary Art and Culture (2006). But in other languages, the shade remains difficult to pin down. Pink rarely appears in nature, which may explain why the color only entered the English language as a noun at the end of the 17th century.
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