The latest show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York–MoMa–is called Color Chart, Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today. It is based on the idea of the color wheel, a staple of school art rooms and art schools for ever, it seems, and centers on the experiments of artists with color, many in the 1960s and 1970s when I was going to graduate school and teaching these new ideas about the use of color. To call it a reinvention, however, is simply wrong.
It is always interesting to me to see by what criteria works/artists are chosen to be in the exhibition and how well the curators fulfill their mission. Their purported “theme” encompasses artists who used “color as a mass-produced and standardized commercial product…the lush beauty that results when contemporary artists assign color decisions to chance, readymade source, or arbitrary system.” This, then, included, notably, several variations of works consisting of color swatches tacked to the wall, with and without color names; and Andy Warhol‘s silk-screened Marilyns in several color combinations and variations on that particular theme including a room of Dan Flavin‘s Neon light sculptures and On Karawa‘s Dates in various colors. OK so far, but could the newly acquired Rauschenberg fit the criteria, or the several large bi-color canvasses (I wasn’t reading all the wall text), the combinations of which appeared to be anything but arbitrary or readymade?
It did get me thinking about color particularly because I have been working so closely with the refined Japanese sense of color. In my deconstructing post, I promised a larger version of the deconstruction of the wonderful purple kimono with its brilliant vermilion lining. I was lucky enough to have in my reserved for later purchase file, this fantastic vermilion fabric (luckier still that nobody had bought it) and the results are here. As with the Mark Rothko (not included in the MoMa Show) pictured next to the scarf, the colors are electric, and never arbitrary.
I may have said this before, but every day I am delighted and amazed anew by the wealth of colors and designs and the sheer beauty of the marvelous silks available from Japan for designing my new scarves. I take great pleasure in carefully choosing from the hundreds, perhaps more, of kimono and fabrics and discerning which ones will be the most versatile–will be able to blend with several others in order to be combined in a myriad of ways; which will provide the greatest amount of variety within the same piece; which will yield the greatest amount of continuous fabric without waste. This is a learning process, learning not simply by trial and error although, of course that is necessarily part of the process, but by beginning to understand the terms and what they mean. Today I await the arrival of a piece that has all the most desirable elements: karinui; furisode; rinzu; yuzen. Let me explain what the words mean and how that adds up to perfection for my purposes. 
Often I think that buying certain items on the web, in spite of some sellers’ (often mammoth) efforts, is much like buying a pig in a poke. I have been buying fabric for some time now, and although I consider myself to be a discerning consumer, I am often disappointed, sometimes even dismayed, by the difference between the image that the seller chooses to show and the reality of the actual fabric. And, of course, obversely, I am sometimes delighted. Maybe a pig in a poke isn’t a completely accurate analogy. One can certainly tell whether what is pictured is a pig or a cat; what can’t be known is what kind of pig or cat it is. A better analogy would be the blind man and the elephant. The (blind) buyer who sees the leg will imagine an entirely different product from the buyer who sees the trunk or the buyer who sees the ear. 
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