Saturation Point.(Color Chart exhibit)

Byline: --ANNE STRINGFIELD

With Pantone chips having replaced the palette, a vibrant new exhibition at MoMA looks at the irreverent ways that artists use color.

About five years ago, Ann Temkin, a curator in the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Painting and Sculpture, started thinking about how many artists since the sixties have taken color from less than rarefied sources--house and car paints, for instance, or the tidy boxed hues of industrial color charts. "There was this idea of color as something that you could use in a banal way, like you would if you were a shopper at a hardware store as opposed to a genius artist wearing a beret and holding a palette," she says. It was suddenly possible "to see this work in a way that it hasn't quite been seen before."

The result is "Color Chart," an exhibition showcasing artists of the last 60 years who leave their color decisions to chance (like Robert Rauschenberg, who purchased unlabeled remaindered paints to make his Combines) or organized systems (like that of Francois Morellet, who used the numbers in his hometown telephone book to generate random patterns in red and blue). Roaming from the conceptual to the political, from Pop to digital art, the painting, sculpture, photography, installation, film, prints, and drawings on view are united only by their refusal to use color as a straightforward emotional or symbolic cue.

Reaching across decades and countries and movements, the 44 artists represent an astonishing range: Yves Klein to Carrie Mae Weems, Alighiero Boetti to On Kawara, Sherrie Levine to Jasper Johns. Andy Warhol's paint-by-numbers canvases (1962) wryly send up the most populist form of art-making, while Angela Bulloch's Standard Universal pixel boxes (2000) cycle through the 256-color palette available on Macintosh Operating System 9.

Fascinating correspondences emerge throughout. Ellsworth Kelly's arbitrary arrangements of squares of pigment, culminating in Colors for a Large Wall, 1951, seem to presage the computerized future, as exemplified by Cory Arcangel's Colors, 2006, a hacked DVD of the Dennis Hopper film broken into pixel-wide bands of color, ...