Exhibition

Color is an integral element of artistic expression, to the extent that one cannot exist without the other. Things in the world have their own intrinsic colors, and historically there were artistic conventions such as using blue for the sky and white for clouds. The Impressionists disrupted such fixed ideas about color, rendering shades as they appear to the eye, regardless of the objective, intrinsic colors of things. An artist of the next generation, Maurice Denis, went further, defining a painting as essentially “a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.” While he clearly asserted that it is colors that make up a painting, his chromatic sensibility was highly personal, and his idea that the order in which colors are assembled is up to the artist was a precursor to the art of today.
Today, we accept that color can be an expression of artists’ thoughts and emotions rather than a reproduction of nature. Contemporary artists have total freedom to select colors, utilize them in their works, and present them to us. This exhibition surveys the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art’s permanent collection from a chromatic perspective, and presents a broad spectrum of works that highlight the myriad uses of color.