During the annual National Cherry Blossom in Washington D.C., the whole city celebrates pink! What is pink? When our eyes see pink, we’re not seeing actual wavelengths of pink light. It’s an extra-spectral color, which means other colors must be mixed to generate it. The range of pink tones are the result of adding or subtracting yellow and blue tones from a wide spectrum of colors.

Pink has held a place in art for centuries. 18th-century Rococo embraced pink in portraits. In the Renaissance, artists began to explicitly discuss pink as part of their palette. Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks features a sprig of blushing carnations. When describing how to concoct pigments, Italian painter Cennino Cennini described pink as “made from the loveliest and lightest sinopia that is found and is mixed and mulled with St. John’s white. This pigment does you great credit if you use it for painting faces, hands and nudes on walls.” Pink permeated the French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist movement, and is found in Claude Monet’s lilies and Edgar Degas’s dancers. After his famous Blue Period, Picasso embraced the warmth and cheer of pink in his Rose Period.

In contemporary art, pink continued to be embraced by artists, such as in Andy Warhol’s Marilyns and David Hockney’s bathers. Recently, British artist Stuart Semple created a fluorescent pink paint pigment, the “world’s pinkest pink” which he makes available to all artists, except Anish Kapoor; in retaliation to Kapoor buying the exclusive rights to the Vantablack pigment. Williams College Museum of Art featured an exhibition, Pink Art, which used both human eyes and computer algorithms to determine what pieces of art in the collection feature pink. As participants decide which colors in a group are pink, they produce an evolving visual definition of the color 

Touchstone Gallery invites you to explore all of the shades of pink in our March shows, starting March 21. You can use our physical or digital pink color chart to see what hues of pink your eyes see in the works on view. How many will you discover? 

Sources include: 

• The Shady Past of the Colour Pink by By Kelly Grovier. BBC.com, April 19, 2018

• A Brief History of the Color Pink by Alice Bucknell. Artsy.com, Nov 6, 2017

• This Artist Is the Only Person Banned From Using the World’s Pinkest Pink by Danny Lewis, Smithsonian Magazine, Dec 16, 2016

• Exhibit information from artmuseum.williams.edu/pink-art