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The entrance gallery to "Jasper Johns: Gray" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with False Start (1959) and Jubilee (1959)
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THE GRAYING OF MODERNISM
by Donald Kuspit


It was not for nothing that white was chosen as the vestment of pure joy and immaculate purity. And black as the vestment of the greatest, most profound mourning and as the symbol of death. The balance between these two colors that is achieved by mechanically mixing them together forms gray. Naturally enough, a color that has come into being in this way can have no external sound, nor display any movement. Gray is toneless and immobile. This immobility, however, is of a different character from the tranquility of green, which is the product of two active colors and lies midway between them. Gray is therefore the disconsolate lack of motion. The deeper this gray becomes, the more the disconsolate element is emphasized, until it becomes suffocating.
-- Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art(1)

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