Tapping Your Inner Rothko

In the February issue of ARTnews, there's what turned out to be a very entertaining article by Nicole Lanctot about the color galleries and museums choose for their walls. I say "turned out to be..." because I had talked with the author over the course of a few months about this topic and was very impressed with how something seemingly so mundane turned out to be so enjoyable in print (nice work, Nicole). Here's a snippet:

Many shades of the color white would be suitable to paint a gallery wall. "The 'wrong' kind of white isn't likely to ruin many exhibitions," says dealer Edward Winkleman, author of How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery [shameless self-promotion link]. "But there is a subtle psychological effect to every color."

In his previous New York gallery spaces, Winkleman has chosen Benjamin Moore's White Dove, "which has a slight hint of yellow to it and warms up the room nicely," he says. He wanted the ambience of "a pub in England." But he opened his new space, on West 27th Street, in January with the walls painted Super White. "This cooler white connotes a sense of examination," Winkleman says, "like an operating room or interrogation room, which is appropriate for the work in our first show," conceptual photography by Ulrich Gebert [and again!].

Deciding on the shade of white was "a big deal" at ACA Galleries in New York, says Dorian Bergen, co–owner of the gallery. "We mixed the colors ourselves," creating a custom color with a pinkish tone. "White is too white," Bergen points out.

At Haines Gallery in San Francisco, the goal was to paint the walls a white "that allows the attention to be on the work," says Sean Brimer, the gallery's preparator. That white has for many years been Pure Brilliant White by Glidden. "We use a color that's not too bright on its own, because with the sun coming in, it gets really bright," Brimer says.

At Sperone Westwater, it's Benjamin Moore's Decorators White, which the gallery also plans to use at its new downtown Manhattan space, designed by Norman Foster; it opens this spring. But for 2009's Susan Rothenberg show, the gallery walls were repainted in Benjamin Moore's darker November Rain. "It was a matter of trying to create a consistent calm, perhaps even meditative, mood which would suit a number of works," the gallery's co–owner, Angela Westwater, says.

Nicole also delves into how museums are abandoning white for a more complementary "look" for their artwork of a certain age or genre. MoMA's Ann Temkin, for example, noted how they've changed the walls for their permanent collection "from stark white to a grayish putty color, Benjamin Moore's Big Bend Beige."

It's hard when talking about how much thought goes into what color to paint the walls that art hangs on not to think of Mark Rothko:

His preoccupation with the conditions under which his works would be seen extended beyond the material circumstances of hanging, lighting, wall color, etc. For Rothko, the response to a work of art by an observer was an intellectual and moral, as well as a merely visual, transaction; therefore, circumstances that did not promote the reception of the work's inner meaning were no less unacceptable than those affecting its external appearance.

With that degree of attention to the viewing experience in mind, I wanted to try a quiz... It might be more work that anyone would find time to complete, but most of the Eastern seaboard is off work for the blizzard, so perhaps it's a good day to challenge you to tap your inner Rothko. Choose a work of your own art that you can direct us to on a website (or, if you're not an artist, someone else's work, in a museum on the site of an artist you like) and defend your preference for the color you'd paint the wall if you were to install that work in a gallery (or your home).