In late nineteenth-century France, Impressionist painters working in a pastel color palette sometimes depicted women wearing the color pink, such as Edgar Degas’ image of ballet dancers or Mary Cassatt’s images of women and children.
Author of Pink Think, Lynn Peril, dubbed the 1960s Hollywood moviestar Jayne Mansfield, “The Patron Saint of Pink Think.”[1] Mansfield, who owned everything in the color, including a pink Jaguar and a home on Sunset Boulevard named “Pink Palace,” used pink as “a visual shorthand for her ideas of femininity and female sexuality."[1]
The 1972 Womanhouse art installation run by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro with the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts included a kitchen painted completely in a “store-bought pink.”[2] The room was designed by Robin Weltsch and Susan Frazier with Vicki Hodgett’s Eggs to Breasts motifs attached to its walls. According to Schapiro, the room intended to evoke ideas of maternity and domesticity by using pink as a “consciousness-raising motif.”[2]
Contemporary artists and museums still reference the color pink in their work and exhibitions. The Turkish artist-professor Tomur Atagök references Ingres’ Grande Odalisque in her Hommage to Ingres I and II (1985), as well as ancient Egyptian art in Artemis of Ephesus (1997), and features the color pink throughout her “Gender Issues” series.[3] Other female artists who use pink include Sylvie Fleury, whose installations such as First Spaceship on Venus (1996), offer critiques of pink in consumer culture, and Louise Bourgeois, whose Nature Study series uses pink to suggest flesh tones in sculptural forms.[4]
In 2005, the international exhibition Rosa – The Exposed Color: Pink opened at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.[5] From October, 2013 – March, 2014, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, held an exhibit entitled Think Pink to coincide with Breast Cancer Awareness Month that October. The exhibit included clothing, graphic illustrations, and paintings that shed light on the social importance of the color since the eighteenth-century.[6]
- ^ a b Peril, Lynn (2002). Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons. New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 16–18.
- ^ a b Schapiro, Miriam (Spring 1972). "The Education of Women as Artists: Project Womanhouse". Art Journal. 31 (2): 268–270. doi:10.2307/775513. JSTOR 775513 – via JSTOR.
- ^ Atagök, Tomur. "Gender Issues, 1981-". Retrieved April 7, 2018.
- ^ Nemitz, Barbara (2006). Pink: The Exposed Color in Contemporary Art and Culture. Ostfildern; New York: Hatje Cantz ; D.A.P. pp. 71–72.
- ^ Nemitz, Barbara (2006). Pink : the exposed color in contemporary art and culture. Ostfildern; New York: Hatje Cantz ; D.A.P. p. 24.
- ^ "Exhibition - Think Pink". Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Retrieved April 7, 2018.