Curator, Ann Temkin: I'm Ann Temkin, the Blanchett Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.
This painting entitled, Tu M is Marcel Duchamp's last oil on canvas. What you see is an inventory, of many of what have now become his most famous works. His ready-mades, where he simply took an object from the store, selected it and more or less baptized it a work of art. Whether it be a bicycle wheel, as you see on the far left, or a hat rack, as you see on the right.
The most tangible thing in the painting in terms of color is a long cascade of color swatches. This is probably the first appearance in the history of art of colors from a paint catalog. The idea that color is a readymade, color is something that you can just buy, and not change, and it nonetheless is art, is something that Duchamp foresaw.
We begin the exhibition with this work because it's such an important precursor for the kind of attitude that the whole show explores. I don't mean to say that all the artists in this show were followers of Duchamp, or perhaps that they even were aware of this painting itself. But it sets the tone for the kind of color chart sensibility that the show investigates with work made many decades later.
After World War II, artists were much more matter-of-fact about the way they used color, and often color was something that was chosen by chance or by some kind of impersonal system that had nothing to do with the emotions of the artist.
For me, the joy of so many of the works in the exhibition is that, despite the seemingly objective way in which the artists are working, the color has a magic.