Publisher's Description
From the rosy tint of wind-reddened cheeks to the first flush of arousal,
from cherry blossoms to Pepto-Bismol, pink is a sweet, intimate, fragile
and sickening shade. Few colors trigger more contradictory associations
and emotions—tender, childish, plastic, pornographic—or are so symbolic
of both high and low culture. Pink is sometimes awkward, even embarrassing,
but on the other hand it is enjoyed and associated with the idea
of beauty. Artists of all hues, from Jean-Honoré Fragonard to Pablo
Picasso, Caspar David Friedrich, Louise Bourgeois, Sylvie Fleury or Pipilotti
Rist, have studied it in their works. The examples collected here include
those and more, featuring Caspar David Friedrich, the early Joseph Beuys,
Willem De Kooning, Andy Warhol and Yves Klein, not to mention contemporaries
like Christo, Nan Goldin, Vanessa Beecroft, Wolfgang Tillmans
and Takashi Murakami. In addition, Pink gathers work by a group of young
talents from the Bauhaus University in Vienna and the Tokyo National
University of Fine Arts and Music, where working students cooperated
over an interactive web site to investigate the color’s most current
perceptions and uses. Their final selection suggests, among other things,
that viewer reactions are determined by cultural factors. For example,
the positive perception of pink in Japan seems strikingly masculine to the
Western viewer; every year the country pauses to contemplate the pink
blossoms of the cherry trees, which, after just a few days, drift like snow
to the ground, symbols of the death of the samurai, who falls in the
bloom of youth.