At a certain point of 1957 film "Funny Face", Miss Prescott, a fashion editor modelled on the indomitable Diana Vreeland, choreographs an entire number around the virtues of pink. "Think Pink" she sings, encouraging her staff and readers to ditch black, red and blue (and the rest of the other colours…), banish dull and dreary shades and opt for pink for that "quelque chose", a nuance that can instantly lift the mood. After all, Elsa Schiaparelli said that pink is "bright, impossible, impudent (...) life-giving".
Yet the history of fashion and colours is full of prejudices about this shade: pink is universally considered as a problematic colour as it carries many connotations, dichotomies and symbolic/cultural meanings.
Associated with feminine and queer taste, it is considered as frilly, frivolous, trivial, superficial and fragile, yet it is also reassuring like the fluffiest cotton candy, but also dangerous, romantic and punk with a touch of kitsch. Pink embodies the visual excesses of 18th century Rococo ornaments, but also the 1990s work of queer artists Pierre et Gilles. John Monteleone, director of the Wollongong Art Gallery, New South Wales, Australia, calls it "a divisive colour", almost a marginalized shade, capable of triggering chromophobia and prejudices.
All these views about pink inspired an exhibition at Wollongong Art Gallery, "Thinking Through Pink" (until 5th March 2023). The event is designed to investigate ideas about pink by looking at a variety of objects.
The exhibition features art from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and brings together works selected by exhibition curator, Dr Sally Gray, who tried to connect objects through colour, materials and aesthetic values, selecting them from the archives at Wollongong Art Gallery and at The Powerhouse, Sydney.
Dr Sally Gray's approach is focused on understanding the objects and the histories behind them and connecting them together through the complexity of the colour pink.
The pieces on display are clever homages to pink from different times and places and with very different meanings, but all of them are unusual and intriguing: Derby porcelain figurines from 1700s dialogue with a wide variety of pieces, including pink court shoes from 1927, John Brack's 1970 painting "Peonies"; Paul Yore's quilted piece "Dreaming Is Free", the 1988 G'Day Chair designed by Brian Sayer and Christopher Connell, and Ebony Russell's pink urn, a sort of memento mori souvenir made in porcelain with a cake decorating tool that gives the impression the vase is made with pink sugar and cream.Dr Gray highlights in an essay accompanying the exhibition that pink is actually the oldest colour on our planet: in 2018, numerous science publications reported indeed that Australian National University lead researchers Jochen Brocks and Nur Gueneli extracted a bright pink pigment from bacteria fossils - cyanobacteria - preserved in billion-year-old rocks under the Sahara Desert in Mauritania, West Africa.
The discovery proved that pink wasn't created to be a pretty feminine shade, after all, in Renaissance Italy, red dyes were the most expensive, and the various hues derived from them - including many shades of pink - were prized for denoting 'male dignity' and magnificence in clothing for the most powerful elites. Gray mentions how dyes that produced textile colours ranging from deep crimsons to violets - from "carnation pink" to "pink sapphire" and "peach blossom" - were used for men's garments that had to display honour, wealth and power.
Think also about the warm tones and in particular the vivid and bright red and pink nuances in Giovanni Battista Moroni's paintings, while Pontormo was considered by film-maker Derek Jarman as "the pinkest painter".
Pink also appeared in François Boucher, François- Hubert Drouais and Maurice Quentin de La Tour, both as a dominant and an ambient colour, in dress, drapery, fabric detail, ribbons, lace, shoes, flowers, furniture and jewellery.
Colours and ornamentation started disappearing in men's dress after the French Revolution, as the black suit was adopted in the 19th century and fear of colour crept in men's attire. In the meantime, with the second industrial revolution, from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, colours underwent an expansion also thanks to synthetic dyes and to new materials that pushed towards the democratization of a whole range of new shades.
Interestingly enough, for children it remained popular to use pink for boys and blue for girls, as suggested in the June 1918 Ladies Home Journal, and confirmed in 1927 by Time magazine. Things radically changed in the '40s when American consumer culture brought a major change and manufacturers settled on pink for girls and blue for boys.
Interior design caught up and pink became popular for a wide range of products, including household appliances from fridges to radios, carpets, lighting fixtures, dinnerware, curtains, display cabinets and eating utensils. Domestic culture in the '50s was prevalently feminine and reinforced the impression that pink was a colour for women. Elsa Schiaparelli, who became famous for her trademark shocking pink in the '30s, remarked in her biography published in the mid-1950s, that men wouldn't wear "a spot of colour on their waistcoats" as that "might deprive them of their manhood".
Pink at the time didn't have a great reputation as it wasn't always associated with good taste: Dr Gray explains how, when asked to provide advice for the 1962 official visit to India of Jackie Kennedy accompanied by her sister Lee Radziwill, Vreeland stated, "Pink is the navy blue of India", to highlight that India was more open to the use of bright colours.
Jackie Kennedy followed her suggestion and for her arrival at New Delhi airport in March 1962, she donned what the US Ambassador to India referred to as "a suit of radioactive pink", revealing in this description, his own colour phobia. Yet, thanks to Diana Vreeland pushing the American First lady to adopt it, pink turned into a colour of international diplomacy.
In the same decade, the use of mind-altering substances such as LSD inspired bright poster and album designs in hot pinks and magentas. Art-wise this period included the neon light works of artists Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Nauman and Dan Flavin, and the fluoro or Dayglo colours of Andy Warhol's screen prints.
Dr Gray also explores the meaning of the pink triangle: initially used as a badge of shame and oppression of homosexuals by the Nazi regime, most notably in its concentration camps, the triangle was reclaimed as a symbol of gay self-identity in the 1970s. It has since been adopted by the larger LGBTQIA+ community as a popular symbol of pride as proved by Peter Tully's brooch representing a map of Australia with a pink triangle.
In the '70s for feminist postermakers at the Tin Sheds Art Workshops at The University of Sydney, Jan Fieldsend, Marie McMahon and Jan Mackay, pink was part of a search for artistic ways and means. Reappropriating pink, these artists didn't conceive it as a feminine and weak colour, but as powerful and pleasurable. Adopting it was for them away to stick two fingers to the establishment, it was an act of resistance against marginalisation.
In more recent decades pink has been lauded, reviled and resurrected, turning in 2016 into Pantone's "Colour of the year", and it was celebrated as the influential "Millennial pink", a post-pretty shade, nice and delightful, minus all the heavy ideological meanings and the chromophobia attached to this shade for centuries, but simply beloved on social media, especially on Instagram.
Pink also turned into a very fashionable colour, celebrated by the Museum at FIT with the 2019 exhibition "Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color", while the Valentino fashion house collaborated with Pantone last year to create a special new pink - Pink PP (a reference to creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli) - for its Autumn/Winter 2022-23 collection. This shade was used for all the looks in the collection, from voluminous coats to suits and bubble dresses.
While Paul Simonon stated that pink is "the only true rock'n'roll colour", some designers use the slogan "pink is punk" to hint at its indomitable power. The late Italian fashion and interior designer Cinzia Ruggeri also liked this shade: pink was feminine in her mind, but it wasn't just that, it was a punk, hilarious, rebellious, non-conformist, anti-authoritarian, anti-corporative, anti-consumerist, anti-corporate greed shade, probably best embodied by her cute pig designs.
Ruggeri once stated about it: "Vedo la donna come un foglio rosa un po' profumato molto femminile, però con del cervello. C'è sempre stato spazio per l'intelligenza", that translated means, "In my opinion a woman is like a pink sheet, a little perfumed, very feminine, but with brains. There is always room for intelligence". So be it pale or hot and bright, enjoy pink, but not as something frivolous or trivial, but as a shade that leaves a lot of space for smart thoughts and clever ideas.
Image credits for this post
Patricia Piccinini, Blush, 2019, ABS plastic and Automotive paint. WAG collection
John Brack, Peonies, 1970, oil on canvas. Wollongong Art Gallery
Paul Yore, Dreaming Is Free, 2016, Mixed media appliqued quilt comprising textiles, found materials, cotton thread, buttons, beads, sequins. Courtesy of the artist
Figure, porcelain, Derby Porcelain Works, Derbyshire, England, c. 1760. Powerhouse collection.
Ebony Russell, Decorative Urn: Pink and Useless, 2020, Piped porcelain and stain. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Simon Hewson
Elvis Richardson, Settlement #1, 2018-2021. Modified found gate, pink powder coated. Lent by Ellen Koshland. Courtesy of the artist and Ellen Koshland
Ex de Medici, I Married Her With My Diamond, 2018, watercolour and gold leaf on paper. Wollongong Art Gallery
US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy stepping off the plane at New Delhi, India, 1962
Peter Tully, Brooch, acrylic, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, c. 1990. Powerhouse collection, Sydney
David McDiarmid and Ron Smith (artists) Tony Guthrie (photographer), Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Workshop G'Day Chair intervention #15a, for the G'Day Gala. Benefit auction for the AIDS Trust of Australia, 1988 G'Day Chair designed by Brian Sayer and Christopher Connell 1988, 1988-2022, Donated by Brian Sayer, 2022
Joanne Saad, Dancing Queen, 2005. WAG collection
Valentino, A/W 2022-23 collection
Ebony Russell, Decorative Urn: Pink and Useless (detail), 2020, Piped porcelain and stain. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Simon Hewson
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