This year, the colour that you will be seeing everywhere is a shade titled: PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri. Every year, the Pantone colour of the year selection process requires thoughtful consideration and trend analysis. To arrive at this selection, Pantone’s colour experts at the Pantone Color Institute™ combed the world looking for new colour influences.
Pantone describes the very peri shade as a “provocative and thoughtful purple shade” that embodied individuality and spirituality. According to the company, it alludes to the mysteries of the cosmos and the unknown and the colour’s courageous presence encourages personal inventiveness and creativity.
Throughout history the colour purple is generally associated with royalty, luxury, nobility, power, and ambition. Purple is also used to represent creativity, extravagance, dignity, grandeur, independence, pride, peace, mystery, and magic.
The colour purple has been popular with artists for hundreds of years, beginning in millennium B.C., when humans created a pigment called purpura or Tyrian purple. Years on the Catholic church then adopted the colour, and violet-robed religious figures began to feature in Old Master paintings. Later, the Impressionists such as Cézanne, Matisse, and especially Monet, used the colour violet so prolifically that critics accused the painters of having ‘violettomania’.
Abstract painter Mark Rothko also played with the colour’s religious associations when he used the colour in the the non-denominational Rothko Chapel in Houston. He loved the hue so much so, there is even a book called ‘What was it with Mark Rothko and Purple?’.
Purple went hand in hand with Pop Art in the 1960s and can be seen in many of Andy Warhol’s works, from his purple portraits to his purple cow.
Present day artists including Yayoi Kusama, Anish Kapoor, James Turrel and Jeff Koons have also brought the shade into the 21st century to the masses within their works.
And most recently last year, Cyril Lancelin presented a dreamlike purple installation in Paris. You can read all about that in his interview with The Art Gorgeous here.
Here we investigate more art works that were ahead of the trend and encompass the ultraviolet shade.
Installation view of Remember your dreams, by Cyril Lancelin at Palais Galliera Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) Le filigrane violet via Christie’s
Self Portrait (1986), a nine-foot-tall painting of Andy Warhol that was previously owned by Tom Ford via Art News
Josef Albers Palatial, 1965 via the Susan Sheehan Gallery
Judy Chicago Purple Atmosphere, 1969/2019 ChromaLuxe metal print on aluminum for sale via Artsy
Claude Monet Waterloo Bridge, Blurred sun, 1903 “Monet – Lost in Translation” at ARoS Aarhus Museum of Art, Aarhus
Anish Kapoor [no title] 1998 via the Tate
