'True Colors' exhibit runs a spectrum of emotions

Hans Hoffman declared our entire being nourished by it, Henri Matisse saw it as a means of liberation, and Josef Albers observed that we can never really perceive what it is physically. How these and other artists grapple with the elusive and potent property of color is the subject of the Nassau County Museum of Art’s current exhibition "True Colors."

Comprising more than 100 works, the exhibit offers up a spectrum of paintings, sculptures and decorative objects largely from the past century dedicated to exploring chromatic effects. “Color goes directly to our emotions — from perception to the mind to the heart,” says museum director Charles A. Riley, the show’s organizer.

Viewers are greeted by an image of St. Sebastian by the influential Renaissance artist Titian. Though a chronological outlier from the rest of the show, the painting represents the new and personal use of color by its author and in Western art. “Two rival camps emerged,” Riley says, “the colorists like Titian who were seen as a little out of control and artists like Raphael recognized for their rational and orderly compositions,” ones that emphasized the primacy of drawing and form.

Many of the big-name modernists are here — Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, Paul Klee — as well as more contemporary champions of color such as Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Joan Mitchell, John Chamberlain and Larry Poons.

Throughout the installation in the museum’s Georgian-style mansion it becomes evident who knew and who influenced whom, from Henri Matisse to Robert Motherwell. The latter is represented by three reunited paintings from his Open series, permutations of simple planes of color divided by three charcoal lines. The large canvases are based on Matisse’s use of the window as a motif contrasting the inner self and the outer world, the emotional and the physical.

Among the more recent explorations of vivid hues is an electric spiraling piece by Deborah Kass, best known perhaps for her aluminum “OY/YO” sculpture first installed at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. Kass’ “After Louise Bourgeois” gives a new spin and adds significant color to one of the doyenne artist’s feminist-inspired quotes.

The glow from lighted works by Kass, as well as by Joseph Kosuth and Keith Sonnier, radiates with that of pastel glassware on view by Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose paintings, Riley says, are the core of the museum’s holdings.

Mining other local treasures, the show also includes pieces by Long Island-based Barbara Ernst Prey and Scott McIntire. Sagaponack artist Nathan Slate Joseph contributes a site-specific installation combining bright pigments and galvanized steel. Noting the transient nature of Joseph’s piece and the show at large, Riley urges museum-goers to come and visit.

“Like a rainbow,” he says of the kaleidoscopic exhibition, “it’s here — and then it’s gone.”