Grayness - Grey in History and Art - Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

In the late 1930s, grey became a symbol of industrialization and war. It was the dominant color of Pablo Picasso's celebrated painting about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, Guernica.

After the war, the grey business suit became a metaphor for uniformity of thought, popularized in such books as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, (1955), which became a successful film in 1956.

  • Grey concrete was a popular building material for monumental works of modern architecture in the late 20th century. This is the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California (1959) by American architect Louis Kahn.

Read more about this topic:  Grayness, Grey in History and Art

Famous quotes containing the words twentieth and/or centuries:

    In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.
    Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)

    For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.
    Albert Camus (1913–1960)