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.