Think about it. You’re in the dark of a cave, painting a yellow horse by the light of a flickering flame. Yellow is a color that seems lit from within, like it contains its own fire. Just like the sun it often represents.
There’s something unnerving about yellow. It has many meanings around the world: serenity, royalty, happiness, amusement, wisdom, and creativity. But also caution, sickness, anxiety, envy, and cowardice. The thing is, it doesn’t sit still. You call it one thing and then it immediately becomes something else.
Here are six takes on the changeling yellow from our creative and fiery staff.
circling the solar citrus
What a lovely spread we have here! Oysters, ready to be shucked and slurped. A little red mullet looks startled, possibly contemplating its inevitable devourment.
The carp looks to be giving one last flail as it takes its final gulp of air. Its feathery tail pushes the entire picture plane down toward us. Everything seems to be tilting frontward, tipping slowly—descension in suspension. Everything looks like it’s about to fall.
With the line of the eel and knife, Manet guides our gaze toward the lemon. This zesty piece of fruit is the sun of this gastronomic galaxy. All the other objects seem to be caught within its orbit. The carp looks like it wants to swallow that lemon whole right before it suffocates. Tragically, the lemon is just out of reach.
I imagine Icarus with the same expression as this fish, right as his wax wings melted. Just as he began to fall, I see him looking toward the zenith sun longingly. Maybe the poet Sian Wilmot is right when she suggests that possibly all Icarus wanted, that poor boy, was to get a little taste of the sun.
—Ryan Pfeiffer, technician, Art Handling, Collections and Loans
Tales of Flame
Toshiko Takaezu is one of the forerunners of female ceramic artists from the mid-20th century who stripped utility from traditional clay forms. In Black Hole, the splash of yellow beckons.
This yellow tells tales of the kiln’s atmosphere and the path of the flame, with wisps of blues and greens chiming in. This is a vessel holding its breath and waiting for its secret to be discovered. The yellow drifts and dissolves into an iron-rich brown until the story is abruptly interrupted by the titular black hole.
The ethereal surface surrounding this chasm defies gravity, as if the air trapped inside might create buoyancy. Is the hole a window into the vessel or a portal to the cosmos? Perhaps it is neither, but instead an invitation for introspection.
—Christina Warzecha, specialist, Modern and Contemporary Art
Bearing the unknown
It towers above me—tucked into the corner of The First Part of the Return from Parnassus by Cy Twombly. A burst of yellow, encased in a triangle.
The title refers to Mount Parnassus, mythical home of the Muses. Twombly’s inscriptions trace back to literary sources, revealing a layered language. His numbers, colors, and scrawled poetry fragments form a code—one that resists decoding.
His yellow calls to me as mystery, as warning against the urge to understand. That unknowing draws me in.
Cy Twombly
In her poem “Ripe Peach,” Louise Glück writes:
“There was a time
only certainty gave me
any joy. Imagine —
certainty, a dead thing.”
That line echoes Twombly’s refusal to fix meaning. His work, and this yellow, hum with aliveness that certainty can’t hold. Maybe that’s the point: to stand in the presence of something alive, still becoming. Not to solve the mystery, but to witness.
Twombly offers no answers—only presence. And in that corner, yellow becomes more than color. It becomes a way of seeing, of bearing the unknown.
—Veronica Cajigas, retail manager, Retail
perfecting the monster
John Chamberlain, like Doctor Frankenstein, knows that most things considered dead merely need to be jolted to life. For this piece, I picture him visiting a graveyard of steel, collecting lifeless parts, and then welding them all to a frame. Yet something is missing.
I see John as he walks through the neighborhood on a summer’s day, when, suddenly, there it is on a lawn, a strip of wet yellow plastic fun, filled with children slipping and sliding. When John grabs the end and yanks, the children careen off into the grass. He drapes it over his shoulder and runs, the kids screaming, the yellow dragging behind him like a majestic robe. Once back in the lab, the mad doctor molds the Slip ‘n Slide into what strangely resembles a brain. With a lightning bolt of genius you can hear him yell out, “It’s alive!”
It was the exact object needed to make this the perfect monster. John knew it. Without the plastic yellow brain, it would be a lifeless metal corpse. I believe that is why he also calls his creation “toy.”
I could be totally wrong about all of this, but I honestly do not think that I am that far off.
—Nicholas Barron, senior specialist, Modern and Contemporary Art
the soothe of serenity
There it is, glowing in the upper-right corner, a golden yellow clustered together: Monet’s sun, just rising above the horizon. It feels like waking up early to a foggy day.
The sunlight reflects off the water and the sky, making the eyes restless with its wandering and begging them to look longer. Painted yellow sunlight often suggests liveliness, but here, mingling with muted greens and purples, it’s serenely warm, a soft glow that feels like hope and anticipation for a new day. This pastel yellow soothes; you become one with this indistinct landscape.
Listen: the tranquil water, the train in the distance, the silhouette of the city, pushing its way through the morning haze.
—Anna Triska, educator, Student Experiences, Ryan Learning Center
The Inevitability of Entropy
Through the use of primary colors and bold flat shapes, Fernand Leger’s Divers on a Yellow Background strikes a balance between (the often opposed) abstraction and figuration.
Yellow at the core of the galaxy. On furloughs during WWI, Léger spoke with Trotsky, often about his ideas for a “polychrome” city that would have included yellow streets in Moscow. At the battle of Verdun, the artist was engulfed in the color, being hospitalized after exposure to mustard gas.
A color once worn only by the emperor, and also an adjective for keeping quiet about their new clothes.
In 1940, Fernand was struck by the image of swimming dock workers in Marseille as he anticipated passage to America amidst yet another world war. A year later in New York he painted Divers reflecting back on that moment.
A tenuous balance, with a jumbled nest of bodies being pulled toward the abstraction, a free fall into form. Knotted yet unmoored.
—William FitzPatrick, carpenter, Trade Shops
P.S. Here are some choice local yellows I am partial to, being born jaundiced in Chicago:
- No. 2 Pencil (1893 World’s Fair debut)
- Taxi Cab (1907 Yellow Cab Company)
- McMaster-Carr Catalogue (1908 1st printed)
- Rust-Oleum Sunburst (1921 founded)
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- European Painting and Sculpture
- Impressionism
