the colour census

The colour wall hangs every work by its hue and asks nothing further. This office counts them. Each work's dominant colour is fixed at the moment the accession committee admits it, so the census below is recomputed from the register every time the page is opened, and will disagree with itself from one sitting to the next.

the wheel

every chromatic work, in 10° bands

consulting the register…

the rooms, by colour

The committee asked which of its annexes was the reddest. The register answers, and answers for the other colours while it is at it. Each room is painted the mean of its holdings; the strip shows how its works divide among the families, with the greys left as a gap. Rooms of fewer than thirty works are listed but not ranked.

after dark

An 8 met in daylight is usually the colour of its wall. An 8 met at night is lit, painted, or neon, and the register shows it: the share of chromatic works rises through the evening and is highest in the small hours. The bars give the chromatic share by hour of the photograph; the chips beneath are the mean colour of that hour's works.

the sun and the wall

The light audit knows how high the sun stood at every encounter. Set against colour, the register shows no simple rule — the museum does not warm as the sun rises — but it does show a shape. Under a high sun the collection is the ochre of walls. With the sun on the horizon, the hour photographers call golden, it is at its bluest: shadowed streets and open sky. And once the sun is well down it turns warm again, this time by lamplight. The lines give the warm and blue shares by band of solar elevation; the chips are each band's mean colour.

consulting the light audit…

by latitude

The same count, by distance from the equator, north or south. The tropics are the most chromatic; the reds thin out with latitude, and the far north is mostly ochre and grey.

the thread, in colour

Every dated work, one stripe each, in the order the museum met them. Then a year at a time, and finally the whole collection averaged into a single colour — which is, as anyone who has looked at nine thousand walls could have predicted, a warm grey.

twins and strangers

Colours are compared in CIELAB, where a difference of about 2.3 is the smallest the eye can be trusted to notice. Two works closer than 1 are, for any practical purpose, the same colour. The register was asked for the pair of such twins standing farthest apart on the earth, and, at the other extreme, for the work whose colour is least like any other in the museum.

the same colour, farthest apart

the loneliest colours

nearest the museum's own gold