Color—or the absence of it—is the fertile subject of two major museum shows in New York this season. "Jasper Johns: Gray" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art mines the artist's five-decade career for canvases and sculptures dominated by his favorite noncolor: gray. Over at the Museum of Modern Art, "Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today" looks like a Technicolor land of Oz by comparison. The show offers an appealingly counterintuitive look at the use of ready-made color—from house paint to vinyl tape—in the work of 44 artists.

"Color Chart," organized by MoMA curator Ann Temkin, has a thesis. Midway through the 20^th century, she argues, artists began to think about color in a new way: as a standardized, mass-produced product, something to be picked up in a store rather than hand-mixed on a palette. The show's central conceit is the commercial color chart, evoked most directly in this painting by Pop artist Jim Dine, who grew up working in his grandfather's hardware store in Cincinnati. While most of the works in the show are less literal in their reference, Temkin makes a smart and persuasive case for the emergence of what she calls a "color-chart sensibility" in postwar and contemporary art.