Ready-mixed commercial house paints were first introduced in the 1880s, but it wasn't until the 1950s that artists moved away from traditional oil paints and began to embrace the industrial look of these new alkyd-based formulas. For this work from 1962, Frank Stella, who first supported himself by painting apartments in New York, used Benjamin Moore paint because, he said, "it had the nice dead kind of color that I wanted." (Benjamin Moore also happens to be the sponsor of "Color Chart.") The structure of the painting is simple: Concentric squares echo the shape of the canvas with the colored stripes progressing methodically through the spectrum, from red to purple and back again.

Abstract Expressionists like Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning were also using commercial house paints, but Stella found their gestural, angst-ridden style overbearing. Instead, he wanted to make paintings that were blunt, impersonal expressions of the materials themselves. "I knew a wise guy who used to make fun of my painting," Stella said in a 1964 radio interview, "but he didn't like the Abstract Expressionists either. He said they would be good painters if they could only keep the paint as good as it is in the can. And that's what I tried to do. I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can."