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Pantone’s ‘Color of the Year,’ Minimalist Design, and the Visuals of Imperial White Supremacy

Jo Leuenberger

Pantone has announced its 2026 ‘Color of the Year:’ Cloud Dancer, Pantone 11-4201, a rather pallid shade of white. The choice has not been well-received. Choosing white during the latest rise of fascism in the United and Europe has made it a jarring choice, and it’s difficult to believe that no one in Pantone’s executive leadership was informed of the link. Press outlets from Hyperallergic (Nayyar 2025) to the New York Times (Styles Desk 2025) have run pieces baffled by the choice, making the obvious associations: purity, cleanliness, white supremacy. The neat erasure of visual interest—allegedly in the quest for harmony—has further infiltrated Pantone’s promotional materials, hardly helping their case. There, Pantone uses unnervingly tight language that is too easy to read into: ‘providing a refuge of visual cleanliness’ (Pressman 2025), ‘a conscious state of simplification’ (Pressman 2025), ‘a discrete white hue’ (Eiseman 2025). More positive notes are proffered by Pantone that stress the meditative qualities of the shade: ‘perfect harmony’ (Pressman 2025), ‘blank canvas’ (Pressman 2025), ‘calming influence’ (Pressman 2025). 


These connections are nothing new. The pure, total white of ancient Greek sculptures was considered the pinnacle of artistic beauty in Europe from the Renaissance well into the twentieth century. As chemical testing improved and indicated that these sculptures were more often painted colourfully than not, notions of their polychromy remained controversial even when acknowledged (Keats 2022). As early as 1944, Gisela Richter noted that ‘The idea of painted statues somehow filled people with horror, and only after the evidence in its favor had become overwhelming did the supporters of white, unpainted sculptures give up their case’ (Richter 1944). Polychromy interrupted European idealisations of Antiquity’s formal sculptural purity; color marred the neat, monochromatic sublimity of marble. 


Minimalist aesthetics have long been used by white designers against the aesthetics of working-class people of colour, often under coded language of ‘business’ or incohesion, usually conveniently ignoring points in European history, like Baroque and Neoclassicism, where maximalism was the checkmark of aristocracy. The sleek, clean simplicity of midcentury modern in the postwar period expunged the Islamic and Asian influences that had previously infiltrated European design. By the 1960s, to purposefully have less—when one could afford more—had become the elite’s status symbol. Of course, to have less was not so chic if it came from an actual lack of resources. Bourgeois minimalism’s project, indeed, was never inclusivity.


Surely, most minimalists artists and designers do not intend minimalism as an exclusionary or even right-wing position, nor is it inherently either—there are, for example, eco-minimalists who use minimalism as a means of reducing consumption and pollution. Yet at its most extreme, the sweeping insistence on minimalism as a ‘decluttering’ or ‘purity’ gives it unfortunate parallels with ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure, especially when minimalism becomes a visual aesthetic. Pantone has neglected to assign an overtly political allegiance to their choice, 


The color white, too, is no stranger to controversy. Since the advent of Abstract Expressionism, white has been used in art and design as a source of provocation—Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951) provide a gauche example of the ‘theatrical’ minimalism which Michael Fried famously railed against as ‘largely ideological’ (Fried 1967). Of course, Rauschenberg’s paintings were, in both a literal and figurative sense, not blank canvases, being coated uniformly in house paint. Their simplicity, rather than harmonising, is meant in part to be an incendiary reaction simultaneously within and against Abstract Expressionism. The mechanical plainness of the canvas rejects the mark of an individual human artist, thus removing any association with the craftsmanship or technical difficulty of ‘fine art.’


Though Rauschenberg isn’t using minimalism in its extremist form, the removal of the individual human mark is partly the appeal of minimalism when it’s used as a tool of fascist ideologies—mechanical reproduction can be an expression of uniformity, sameness, and quality control. This tracks, to some degree, with minimalist geographies. Today, minimalist design is frequently associated with Northern European countries—particularly the Nordic countries and Germany—and Japan, regions either upheld by white supremacists as cultural paradises or with recent colonial histories. While minimalist designers may not be to blame for the associations placed upon their mode of work, nor does it necessarily reduce the prowess of their designs, it is nonetheless true that the aesthetics of wealthy countries in the Global North and their apparent predecessors (the Greeks and Romans of antiquity, for example) remain the most unanimously prized—even the fetishised art of the former Ottoman Empire and China failed to retain the acclaim of Danish, West German (importantly, the Soviet East Germany is hardly as valued), and Japanese output in the latter half of the twentieth-century, despite their appropriation by Europeans centuries earlier. This is a phenomenon with which Pantone, headed by a team of internationally-renowned designers, must be at least peripherally familiar, especially since the treasuring of the color ‘white’ holds obvious racialised connotations.


Perhaps the most unnerving aspect of Cloud Dancer’s reign is its near-inevitability. Given recent picks for ‘Color of the Year,’ Cloud Dancer is ultimately expected. The 2020s have been a decade of neutrals for the Color of the Year, making up three of the seven choices since 2020. Before then, a neutral had been chosen for Color of the Year only once, in 2006—Sandy Dollar, Pantone 13-1106 TCX, an unassuming beige. A series of corporate collaborations remind us that the Color of the Year is a moneybag: Play-Doh x Pantone (white play-doh), Joybird x Pantone (white sofas), Post-it x Pantone (literally white sheets of paper). This swiftly puts off any hopes of an eco-friendly reading of the choice, while explaining Pantone’s insistence that it ‘does not assign political narratives to color’ (Feitelberg 2025)—which apparently follows the logic of choosing colors as exemplative of the zeitgeist—and perhaps the choice for neutrals generally: they’re trying to pander to as many consumers as possible. In this sense, it might not be white that’s representative of our present culture than it is the choice of white—values of erasure and purity disguised as simplicity, and a purposeful ignorance of what that might mean.



Source

Keats, J. (2025). White Supremacy Or A Fetish For Minimalism? The Met Confronts The 

‘Conspiracy’ To Deprive Ancient Greek Sculpture Of Color. Forbes. 

for-minimalism-the-met-confronts-the-conspiracy-to-deprive-ancient-greek-sculpture-of-

color/

Feitelberg, Rosemary. (2025). Pantone’s 2026 ‘Color of the Year’ Is ‘Cloud Dancer.’ WWD.

Fried, Michael. (1967). Art and Objecthood. The University Chicago. https://monoskop.org/

images/8/8f/Fried_Michael_Art_and_Objecthood_Essays_and_Reviews_1998.pdf.

Nayyar, Rhea. (2025). Pantone’s Color of the Year Sounds About White. Hyperallergic.

Pressman, Laurie. (2025). Pantone Introduces the Pantone Color of the Year 2026: PANTONE 

pantone-announces-color-of-the-year-2026-cloud-dancer

Pantone. (2025). Color of the Year 2026. https://www.pantone.com/uk/en/color-of-the-year/2026.

Richter, Gisela. (1944). Polychromy in Greek Sculpture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Styles Desk. (2025). Pantone’s 2026 Color of the Year Is ‘Cloud Dancer.’ The New York Times.

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