UPC for You and Me

The grocery industry adopted the Universal Product Code, or bar code, in 1973. The first item with the code—a pack of Wrigley's gum—was scanned on this day in 1974.

Bar codes keep track of most everything these days. Some museums even use them to catalog their art works.

This painting by Washington Color School artist Gene Davis might resemble a bar code, but it is definitely too big to scan.

Gene Davis said he regarded the stripe as "subject matter—in the same way that one artist uses the nude and another landscape." The lively sequence of stripes in Black Grey Beat does not follow a pre-conceived plan. Davis described his method as "extremely romantic, chaotic, intuitive—anything but careful and calculated."

Source: Modernism & Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Gene Davis, 1920–85, Black Grey Beat, before 1966, acrylic on canvas, 90 3/4 x 187 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift from the Vincent Melzac Collection.