“Color Chart,” a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, is an exhibition so simple and right in its conception that one marvels at the fact that it hasn’t been done before. The show gathers work by 44 artists who have responded to the commercial color chart. And for most of these artists, using the color chart has meant treating color as a ready-made, something found rather than something expressing emotion.

Given that Marcel Duchamp invented the notion of the ready-made, it makes sense that the show begins with his painting “Tu m'” (1918), which in English corresponds to “You — me.” Made to fit over his patron Katherine Dreier’s bookshelf, the long and narrow canvas features a bicycle wheel — perhaps a reference to one of the artist’s first ready-mades — and a hand pointing to a sheet of paper, which floats above small rows of color samples. Atop the hand, a line of square color samples seems to recede into the distance.

Duchamp’s example inspired the 117 colored cardboard paint samples running across the center of Robert Rauschenberg’s well-known combine painting “Rebus” (1955), a collage-like work that includes paint splashes and bits of drawing, as well as cut and pasted images from newspapers and magazines. “At that time,” says the artist in the wall text, “surplus paint fit my budget very well … I would just go and buy a whole mess of paint, and the only organization, choice, or discipline was that I had to use some or all of it and I wouldn’t buy any more paint until I’d used that up.”

Indeed, for a number of these artists, such as Mr. Rauschenberg, necessity has been the mother of chromatic invention. So, for instance, Ellsworth Kelly’s decision to build his 8-foot-square “Colors for a Large Wall” (1951) from 64 1-foot-square paintings, each painted its own color, was directed by the fact that the place he was living in didn’t have room for a large work.

Allusions to the commercial uses of mass-produced paints are rife, ranging from the relatively muted to more blaring instances. In the former category, Frank Stella’s painting “Hampton Roads, New Madrid, Delaware Crossing, Sabine Pass, Palmito Ranch and Island No. 10” (1962) consists of six individually hung and individually colored square canvases, each with a different geometric on it. On the other end of the scale, Alighiero Boetti’s series of monochrome paintings from 1967 — made in Turin, where the Fiat motor company is based — employs automobile paint sprayed onto the support and embossed with the color’s name in cork lettering. “Rosso Palermo” is, for example, a shiny red, while “Bianco Saratoga” is white.

Not surprisingly, John Chamberlain, who is famous for sculptures made from crushed car parts, also worked with automobile paint, here in a rare and wonderfully understated series of paintings. Named for musicians and pop-music groups, these 1-foot-square paintings in auto lacquer on Masonite balance simple, three-by-three grids of squares toward their outer edges. “Elvis” (1963), to take one example, pairs a pale yellow grid with a darker yellow grid on a mustard background.

As for more recent work, Cory Arcangel’s ingenious digital projection “Colors” (2005) retools the 1988 Dennis Hopper film of the same name. For his piece, Mr. Arcangel wrote a program that plays the movie one horizontal line of pixels at a time. The result is a changing array of vertical lines that flicker like a kinetic abstract painting. According to press materials, it would take more than a month to play the entire film this way, but I did not remain in its darkened room quite long enough to confirm this.

Despite the programmatic nature of many of the works on view, a smattering of quirky, lighthearted pieces, such as Mr. Arcangel’s, provides moments of whimsical respite. Sol LeWitt’s “Wall Drawing #84” (1971) demonstrates that by filling a 12-inch square with all the crayons in a Crayola pack of 12, one can produce an unexpectedly beautiful abstraction. Dimpled like rhino skin, the version on view seemed to have a layer of purple and violet with blues and greens visible below. Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader’s video “Primary Time” (1974) takes the Dutch master Piet Mondrian as its subject. In reference to Mondrian’s famously restricted palette of red, yellow, blue, black, and white, the 26-minute video simply consists of a person arranging red, blue, and yellow flowers.

Commercial colors are manufactured to achieve inexpensive standardization, and yet they also provide customers with a measure of individuality: Everything from cars to clothes to tract homes comes in a variety of colors that one can choose. What is most affecting about the work at MoMA is how, though virtually all the artists strive to match the impersonality of commercial color, usually by making programmatic work, their choices almost always turn out to be personal. It’s a tension exemplified by the title of Dan Flavin’s 1987 sculpture, which uses commercial light tubes and is called “untitled (to Don Judd, colorist).” Emotions seep into even the tightest of industrial boxes — a circumstance that can make even a Minimalist blush fluorescent red.

Until May 12 (11 W. 53 St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).