Monochromatic painting
Since its inception by the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, monochromatic painting has been an integral part of modern and contemporary Western visual art. The non-representational potential of a single color has been investigated by artists, who have used it as a starting point for conceptual works, visual research into the intrinsic qualities of painting, and a means of expressing emotions through changes in value, textural diversity, and formal nuances. Monochromatic works continue to have a significant influence on modern art, ranging from geometric abstraction in a range of media to non-representational gestural painting. Since its inception by the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, monochromatic painting has been an integral part of modern and contemporary Western visual art. The non-representational potential of a single color has been investigated by artists, who have used it as a starting point for conceptual works, visual research into the intrinsic qualities of painting, and a means of expressing emotions through changes in value, textural diversity, and formal nuances. Monochromatic works continue to have a significant influence on modern art, ranging from geometric abstraction in a range of media to non-representational gestural painting.
Combat de Nègres pendant la nuit ("Battle of negroes during the night"), a black painting by poet Paul Bilhaud that had been missing since 1882 until its rediscovery in a private collection in 2017–2018, marked the beginning of monochrome painting at the first Incoherents exhibition in Paris in 1882. The French government has designated it a National Treasure. Bilhaud was not the first to produce an all-black piece of art, though; for instance, Bertall released his black Vue de La Hogue (effet de nuit) in 1843, and Robert Fludd published an image of Darkness in his 1617 book on the creation and organization of the cosmos. The author Alphonse Allais participated in the Incoherent Arts shows that followed (also in the 1880s). "First communion of anemic young girls in the snow" (white) or "Tomato harvesting by apoplectic cardinals on the shore of the Red Sea" (red) are two examples of communion of young chlorotic females during a period of snowfall. In 1897, Allais released his monograph Album primo-avrilesque, which included seven monochrome paintings. However, compared to 20th-century monochrome painting since Malevich, this type of activity is more akin to 20th-century Dada or Neo-Dada, especially the works of the Fluxus group in the 1960s. In an interview with Cyril Berger that appeared in Paris-Journal on May 29, 1911, Jean Metzinger discussed the Succès de scandale that resulted from the Cubist exhibition at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants.
Brice Marden, The Dylan Painting, 1966/1986, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Only by inventing a new rhythm for the good of humanity have we cubists fulfilled our obligation. There will be others who follow in our footsteps. What are they going to discover? That is the future's great mystery. Who knows? Perhaps one day a great painter will not display entirely white canvases with nothing at all on them, mocking the frequently violent game of purported colorists and returning the seven colors to the primal white unity that covers them all. (May 29, 1911, Jean Metzinger). A "completely white canvas" would be realized two years after Metzinger's (then) bold forecast that artists would take abstraction to its logical conclusion by fully eschewing representational subject matter and returning to what Metzinger refers to as the "primordial white unity." It's possible that the author of a satirical manifesto titled Manifeste de l'école amorphiste, which was published in Les Hommes du Jour on May 3, 1913, had Metzinger's vision in mind when he used the argument that "light is enough for us" to defend amorphism's blank canvases. According to art historian Jeffrey S. Weiss, "Vers Amorphisme may be gibberish, but it was also enough of a foundational language to anticipate the extreme reductivist implications of non-objectivity" in this context.
In a broad and general sense, minimalism's European origins can be found in the geometric abstractions of Bauhaus painters, in the works of Russian Constructivist and De Stijl artists like Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, and in the sculptures of Romanian Constantin Brâncuň. The paintings of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, and a variety of other artists, including Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio Morandi, and others, are additional sources of inspiration for minimalist art. Additionally, the painterly subjectivity of Abstract Expressionism, which dominated the New York School in the 1940s and 1950s, was opposed by minimalism. The fact that monochrome paintings can be interpreted in a variety of ways, even impossible ones, may be the reason why so many artists, critics, and journalists find them so captivating. The monochrome has never gone away, despite the fact that few artists have dedicated themselves solely to it, and it has never become dominant. It resurfaces amid periods of esthetic and sociopolitical upheaval, either as a symbol of high modernism or as a ghost haunting it.
Suprematism and Constructivism
Suprematist Composition: White on White, created in 1918 by Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich, marked the beginning of monochrome painting as we know it today in Moscow. This was an adaptation or follow-up to his 1915 piece Black Square on a White Field, which was a significant contribution to geometric abstraction in the 20th century on its own. Alexander Rodchenko, a constructivist painter, displayed three paintings in 1921: Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow Color. Each painting was a monochrome representation of one of the three main colors. It was his intention for this piece to symbolize the "death of painting." Malevich interpreted Rodchenko's monochrome as a focus on the conventional presumptions of painting, a sort of meditation on the essence of art, whereas Rodchenko meant his work to be a demolition of those presumptions.
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915), Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery, oil on canvas
The almost paradoxical dynamic of this type of work was articulated very early in its history by these two approaches: a monochrome can be interpreted as either a flat surface (material entity or "painting as object") that represents nothing but itself and thus represents an end in the evolution of illusionism in painting (i.e. Rodchenko); or as a depiction of multidimensional (infinite) space, a fulfillment of illusionistic painting, representing a new evolution—a new beginning—in the history of Western painting (Malevich). The fact that monochrome paintings can be interpreted in a variety of ways, even impossible ones, may be the reason why so many artists, critics, and journalists find them so captivating. The monochrome has never gone away, despite the fact that few artists have dedicated themselves solely to it, and it has never become dominant. It resurfaces amid periods of esthetic and sociopolitical upheaval, either as a symbol of high modernism or as a ghost haunting it. Furthermore, many have noted that, without consulting the artist's commentary, it might be challenging to infer the artist's intentions from the picture itself.
Abstract Expressionists
Milton Resnick was an abstract expressionist painter for a considerable amount of time. He first experimented with the action painting technique that was popular at the time in the 1940s. His latter work, which spans the 1950s through the 1970s, is frequently described as abstract impressionist. This is mostly due to the fact that, like Claude Monet in the renowned Waterlilies series, he used repeated, repetitive, and close-valued brushstrokes to create his allover compositions. Resnick's paintings became monochrome in the last 25 years of his career, albeit they still had heavily layered and brushed surfaces.
Untitled, private collection, acrylic painting on paper, approximately 1990
Ad Reinhardt was an abstract expressionist artist known for painting nearly “pure” monochromes over a considerable span of time (roughly from 1952 to his death in 1967), in red or blue, and lastly and most (in)famously, in black. Like the Johns works discussed below, Reinhardt’s black paintings contain the faint traces of a geometric form, but the actual boundaries are not immediately apparent unless the viewer spends some time with the work. This tends to encourage meditative contemplation for the viewer and to create doubt concerning perception; in terms of Frank Stella's famous saying, you might even doubt whether "what you see" is really what you are seeing. Like the Johns works discussed below, Reinhardt’s black paintings contain the faint traces of a geometric form, but the actual boundaries are not immediately apparent unless the viewer spends some time with the work. This tends to encourage meditative contemplation for the viewer, and to create doubt concerning perception; in terms of Frank Stella's famous saying, you might even doubt whether "what you see" is really what you are seeing.
Reinhardt at work on one of his 60x60" Abstract Black Painting, circa 1960
His monochromatic series, called Presences, which dated from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, was one of the most potent series of paintings Richard Pousette-Dart produced in his long career as an abstract expressionist painter. Since its inception by the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, monochromatic painting has been an integral part of modern and contemporary Western visual art. The non-representational potential of a single color has been investigated by artists, who have used it as a starting point for conceptual works, visual research into the intrinsic qualities of painting, and a means of expressing emotions through changes in value, textural diversity, and formal nuances. His monochromatic series, called Presences, which dated from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, was one of the most potent series of paintings Richard Pousette-Dart produced in his long career as an abstract expressionist painter.
Monochrome works: The Blue Epoch
Yves Klein: Klein had been painting monochromes as early as 1949 and the first private showing of these works was in 1950, but the first public showing was the publication of the artist's book Yves: Peintures in November 1954. In a parody of a conventional catalog, the book presented a series of powerful monochromes related to the various cities where he had lived in the past few years. Yves: Peintures preceded his first two shows of oil paintings, at the Club des Solitaires, Paris, October 1955 and Yves: Proposition monochromes at Gallery Colette Allendy, February 1956. These shows, showing orange, yellow, red, pink and blue monochromes, disappointed Klein deeply, as people went from painting to painting, connecting them together as a sort of mosaic.
Yves Klein, IKB 191, 1962.
Based on audience reactions, [Klein] realized that…viewers believed his various canvases of one color to be a new form of bright abstract interior decoration. Klein, surprised by this misunderstanding, realized that a further and decisive step toward monochrome art had to be taken... From then on, he would work on just one color, and that would be the dominant one: blue. The following exhibition, Proposte Monochrome, Epoca Blu (Proposition Monochrome; Blue Epoch) at the Gallery Apollinaire, Milan, (January 1957), featured 11 identical blue canvases, using ultramarine pigment suspended in a synthetic resin, Rhodopas. With the help of Edouard Adam, a Parisian paint dealer, discovered the effect was to retain the brilliance of the pigment which tended to become dull when suspended in linseed oil. This was an adaptation or follow-up to his 1915 piece Black Square on a White Field, which was a significant contribution to geometric abstraction in the 20th century on its own. Alexander Rodchenko, a constructivist painter, displayed three paintings in 1921: Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow Color. Each painting was a monochrome representation of one of the three main colors. It was his intention for this piece to symbolize the "death of painting."
This color, like that of the lapis lazuli that was used for the robes of the Madonna in medieval paintings, became famous as 'International Klein Blue' (IKB). To further augment the spatial ambiguities, the paintings were affixed to poles, 20 cm from the walls.The show was a critical and commercial success, touring to Paris, Dusseldorf and London. The exhibition at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, May 1957, was a seminal happening: 1001 blue balloons were released for the opening, and blue postcards were sent out with IKB stamps that Klein had bribed the postal service to accept as legitimate. At the same time, Gallery Collette Allendy was showing an exhibition of tubs of blue pigment and fire paintings.
Allan McCollum, Collection of One Hundred Plaster Surrogates, 1982/1990, Enamel on cast Hydrostone. Collection: Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerp, Belgium
Olivier Mosset has also lived a lot in Paris and New York. In the 1960s he was member of the BMPT group (with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni) in Paris. The group questioned the idea of authorship and originality, claiming that they often did each other’s work and that the art object was more important than its authorship. In the late 1970s, in New York, during the heyday of Neo-expressionism, Mosset painted a long series of monochromes. He became a founding member of the New York Radical Painting group, radical in the sense of both an implied radical social stance, and of a return to the radical ‘root’ of painting.Olivier Mosset has also lived a lot in Paris and New York. In the 1960s he was member of the BMPT group (with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni) in Paris. The group questioned the idea of authorship and originality, claiming that they often did each other’s work and that the art object was more important than its authorship. In the late 1970s, in New York, during the heyday of Neo-expressionism, Mosset painted a long series of monochromes. He became a founding member of the New York Radical Painting group, radical in the sense of both an implied radical social stance, and of a return to the radical ‘root’ of painting.
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