Monochromatic painting has played a significant role in modern and contemporary Western visual art, originating with the early 20th-century European avant-gardes. Artists have explored the non-representational potential of a single color, investigating shifts in value, diversity of texture, and formal nuances as a means of emotional expression, visual investigation into the inherent properties of painting, as well as a starting point for conceptual works. Ranging from geometric abstraction in a variety of mediums to non-representational gestural painting, monochromatic works continue to be an important influence in contemporary art.

Origins

Monochrome painting was initiated at the first Incoherents exhibition in Paris in 1882, with a black painting by the poet Paul Bilhaud entitled Combat de Nègres pendant la nuit ("Battle of negroes during the night"), which had been missing since 1882 when it was rediscovered in a private collection in 2017–2018. It has been classified as a National Treasure by the French state. Although Bilhaud was not the first to create an all-black artwork: for example, Robert Fludd published an image of Darkness in his 1617 book on the origin and structure of the cosmos; and Bertall published his black Vue de La Hogue (effet de nuit) in 1843. In the subsequent exhibitions of the Incoherent arts (also in the 1880s) the writer Alphonse Allais proposed other monochrome paintings, such as Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige ("First communion of anaemic young girls in the snow", white), or Récolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la Mer Rouge ("Tomato harvesting by apoplectic cardinals on the shore of the Red Sea", red). Allais published his Album primo-avrilesque in 1897, a monograph with seven monochrome artworks. However, this kind of activity bears more similarity to 20th century Dada, or Neo-Dada, and particularly the works of the Fluxus group of the 1960s, than to 20th century monochrome painting since Malevich. Jean Metzinger, following the Succès de scandale created from the Cubist showing at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, in an interview with Cyril Berger published in Paris-Journal 29 May 1911, stated: "We cubists have only done our duty by creating a new rhythm for the benefit of humanity. Others will come after us who will do the same. What will they find? That is the tremendous secret of the future. Who knows if someday, a great painter, looking with scorn on the often brutal game of supposed colorists and taking the seven colors back to the primordial white unity that encompasses them all, will not exhibit completely white canvases, with nothing, absolutely nothing on them. (Jean Metzinger, 29 May 1911)" Metzinger's (then) audacious prediction that artists would take abstraction to its logical conclusion by vacating representational subject matter entirely and returning to what Metzinger calls the "primordial white unity", a "completely white canvas" would be realized two years later. The writer of a satirical manifesto entitled Manifeste de l'école amorphiste, published in Les Hommes du Jour (3 May 1913), may have had Metzinger's vision in mind when the author justified amorphism's blank canvases by claiming 'light is enough for us'. With perspective, writes art historian Jeffery 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 a broad and general sense, one finds European roots of minimalism in the geometric abstractions of painters associated with the Bauhaus, in the works of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the De Stijl movement, and the Russian Constructivist movement, and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. Minimal art is also inspired in part by the paintings of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, and the works of artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio Morandi, and others. Minimalism was also a reaction against the painterly subjectivity of Abstract Expressionism that had been dominant in the New York School during the 1940s and 1950s. The wide range of possibilities (including impossibility) of interpretation of monochrome paintings is arguably why the monochrome is so engaging to so many artists, critics, and writers. Although the monochrome has never become dominant and few artists have committed themselves exclusively to it, it has never gone away. It reappears as though a spectre haunting high modernism, or as a symbol of it, appearing during times of aesthetic and sociopolitical upheavals.

Suprematism and Constructivism

Monochrome painting as it is usually understood today began in Moscow, with Suprematist Composition: White on White of 1918 by Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich. This was a variation on or sequel to his 1915 work Black Square on a White Field, a very important work in its own right to 20th century geometric abstraction. In 1921, Constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko exhibited Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow Color: three paintings together, each a monochrome of one of the three primary colors. He intended this work to represent the "death of painting." While Rodchenko intended his monochrome to be a dismantling of the typical assumptions of painting, Malevich saw his work as a concentration on them, a kind of meditation on art's essence (“pure feeling”). These two approaches articulated very early on in its history this kind of work's almost paradoxical dynamic: that one can read a monochrome either as a flat surface (material entity or “painting as object”) which represents nothing but itself, and therefore representing an ending 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 Western painting's history (Malevich). Additionally, many have pointed out that it may be difficult to deduce the artist's intentions from the painting itself, without referring to the artist's comment.

Artists

New York

Abstract Expressionists

Color field

Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, several abstract expressionist/color field artists (notably: Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Theodoros Stamos, Sam Francis, Ludwig Sander, Clyfford Still, Jules Olitski, and others) explored motifs that seemed to imply monochrome, employing broad, flat fields of colour in large scale pictures which proved highly influential to newer styles, such as post-painterly abstraction, lyrical abstraction, and minimalism. One of Barnett Newman's near monochrome paintings generated outrage and widespread ridicule (and discussion) in Canada when the National Gallery purchased his 1967 painting Voice of Fire for $1.8 million in the 1980s. Another of Barnett Newman’s very sparse (though technically not monochrome) geometric abstractions was slashed with a knife by an enraged viewer in the 1980s at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Lyrical Abstraction

Lyrical abstractionist painters such as Ronald Davis, Larry Poons, Walter Darby Bannard, Dan Christensen, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Ralph Humphrey, David Budd, David R. Prentice, David Diao, David Novros, Jake Berthot, and others also explored and worked on series of shaped and rectangular canvases that approached the monochrome—with variations especially during the 1960s and 1970s.

Shaped canvas

Since the 1960s artists as diverse as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Ronald Davis, David Novros, Paul Mogensen, Patricia Johanson and others made monochrome paintings on various shaped canvases. While some of their monochromatic works related to minimalism none of the above were minimalists.

Neo-Dada

Minimalists

Europe

Monochrome works: The Blue Epoch

"From the reactions of the audience, [Klein] realized that...viewers thought his various, uniformly colored canvases amounted to a new kind of bright, abstract interior decoration. Shocked at this misunderstanding, Klein knew a further and decisive step in the direction of monochrome art would have to be taken...From that time onwards he would concentrate on one single, primary color alone: blue." The next 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. Discovered with the help of Edouard Adam, a Parisian paint dealer, the effect was to retain the brilliance of the pigment which tended to become dull when suspended in linseed oil. Klein later patented this recipe to maintain the "authenticity of the pure idea". This colour, reminiscent of the lapis lazuli used to paint the Madonna's robes in medieval paintings, was to become famous as "International Klein Blue" (IKB). The paintings were attached to poles placed 20 cm away from the walls to increase their spatial ambiguities. The show was a critical and commercial success, traveling to Paris, Düsseldorf and London. The Parisian exhibition, at the Iris Clert Gallery, May 1957, became a seminal happening; As well as 1001 blue balloons being released to mark the opening, blue postcards were sent out using IKB stamps that Klein had bribed the postal service to accept as legitimate. An exhibition of tubs of blue pigment and fire paintings was held concurrently at Gallery Collette Allendy.

Asia

Dansaekhwa (Korean: 단색화), is a style of South Korean "monochrome painting" beginning in the mid 1970s. Dansaekhwa artists often exhibited together, yet they were not part of an official artistic movement. Some artists associated with the style are: Cho Yong-ik, Chung Chang-sup, Chung Sang-Hwa, Ha Chong Hyun, Kim Tschang-yeul, Lee Dong-Youb, Lee Ufan, Park Seo-Bo, and Yun Hyong-keun.

Others

Monochrome painting in popular culture

Monochrome paintings most expensive sales

The following sales marked record prices for monochrome paintings:

Sources