Monochromatic painting has played a crucial 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.
Monochrome paintings should not be confused with older styles of grisaille painting using only or mainly a single colour, typically black or grey.
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)Jean Metzinger, "Chez Metzi", interview by Cyril Berger, published in the Paris-Journal, 29 May 1911, p. 3Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten: A Cubism Reader, Documents and Criticism, 1906-1914, University of Chicago Press, 2008, Document 17, Cyril Berger, Chez Metzi, Paris-Journal, 29 May 1911, pp. 108-112
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".Jeffrey S. Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-gardism, Yale University Press, 1994,
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 range of interpretation of monochrome paintings is one reason the monochrome remains relevant to artists, critics, and writers. Although the monochrome has not become a dominant style and few artists work with it exclusively, it continues to recur, often appearing during periods of aesthetic and sociopolitical changes.The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, October, Vol. 37, (Summer, 1986), pp. 41-52 (article consists of 12 pages), Published by: The MIT Press
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
Milton Resnick had a long career as an abstract expressionist painter. Initially, during the 1940s, he explored the then-current style of action painting. His later work, from the 1950s through the 1970s is often characterized as abstract impressionist —largely because he constructed his allover compositions with multiple, repetitive, and close-valued brushstrokes, in the manner of Claude Monet in the famous Waterlilies series. During the final two and a half decades of his painting career Resnick's paintings became monochromatic, albeit with thickly brushed and layered surfaces. Ad Reinhardt was an abstract expressionist artist notable 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 mentioned below, Reinhardt's black paintings contained faint indications of geometrical shape, but the actual delineations are not readily visible until the viewer spends time with the work. This tends to encourage a state of contemplative meditation in the viewer, and to create uncertainty about perception; in terms of Frank Stella's famous quote, you may question whether "what you see" is actually what you are seeing. Richard Pousette-Dart created several distinct series of paintings during his long career as an abstract expressionist painter, his monochromatic series called PresencesImage valeriecarberry.com spanning the late 1950s through the early 1990s, was among his most powerful.
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, Brice Marden, 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
Robert Rauschenberg: "A canvas is never empty". In the early 1950s, became known for white, then black, and eventually red monochrome canvases. In the White Paintings (1951) series, Rauschenberg applied everyday house paint with paint rollers to achieve smooth "blank" surfaces. White panels were exhibited alone or in modular groupings. The Black Paintings (1951–1953) incorporated texture under the painted surface by way of collaged newspaper that sometimes indicates a grid-like structure. The Red Paintings (1953–54) incorporate still more materials such as wood and fabric under the heavily worked painted surface, and seem to foreshadow Rauschenberg's development of assemblage in his "Combine Paintings" as well as his stated intention to act in "the gap" between "Art" and "Life". The white canvases became associated with the work 4'33" by the composer John Cage, which consisted of three movements of silence, and was inspired at least in part by Cage's study of Zen Buddhism. In both works attention is drawn to elements of listening / viewing which lie outside the artist's control: e.g. the sounds of the concert environment, or the play of shadows and dust particles accumulating on the 'blank' canvas surfaces ("landing strips" – Cage). In a related work, his Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953, Rauschenberg erased a drawing by abstract expressionist artist Willem de Kooning. Perhaps surprisingly, De Kooning was sympathetic to Rauschenberg's aims and implicitly endorsed this experiment by providing the younger artist with one of his own drawings which was very densely worked, taking 2 months and many erasers for Rauschenberg to (incompletely) erase.