Monochrome painting  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Monochrome painting is sometimes seen as meditative art. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century painters have created monochromatic painting. The exploration of one color, the examination of values changing across a surface, the expressivity of texture and nuance, expressing a wide variety of emotions, intentions and meanings. From geometric precision to expressionism, the monochrome has proved to be a durable idiom in Contemporary art.

Origins

“Monochrome painting” began as a joke. A typical example, which may be familiar from popular puzzle books, might be a blank page or canvas bearing the title “A White Cow in a Snowstorm.” The practice was picked up more systematically by the Incoherents, a small art movement in late 19th century France, who transformed it from a whimsical pastime to an artistic statement.

But the first to use this practice as an artistic statement, tongue still firmly in cheek was Jean-Louis Petit with Vue de la hougue (effet de nuit) (1843). It consisted of ablack paintig filled with white dots. It was reproduced by Bertall in L'Illustration and in the Journal Universel[1].

On the Incoherents first exhibition in the home of Jules Lévy on October 1, 1882, an all-black painting by poet Paul Bilhaud called Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night was exhibited. Bilhaud's painting was appropriated by Alphonse Allais who produced an album of seven monochrome prints, entitled Album primo-avrilesque.

This kind of whimsical and absurdist activity resurfaced again 20th century Dada and particularly the works of the Fluxus group of the 1960s, than to 20th century monochrome painting of Malevich and Yves Klein.

The very broad range of possibility (or impossibility) in interpretation of the monochrome in painting is arguably why monochrome painting is so engaging to so many artists, critics, and writers. Although 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.

See also

• Auguste Erhard: Les plus petits des infiniments petits, visibles seulement aux yeux de la sciences, 1882. (En hommage aux récentes découvertes de Pasteur.)

Examples

• Yves Klein
• Black-and-white
• Paul Bilhaud
• Black Square
• Color field painters
• Lucio Fontana
• Robert Ryman
• Anti-art