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 artContemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced since...
.
Origins
A late 1990s article in
Art in AmericaArt in America is an illustrated monthly magazine published since 1913. The magazine covers the visual art world, both in the United States and abroad, with a concentration on New York City and contemporary art fairs. Art in America bills itself as "the World's Premier Art Magazine."-History:Betsy...
asserts that “monochrome painting” began as a joke. The article states that it was merely a whimsical pastime of salon life in late 19th century
FranceFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
. 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.” However, this kind of activity bears more similarity to 20th century
DadaDada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
, or
Neo-DadaNeo-Dada is a label applied primarily to the visual arts describing artwork that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast. It also patently denies traditional concepts of aesthetics...
, and particularly the works of the
FluxusFluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
group of the 1960s, than to 20th century monochrome painting since Malevich.
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 modernismHigh modernism is a particular instance of modernism, coined towards the end of modernism. "High modernism", like similar names designating intellectual and artistic eras such as "the high Middle Ages" or "the high Baroque", presumably is meant to specify the most characteristic, developed,...
, 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
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
, with Suprematist Composition: White on White of 1918 by Suprematist artist
Kazimir MalevichKazimir Severinovich Malevich , was a painter and art theoretician, pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Avant-garde Suprematist movement.- Life and work :...
. This was a variation on or sequel to his 1913 work “Black Square on a White Field”, a very important work in its own right to 20th century geometric abstraction.
In 1921,
ConstructivistConstructivism was an artistic and architectural movement that originated in Russia from 1919 onward which rejected the idea of "art for art's sake" in favour of art as a practice directed towards social purposes...
artist Alexandr Rodchenko exhibited three paintings together, each a monochrome of one of the three
primary coloursPrimary Colors: A Novel of Politics is a 1996 novel by "Anonymous" .-Roman à clef:Primary Colors is a roman à clef inspired by U.S. President Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign in 1992...
. 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.
Abstract Expressionists
- Milton Resnick
Milton Resnick was a major abstract expressionist painter and teacher known for his mystical, abstract and figurative paintings. Born in Bratslav, Russia, he emigrated to the United States in 1922.-Biography:...
(January 7, 1917 Bratslav, Rodolia, Ukraine - March 12, 2004 New York, New York, USA) had a long career as an Abstract Expressionist painter. Initially, during the 1940s, he explored the then-current style of
Action PaintingAction painting, sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied...
. 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 MonetClaude Monet also known as Oscar Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet
[ giverny.org...]
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
Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism...
(1913 Buffalo, New York, USA - 1967 New York, New York, USA) 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 dilineations are not readily visible until the viewer spends time with the work. This tends to encourage a state of contemplative
meditationMeditation is used here as a broad term for practices done by a sole practitioner without much, if any, external aide, often for the purpose of self-transformation...
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
Richard Pousette-Dart was an American Abstract Expressionist painter.-Biography:He was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota and grew up in Valhalla, New York. Although Richard never attended art school, his father, Nathaniel J. Pousette-Dart, was a painter and writer on art. He moved to Manhattan in 1937...
Although Pousette-Dart (1916 Saint-Paul, Minnesota, USA - 1992 Suffern, New York, USA) created several distinct series of paintings during his long career as an Abstract Expressionist painter, his monochromatic series called
Presences 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 fieldColor Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...
artists (notably:
Barnett NewmanBarnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.-Youth:...
,
Mark RothkoMark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz , was a Latvian-born American painter and printmaker. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted the classification as an "abstract painter".- Childhood :Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk...
,
Robert MotherwellRobert Motherwell was an American abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston.Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington...
,
Adolph GottliebAdolph Gottlieb was an American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor and graphic artist.-Biography:Gottlieb was born in New York to Jewish parents. From 1920-1921 he studied at the Art Students League of New York, after which he traveled in France and Germany for a year...
,
Theodoros StamosTheodoros Stamos , was a Greek American artist. He is one of the youngest painters of the original group of abstract expressionist painters , which included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.-Biography:Theodoros Stamos was one of the original and youngest...
, Ludwig Sander,
Clyfford StillClyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism.-Biography:...
,
Jules OlitskiJules Olitski was an American abstract painter, printmaker, and sculptor.-Early life:Olitski was born Jevel Demikovski in Snovsk, in the Russian SFSR , a few months after his father, a commissar, was executed by the Russian government...
, 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
CanadaCanada is a country occupying most of northern North America, extending from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
when the
National GalleryThe National Gallery of Canada , located in the capital city Ottawa, Ontario, is one of Canada's premier art galleries.The Gallery is housed in a glass and granite building on Sussex Drive with a notable view of the Canadian Parliament buildings on Parliament Hill. The acclaimed structure was...
purchased "
Voice of FireVoice of Fire is an acrylic on canvas painting made by American painter Barnett Newman in 1967.The purchase of Voice of Fire by the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa for its permanent collection in 1989 at a cost of $1.8 million caused a storm of controversy, as the painting consists only of a...
" for a large sum of money, in the 1980s. Another of
Barnett NewmanBarnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.-Youth:...
’s very sparse (though technically not monochrome) geometric abstractions was slashed with a knife by an enraged viewer in the 1980s at the
Stedelijk MuseumThe Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is a museum for modern art in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It is located at Museum Square, close to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum....
in
AmsterdamAmsterdam is the capital and largest city of the Netherlands, located in the province of North Holland in the west of the country...
.
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical AbstractionLyrical Abstraction refers to two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting;European Lyrical Abstraction born in Paris in 1945, and the French critic Charles Estienne created its name in 1946...
ist painters such as
Ronald DavisRonald Davis , born 1937, is an American painter whose work is associated with Geometric abstraction, Abstract Illusionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Hard-edge painting, Shaped canvas painting, Color field painting, and 3D Computer Graphics...
,
Larry PoonsLawrence Poons , better known as Larry Poons, is an abstract painter who was born in Tokyo, Japan. He studied from 1955 to 1957 at the New England Conservatory of Music, with the intent of becoming a professional musician...
,
Walter Darby BannardWalter Darby Bannard , also known as Darby Bannard, is an American abstract painter.Bannard attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Princeton University, where he struck up a friendship and working relationship with Frank Stella, which continued after graduation and eventuated in the extreme...
,
Dan ChristensenDan Christensen, the American abstract painter, was born in Cozad, Nebraska on October 6, 1942, he died in Easthampton, New York on January 20, 2007....
,
Larry ZoxLawrence "Larry" Zox was an American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract expressionist, Color Field painter and a Lyrical Abstractionist, although he did not readily use those categories for his work....
,
Ronnie LandfieldRonnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction, , and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the Andre Emmerich Gallery...
, Ralph Humphrey, David Budd,
David R. PrenticeDavid R. Prentice is an American artist.Prentice was born in Hartford, Connecticut and studied at the Art School of the University of Hartford from 1962 to 1964, after which he worked as a studio assistant to Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Alexander Liberman and Malcolm...
, 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.
Neo-Dada
- Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is perhaps most famous for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
In the early 1950s, Rauschenberg (b. 1925, Port Arthur, Texas, USA; d. 2008) 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 (1951–53) 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
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist, printmaker, and amateur mycologist and mushroom collector. A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war...
, 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: eg. 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
Willem de Kooning was an abstract expressionist artist, born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.In the post-World War II era, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to variously as Abstract expressionism, Action painting, and the New York School...
. 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.
- Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery.-Life:...
(b. 1930, Augusta, Georgia, USA) was a friend of Rauschenberg, and both were often categorized as Neo-Dadaist, pointing to their rejection of the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic which was dominant in the 1950s. Johns painted a number of works such as
"White Flag," "Green Target," and “Tango,” in which there is only a slight indication of an image, resembling the "White Square on a White Field" of Malevich in technique.
- These works often show more evidence of brushwork than is typically associated with monochrome painting. Many other works also approach monochrome, like the melancholic “grey” works of the early ’60s, but with real objects (“assemblage”) or text added.
Minimalists
- Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter and sculptor associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques that emphasize the simplicity of form. Kelly often employs bright colors to enhance his works. Ellsworth Kelly lives...
(b. 1923, Newburgh, New York, USA) spent a lot of time in both
ParisParis is the capital of France and the country's most populous city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and
New YorkNew York is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States and is the nation's third most populous. The state is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
. He has made a number of monochrome paintings on shaped canvases and single color rectangular panels. His
abstractions were “abstracted” from nature. His interest in nature extends so far that he has made a series of
plant lithographs in an impressive and sincerely realistic style.
- Agnes Martin
Agnes Martin was a Canadian-American painter, often referred to as a minimalist; Martin considered herself an abstract expressionist.-Childhood and background:...
(1912, Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada - 2004, Taos, New Mexico, USA) whose works of the 1950s and 1960s are serene meditations on “perfection,” and hence “beauty,” are typically white, off-white or pale grey canvases with faint evidence of pencil dragged in lines or grids across the painted surface.
- Robert Ryman
Robert Ryman is an American painter identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. The majority of his works feature abstract expressionist-influenced brushwork in white or off-white paint on square canvas or metal surfaces...
(b. 1930, Nashville, Tennessee, USA) in works such as
Ledger (1982) bring the word “constructed” to mind, with attention drawn to supports, framing, and the artist's signature as important elements of works which are usually white, or off-white, and in square format. Abstract Expressionist brushwork is used as formal material in these minimalist constructions. Ryman exhibits a tour de force of variation on a deliberately limited theme.
- Brice Marden
Brice Marden , is an American artist, generally described as Minimalist, although his work defies specific categorization. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery.-Life:...
(b. 1938, Bronxville, New York, USA) in his earliest mature works explored a reductive strategy which seemed similar to that of Jasper Johns’s and Ellsworth Kelly's contemporaneous works, yet more formalist: paintings such as
Return 1 consist of subtly grey fields painted in
encausticEncaustic may refer to:*Encaustic painting*Encaustic tilePainted with wax colors filled with heat, or with any process in which colors are burned in....
(wax-medium) with a narrow strip along the bottom of the canvas where Marden left bare evidence of process (i.e., drips and spatters of paint). During the late 1980s Brice Marden, who held a spiritual/emotional view of abstraction, began a more multi-colored and calligraphic form of abstract painting.
- Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker. He is a significant figure in minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.He was born in Malden, Massachusetts...
(b. 1936, Malden, Massachusetts, USA) echoed composer
Igor StravinskyIgor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor, widely acknowledged as one of the most important and influential composers of 20th century music. He was a quintessentially cosmopolitan Russian who was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of...
’s famous assertion that “music is powerless to express anything but itself” when he said “What you see is what you see,” a remark he later qualified by saying his early paintings were influenced to a degree by the writing of
Samuel BeckettSamuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish writer, dramatist and poet. Beckett's work offers a bleak outlook on human culture and both formally and philosophically became increasingly minimalist....
(see above). In his work he was attempting to minimize any inference of “spiritual” or even “emotional” response on the part of the viewer, and this is perhaps most striking in his pinstripe
Black Paintings (Marriage of Reason and Squalor - detail - 1959) beginning in the late ’50s, where the pinstripes are articulated by unpainted canvas. Later, Stella abandoned not only monochrome, but also eventually geometric painting.
- John McCracken
John McCracken is an American artist. He started his career creating bold, tight geometric compositions on Masonite or treated canvas. While still in school, his first exhibition at Nicholas Wilder's gallery in Los Angeles, California in 1965 was a critical success...
(b. 1934, Berkeley, California, USA) is characteristically Minimalist in that his "objects" aren't adequately categorized as "painting" or "sculpture." Famous since 1965 for "slabs, columns, planks ... Neutral forms," his meticulously finished, polished
monochrome objects are often simply leaned up against gallery walls, in what some critics describe as a casual "West Coast-lean." Although he draws from techniques characteristic of surfboard manufacture, his works are personally and meticulously handcrafted, unlike those of John M. Miller and other more recent artists, which are typically factory-made according to the artist's specifications.
- Allan McCollum
Allan McCollum is a contemporary American artist who was born in Los Angeles, California in 1944, and now lives and works in New York City. He has spent over thirty years exploring how objects achieve public and personal meaning in a world constituted in mass production, focusing most recently on...
(b. 1944, Los Angeles, California, USA) determined in the mid-1970s that the social forces that give paintings meaning may be better undrstood if the "painting" itself could be reduced to a generic form -- a painting that could read as a "sign" for a painting," which could function of a "
placeholderA placeholder is a general term, sign or symbol, which is used in place of a specific unknown or irrelevant term or value.Placeholder may also refer to:In language:...
," or a kind of "
propA theatrical property, commonly referred to as a prop, is any object held or used on stage by an actor for use in furthering the plot or story line of a theatrical production. Smaller props are referred to as "hand props". Larger props may also be set decoration, such as a chair or table. The...
." In the 1970s and early 80s he painted what he called
Surrogate Paintings, and ultimately began casting them in plaster, frame and all. These hundreds of objects that looked like framed, matted, fields of painted blackness, worked as neutral, "generic signs" that might inspire the viewer to think about the social expectations that constructed the "idea" of a painting," more than the actual painting itself. By reducing paintings to mere signs of themselves, McCollum turned the gallery and the museum setting into a kind of theater, highlighting the drama of presenting, displaying, buying and selling, exchanging, photographing, assessing, criticising, choosing, and writing about the works; the object-paintings at the center of the action were purposely rendered moot, in order to turn one's attention to the supplementary devices and social practices that, in the end, bestow the value on the work. Paradoxically, as time went by, these neutral objects became valuable in themselves, as symbols of an anthropological way of looking at art.
- Anne Truitt
Anne Truitt was a major American artist of the mid-20th century; she is associated with both minimalism and Color Field artists like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland....
(1921-2004) was an American artist of the mid-20th century; she is associated with both
minimalismMinimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post-World War II Western Art, most strongly with American...
and
Color FieldColor Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...
artists like Morris Louis and
Kenneth NolandKenneth Noland is an American abstract painter. He is identified today as one of the best-known contemporary American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter.- Biography:Noland was...
. Primarily thought of as a minimalist sculptor, and as a colorist who painted her sculpture, throughout her career Truitt produced several series of Monochromatic paintings.
- She made what is considered her most important work in the early 1960s anticipating in many respects the work of minimalists like Donald Judd
Donald Clarence Judd was a minimalist artist . In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy...
and Ellsworth KellyEllsworth Kelly is an American painter and sculptor associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques that emphasize the simplicity of form. Kelly often employs bright colors to enhance his works. Ellsworth Kelly lives...
. She was unlike the minimalists is some significant ways. She named, for instance, many of her works after places and events that were important to her - a practice suggesting a narrative beyond and yet somehow contained by the sculpture.
- The sculpture that made her significant to the development of Minimalism were aggressively plain and painted structures, often large. The recessional platform under her sculpture raised them just enough off the ground that they appeared to float on a thin line of shadow. The boundary between sculpture and ground, between gravity and verticality, was made illusory. This formal ambivalence is mirrored by her insistence that color itself, contained a psychological vibration which when purified, as it is on a work of art, isolates the event it refers to as a thing rather than a feeling. The event becomes a work of art, a visual sensation delivered by color.
Monochrome works: The Blue Epoch
Although Klein had painted monochromes as early as 1949, and held the first private exhibition of this work in 1950, his first public showing was the publication of the Artist's book
Yves: PeinturesYves Peintures is an artist's book by the French artist Yves Klein, originally published in Madrid, 18 November 1954 ....
in November 1954. Parodying a traditional catalogue, the book featured a series of intense monochromes linked to various cities he had lived in during the previous years.
Yves: Peintures anticipated 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, displaying orange, yellow, red, pink and blue monochromes, deeply disappointed Klein, as people went from painting to painting, linking them together as a sort of mosaic.
"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." Hannah Weitemeier
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 lazuliLapis lazuli is a relatively rare, semi-precious stone that has been prized since antiquity for its intense blue color....
used to paint the Madonna's robes in medieval paintings, was to become famous as '
International Klein BlueThe International Klein Blue is a deep blue hue first mixed by the French artist Yves Klein.International Klein Blue was developed by French artist Yves Klein as part of his search for colors which best represented the concepts he wished to convey as an artist...
' (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 ClertIris Clert was the owner of the Galerie Iris Clert from 1955 to 1971. During its tenure, her gallery became an avant-garde hotspot in the international art scene, particularly to Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Arman and René Laubies....
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.
- Gerhard Richter
- Biography :Richter was born in Dresden, Saxony, and grew up in Reichenau, Lower Silesia, and in Waltersdorf in the Upper Lusatian countryside. He left school after tenth grade and apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the Dresden Art Academy...
(b. 1932, Dresden, Germany) is an artist who is probably best known for his technically stunning photo-realist paintings, which overshadow his abstract and monochrome works. Both his abstract and representational works seem to cover similar emotional terrain, a kind of ironic pessimism which made his work very fashionable in the late 1980s. His grey paintings, are made by drawing “expressive” gestures in wet paint.
(b. 1944, Bern, Switzerland) also has spent considerable time in New York and Paris. In Paris in the ’60s he was a member of the BMPT group, along with
Daniel BurenDaniel Buren is a French conceptual artist.In 1986 he created a 3,000 m² sculpture in the great courtyard of the Palais Royal, in Paris: "Les Deux Plateaux", more commonly referred to as the "Colonnes de Buren"...
, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni. The group brought forth questions about the notions of authorship and originality, implying that they often did each others’ works, and that the art object was more important than its authorship. Later, in New York in the late ’70s, Mosset undertook a long series of monochrome paintings, during the heyday of
Neo-expressionismNeo-expressionism was a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. Related to American Lyrical Abstraction, New Image Painting and precedents in Pop painting, it developed as a reaction against the conceptual and...
. He became a founding member of the New York Radical Painting group, radical referring both to an implied radical social stance, as well as a returning to the radical “root” of painting. This re-assertion of social relevance for abstraction, and even the monochrome, hadn’t been emphasized to such a degree since Malevich and Rodchenko. 1980s neo-geo artists such as
Peter Halley-Early Life and Career:Halley first came to prominence as a result of the geometric paintings rendered in intense day-glo colours that he produced in the early 1980's. His practice as an artist is usually associated with minimalism, neo-geo, and neo-conceptualism...
who assert a socially relevant, critical role for geometric abstraction, cite Mosset as an influence.
See: Untitled 1999
Others
(b.1924, USA) exhibited her monochromatic paintings during the late 1950s in New York City at the Tanager Gallery, one of the first Tenth Street cooperative galleries. As of 2007 she heroically and impressively continues to paint Monochromatic paintings (
See: Presence of the Heart).
(b. Alameda, California, 1952, USA) is an American painter who explores the heratige of momochrome painting, confining himself to the single color
green. http://www.artnet.com/artist/5657/alan-ebnother.html
(b. 1918, Washington, D.C., USA) was a member of the TAOS Transcendental Painting Group in the 1930s, currently residing in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her
square monochromes, made with translucent resin poured onto mirrored plexiglass, seem to glow of their own accord.
- Blažej Baláž
Blažej Baláž is a contemporary Slovak artist. His practise as an artist is usually associated with post-conceptualism and postminimalism. After 1988 he began working with text as art....
(b. 1958, Nevoľné, Slovakia) with his "double monochrom". Colour versus filings of coins, junk, soil or poppy seed. Painting Poppy Seed Field / Makové pole 2001/02.
http://pdfweb.truni.sk/fak/katedry/kpvu/bbalaz/b_balaz_pict_mak.html
See also
- Anti-art
The term Anti-art refers to art which presents a challenge to the currently existing definition of art. It is a term that by wide consensus seems to have been coined by Marcel Duchamp. This would have been around the time that he began making readymades around 1913. Some still regard the readymades...
(Note: it is disputed, whether or not Monochrome painting is indeed "anti-art," or not)
- International Klein Blue
The International Klein Blue is a deep blue hue first mixed by the French artist Yves Klein.International Klein Blue was developed by French artist Yves Klein as part of his search for colors which best represented the concepts he wished to convey as an artist...
Monochrome Painting in the Spotlight
The 1998
Tony awardThe 52nd Annual Tony Awards ceremony was held on June 7, 1998 at Radio City Music Hall and was broadcast by CBS television. A documentaries segment was telecast on PBS television...
winning Broadway play
'Art'‘Art’ is a French language play by Yasmina Reza that premiered on 28 October 1994 at Comédie des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The English language adaptation, translated by Christopher Hampton opened in London's West End on 15 October 1996....
employed a white monochrome painting as a prop to generate an argument about aesthetics which made up the bulk of the play.
Sources
External links
- On view at MoMA: Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist Composition: White on White. 1918
- Henri Matisse. View of Notre-Dame. 1914. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Arts, New York, NY, USA.
- Henri Matisse. French Window at Collioure. 1914. Oil on canvas. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.
- Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Robert Rauschenberg
- Guggenheim Collection - Pop art - Rauschenberg - Untitled (Red Painting)
- Site devoted to work of Gerhard Richter
- Johannes Meinhardt: Painting as Empty Space: Allan McCollum's Subversion of the Last Painting. AURA. Wiener Secession. Vienna, Austria, 1994
- The Charlotte Jackson Gallery
- Charlotte Jackson Gallery’s Florence Pierce Page
- Charlotte Jackson Gallery’s Olivier Mosset Page
- Olivier Mosset in the Spencer Brownstone Gallery
- Conversation between Alan Ebnother and Chris Ashley April 17 - May 4, 2005
- What's New? - New New Painters - Art in America - July, 1999 by Ken Carpenter - Find Articles