Monochrome painting
Encyclopedia
Monochromatic painting has been an important component of avant-garde
visual art throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. Painters have created 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 in a wide variety of ways and means. From geometric precision to expressionism, the monochrome has proved to be a durable idiom in Contemporary art
.
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 France
. 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 Dada
, or Neo-Dada
, and particularly the works of the Fluxus
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 modernism
, or as a symbol of it, appearing during times of aesthetic and sociopolitical upheavals.
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 1913 work “Black Square on a White Field”, a very important work in its own right to 20th century geometric abstraction.
In 1921, Constructivist
artist Alexandr Rodchenko exhibited three paintings together, each a monochrome of one of the three primary colours
. 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.
(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 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.
(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 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.
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.
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 "Voice of Fire
" for a large sum of money, 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
.
ist 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.
, 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.
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."
(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.
(b. 1923, Newburgh, New York, USA) spent a lot of time in both Paris
and New York
. Not strictly a minimalist, 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.
(1927, Rome, Italy-) monotones, white on white paintings were variations on the gridded, rectangle on rectangle themes, but were enlivened with differences in rhythm and conception. One composition included grayed grids and vertical rectagles in several, more opaque whites, clustered centrally.
(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.
(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.
(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 encaustic
(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.
(b. 1936, Malden, Massachusetts, USA) echoed composer Igor Stravinsky
’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 Beckett
(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.
(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.
(b. 1944, Los Angeles, California, USA) determined in the mid-1970s that the social forces that give paintings meaning may be better understood 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 "placeholder," or a kind of "prop
." 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.
(1921–2004) was an American artist of the mid-20th century; she is associated with both minimalism
and Color Field
artists like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland
. 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.
From 1949 on Fontana
started the so-called Spatial Concept or slash series, consisting in holes or slashes on the surface of monochrome
paintings, drawing a sign of what he named "an art for the Space Age" (Concetto spaziale (50-B.1), 1950, MNAM
, Paris).
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.
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.
(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 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-expressionism
. 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
who assert a socially relevant, critical role for geometric abstraction, cite Mosset as an influence. See: Untitled 1999
(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://brenthallard.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/suspension-in-blue-alan-ebnother/
(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.
(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
winning Broadway play 'Art'
employed a white monochrome painting as a prop to generate an argument about aesthetics which made up the bulk of the play.
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
visual art throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. Painters have created 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 in a wide variety of ways and means. From geometric precision to expressionism, the monochrome has proved to be a durable idiom in Contemporary art
Contemporary art
Contemporary 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...
.
Origins
A late 1990s article in Art in AmericaArt in America
Art in America is an illustrated monthly, international magazine concentrating on the contemporary art world, including profiles of artists and genres, updates about art movements, show reviews and event schedules. It is designed for collectors, artists, dealers, art professionals and other...
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 France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
. 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 Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, 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-Dada
Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada is a label applied primarily to audio and visual art that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. It is the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau réalisme. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast...
, and particularly the works of the Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—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 modernism
High modernism
High 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
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, with Suprematist Composition: White on White of 1918 by Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich
Kazimir Malevich
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian painter and art theoretician, born of ethnic Polish parents. He was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Avant-garde Suprematist movement.-Early life:...
. 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, Constructivist
Constructivism (art)
Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th...
artist Alexandr Rodchenko exhibited three paintings together, each a monochrome of one of the three primary colours
Primary Colors
Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics is a roman à clef, a work of fiction that purports to describe real life characters and events — namely, 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 ResnickMilton ResnickMilton 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 Painting
Action painting
Action 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 Monet
Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...
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 ReinhardtAd ReinhardtAdolph 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 meditation
Meditation
Meditation is any form of a family of practices in which practitioners train their minds or self-induce a mode of consciousness to realize some benefit....
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-DartRichard Pousette-DartRichard 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
Color 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 Newman
Barnett Newman
Barnett 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.-Early life:...
, Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz , was a Russian-born American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter".- Childhood :Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian...
, Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell American painter, printmaker and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston....
, Adolph Gottlieb
Adolph Gottlieb
Adolph 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 Stamos
Theodoros Stamos
Theodoros 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...
, Sam Francis
Sam Francis
Samuel Lewis Francis was an American painter and printmaker.-Early life:...
, Ludwig Sander, Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism.-Biography:...
, Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski
Jules 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 Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
when the National Gallery
National Gallery of Canada
The National Gallery of Canada , located in the capital city Ottawa, Ontario, is one of Canada's premier art galleries.The Gallery is now 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 Fire
Voice of Fire
Voice of Fire is an acrylic on canvas abstract 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. Some residents mocked the...
" for a large sum of money, in the 1980s. Another of Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman
Barnett 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.-Early life:...
’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
Stedelijk Museum
Founded in 1874, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is a museum for classic modern and contemporary art in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It has been housed on the Paulus Potterstraat, next to Museum Square Museumplein and to the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum and the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam Zuid...
in Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
.
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical AbstractionLyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
ist painters such as Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis
Ronald 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 Poons
Larry Poons
Lawrence 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 Bannard
Walter Darby Bannard
Walter 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 Christensen
Dan Christensen
Dan 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 Zox
Larry Zox
Lawrence "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 Landfield
Ronnie Landfield
Ronnie 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 André Emmerich Gallery.Landfield is...
, Ralph Humphrey, David Budd, David R. Prentice
David R. Prentice
David 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.
Shaped canvas
Since the 1960s artists as diverse as Frank StellaFrank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, Ellsworth Kelly
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 emphasizing the simplicity of form found similar to the work of John McLaughlin. Kelly often employs bright colors to...
, Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis
Ronald 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...
, David Novros, Paul Mogensen, Patricia Johanson
Patricia Johanson
Patricia Johanson Patricia Johanson is known for her large-scale art projects that create aesthetic and practical habitats for humans and wildlife...
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 RauschenbergRobert RauschenbergRobert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known 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 CageJohn CageJohn Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, 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 KooningWillem de KooningWillem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
Drawing of 1953, Rauschenberg erased a drawing by abstract expressionist artist Willem de KooningWillem de KooningWillem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
. 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 JohnsJasper JohnsJasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
(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 KellyEllsworth 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 emphasizing the simplicity of form found similar to the work of John McLaughlin. Kelly often employs bright colors to...
(b. 1923, Newburgh, New York, USA) spent a lot of time in both Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
. Not strictly a minimalist, 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.
- Mino ArgentoMino ArgentoMino Argento is an Italian artist, whose works comprise abstract paintings on canvas and paper.-Life and work:Mino Argento was born in Rome, Italy in 1927. He worked in architecture as a young man...
(1927, Rome, Italy-) monotones, white on white paintings were variations on the gridded, rectangle on rectangle themes, but were enlivened with differences in rhythm and conception. One composition included grayed grids and vertical rectagles in several, more opaque whites, clustered centrally.
- Agnes MartinAgnes MartinAgnes Bernice Martin was an American abstract painter, often referred to as a minimalist; Martin considered herself an abstract expressionist.She won a National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998....
(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 RymanRobert RymanRobert Ryman is an American painter identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. He is best known for abstract, white-on-white paintings. He lives and works in New York.-Early life and career:...
(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 MardenBrice MardenBrice Marden , is an American artist, generally described as Minimalist, although his work defies specific categorization. He lives in New York and Eagles Mere.Marden 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 encaustic
Encaustic
Encaustic may refer to:*Encaustic painting*Encaustic tile...
(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 StellaFrank StellaFrank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
(b. 1936, Malden, Massachusetts, USA) echoed composer Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
’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 Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
(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 McCrackenJohn McCrackenJohn Harvey McCracken was a contemporary artist who lived and worked in Santa Fe, New Mexico and New York.- Education/teaching :...
(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 McCollumAllan McCollumAllan 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 forty 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 understood 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 "placeholder," or a kind of "prop
Theatrical property
A theatrical property, commonly referred to as a prop, is an object used on stage by actors to further 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 difference between a set...
." 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 TruittAnne TruittAnne 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 minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
and Color Field
Color Field
Color 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 Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known 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. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...
. 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 JuddDonald JuddDonald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism . 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 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 emphasizing the simplicity of form found similar to the work of John McLaughlin. Kelly often employs bright colors to...
. 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.
Europe
- Lucio FontanaLucio FontanaLucio Fontana was an Italian painter, sculptor and theorist of Argentine birth. He was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to Arte Povera.-Early life:...
From 1949 on Fontana
Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana was an Italian painter, sculptor and theorist of Argentine birth. He was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to Arte Povera.-Early life:...
started the so-called Spatial Concept or slash series, consisting in holes or slashes on the surface of monochrome
Monochrome
Monochrome describes paintings, drawings, design, or photographs in one color or shades of one color. A monochromatic object or image has colors in shades of limited colors or hues. Images using only shades of grey are called grayscale or black-and-white...
paintings, drawing a sign of what he named "an art for the Space Age" (Concetto spaziale (50-B.1), 1950, MNAM
Musée National d'Art Moderne
The Musée National d'Art Moderne is the national museum for modern art of France. It is located in Paris and is housed in the Centre Pompidou in the 4th arrondissement of the city. Created in 1947, it was then housed in the Palais de Tokyo and moved to its current location in 1977...
, Paris).
- Yves KleinYves KleinYves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany...
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
Yves 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 lazuli
Lapis lazuli
Lapis 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 Blue
International Klein Blue
International Klein Blue is a deep blue hue first mixed by the French artist Yves Klein. IKB's visual impact comes from its heavy reliance on Ultramarine, as well as Klein's often thick and textured application of paint to canvas.- History :...
' (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
Iris Clert
Iris 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 and Arman....
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 RichterGerhard RichterGerhard Richter is a German visual artist. Richter has simultaneously produced abstract and photorealistic painted works, as well as photographs and glass pieces, thus undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.- Biography :Gerhard Richter was born in...
(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.
- Olivier MossetOlivier MossetOlivier Mosset is a Swiss visual artist. He lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.Mosset 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 Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni...
(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 Buren
Daniel Buren
Daniel Buren is a French conceptual artist.- Work :Sometimes classified as an abstract minimalist Buren is known best for using regular, contrasting maxi stripes to integrate the visual surface and architectural space, notably historical, landmark architecture.Among his chief concerns is the...
, 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-expressionism
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
. 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
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 1980s. 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
- Sally Hazelet Drummond
(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).
- Alan ebnotherAlan EbnotherAlan Ebnother is a contemporary American artist. His practise as an artist is usually associated with monochrome, concrete, modernist, post, color-based, radical, minimalist and abstract Painting.-Life and work:...
(b. Alameda, California, 1952, USA) is an American painter who explores the heratige of momochrome painting, confining himself to the single color green
Green
Green is a color, the perception of which is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 520–570 nanometres. In the subtractive color system, it is not a primary color, but is created out of a mixture of yellow and blue, or yellow and cyan; it is considered...
http://brenthallard.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/suspension-in-blue-alan-ebnother/
- Florence Miller Pierce
(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 BalážBlažej BalážBlažej Baláž is a contemporary Slovak artist. His practise as an artist is usually associated with Neo-conceptualism, Postminimalism, Post-Geo and Post Radical Painting...
(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-artAnti-artAnti-art is a loosely-used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage point of art...
(Note: it is disputed, whether or not Monochrome painting is indeed "anti-art," or not) - International Klein BlueInternational Klein BlueInternational Klein Blue is a deep blue hue first mixed by the French artist Yves Klein. IKB's visual impact comes from its heavy reliance on Ultramarine, as well as Klein's often thick and textured application of paint to canvas.- History :...
Monochrome Painting in the Spotlight
The 1998 Tony award52nd Tony Awards
The 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' (play)
‘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, starring Albert Finney. It played on Broadway in New York...
employed a white monochrome painting as a prop to generate an argument about aesthetics which made up the bulk of the play.
Sources
- The Tate Gallery on Monochrome
- Artnet page on Monochrome Painting
- Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present by Barbara Rose
- In the age of the monochrome - Art in America - Jan, 2005 by Terry Berne - Find Articles
- Geoffrey Dorfman pays tribute to milton resnick
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
- From Monochrome painting to net art: Thomas Dreher/Birgit Rinagl/Franz Thalmair: Monochromacity as a Reflection of Computing Processes in Internet-based Art