Monochrome painting

Monochrome painting - a canvas given over to a single color - began as joke and provocation in 1880s Paris, where the Incoherents exhibited Paul Bilhaud's all-black Combat de Nègres pendant la nuit (1882) and Alphonse Allais answered with white, red, and other one-color 'paintings' later collected in his Album primo-avrilesque (1897). The modern monochrome began in earnest in 1918, when Kazimir Malevich pushed Suprematism to its limit in White on White; Aleksandr Rodchenko's pure-color canvases followed. After the Second World War the format became a sustained inquiry: Yves Klein's saturated blues, Ad Reinhardt's near-black paintings, and Robert Ryman's whites made the surface, the support, and the light falling on them the real subject. It should not be confused with grisaille, which uses single tones to imitate sculpture.

Defining characteristics

• One hue covers the whole surface, so shifts in value and texture become the subject
• Flat, non-illusionistic color fields with no figure, scene, or narrative
• Surface incident - brushwork, canvas weave, thickness of paint - carries the visual interest
• The support itself (edge, stretcher, scale, wall) becomes part of the composition
• Radical reduction: the painting points at color and material rather than an image

Key figures

• Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) — Suprematist whose White on White (1918) is the founding modern monochrome
• Alphonse Allais (1854-1905) — French humorist whose 1880s one-color 'paintings' anticipated the form as parody
• Yves Klein (1928-1962) — Turned uniform fields of patented blue (IKB) into objects of contemplation
• Robert Ryman (1930-2019) — Spent a career on white paintings that foreground paint, edge, and support

Example works

• Black Square — Kazimir Malevich (1915)
• White on White — Kazimir Malevich (1918)
• Album primo-avrilesque — Alphonse Allais (1897)

Sources

• Monochrome painting - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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