Monochrome painting
Photograph by Noah Scalinon Flickr.
Miller and other more recent artists, which are typically factory-made according to the artist s specifications. (b. Colour versus filings of coins, junk, soil or poppy seed.
The Monochrome painting 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 Monochrome painting Combine Paintings as well as his stated intention to act in the gap between Art and Life. (b.
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. 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.
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. Ryman exhibits a tour de force of variation on a deliberately limited theme. (b.
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, 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 . 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.
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. Later, Stella abandoned not only monochrome, but also eventually geometric painting. (b.
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. Alameda, California, 1952, USA) is an American painter who explores the heratige of momochrome painting, confining himself to the single color green.
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. 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.
As of 2007 she heroically and impressively continues to paint Monochromatic paintings (See: Presence of the Heart). (b. 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. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, several Abstract Expressionist / color field artists (notably: Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Theodoros Stamos, 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.
His abstractions were “abstracted” from nature. 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 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.
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.
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. 2008) became known for white, then black, and eventually red monochrome canvases.
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. 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.
The Parisian exhibition, at the Iris Clert Gallery, May 1957, became a seminal happening An exhibition of tubs of blue pigment and fire paintings was held concurrently at Gallery Collette Allendy. (b. Another of Barnett Newman’s very sparse (though technically not monochrome) geometric abstractions was slashed with a knife by an enraged viewer in the 1980s at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Lyrical Abstractionist painters such as Ronald Davis, Larry Poons, Walter Darby Bannard, Dan Christensen, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Ralph Humphrey, David Budd, David R.
Parodying a traditional catalogue, the book featured a series of intense monochromes linked to various cities he had lived in during the previous years. In Paris in the ’60s he was a member of the BMPT group, along with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni.
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. 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.
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). 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.
1944, Bern, Switzerland) also has spent considerable time in New York and Paris. The 1998 Tony award 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. .
1918, Washington, D.C., USA) was a member of the TAOS Transcendental Painting Group in the 1930s, currently residing in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His interest in nature extends so far that he has made a series of plant lithographs in an impressive and sincerely realistic style. (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.
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. 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. A late 1990s article in Art in America asserts that “monochrome painting” began as a joke.
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. 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. In the early 1950s, Rauschenberg (b.
His grey paintings, are made by drawing “expressive” gestures in wet paint. (b. Abstract Expressionist brushwork is used as formal material in these minimalist constructions.
Monochromatic painting has been an important component of avant-garde visual art throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. 1958, Nevoľné, Slovakia) with his double monochrom .
In the White Paintings (1951) series, Rauschenberg applied everyday house paint with paint rollers to achieve smooth blank surfaces. 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.
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. Initially, during the 1940s, he explored the then-current style of Action Painting.
Later, in New York in the late ’70s, Mosset undertook a long series of monochrome paintings, during the heyday of Neo-expressionism. The article states that it was merely a whimsical pastime of salon life in late 19th century France.
Painting Poppy Seed Field / Makové pole 2001/02. 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.
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). White panels were exhibited alone or in modular groupings.
1923, Newburgh, New York, USA) spent a lot of time in both Paris and New York. Although the monochrome has never become dominant and few artists have committed themselves exclusively to it, it has never gone away.
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). Her square monochromes, made with translucent resin poured onto mirrored plexiglass, seem to glow of their own accord. (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. He has made a number of monochrome paintings on shaped canvases and single color rectangular panels.
(b. 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.
1980s neo-geo artists such as Peter Halley who assert a socially relevant, critical role for geometric abstraction, cite Mosset as an influence. 1925, Port Arthur, Texas, USA; d.
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. 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). 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: Peintures in November 1954.
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). This re-assertion of social relevance for abstraction, and even the monochrome, hadn’t been emphasized to such a degree since Malevich and Rodchenko.
