Monochrome painting

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Meditative art is also known as monochrome painting.

[edit] Origins

A late 1990s article in Art in America 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 at least ostensibly to late 20th century monochrome painting since the 1980s.

The very broad range of possibility (or impossibility) in interpretation of the monochrome in painting is arguably why monochrome painting is so engaging to so many artists, critics, and writers. Although monochrome has never become dominant and few artists have committed themselves exclusively to it, it has never gone away. It reappears as though a spectre haunting high modernism, or as a symbol of it, appearing during times of aesthetic and sociopolitical upheavals.

[edit] Suprematism and Constructivism

Black Square, 1915, Oil on Canvas, State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg

Monochrome painting as it is usually understood today began in Moscow, with Kazimir Malevich’s “White Square on a White Field” of 1918. 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, Alexandr Rodchenko exhibited three paintings together, each a monochrome in one of the three primary colours. He intended this work to be a manifestation of “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.

This very broad range of possibility (or impossibility) in interpretation of the monochrome is arguably why monochrome painting is so engaging to many artists, critics, and writers. Although monochrome has never become dominant and few artists have committed themselves exclusively to it, it has never gone away. It reappears as though a spectre haunting high modernism, or as a symbol of it, appearing during times of aesthetic and sociopolitical upheavals.

[edit] Artists

[edit] New York

[edit] Abstract Expressionists

[edit] Milton Resnick

Resnick 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 all-over 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.

[edit] Ad Reinhardt

Reinhardt was an Abstract Expressionist artist notable for painting nearly “pure” monochromes over a considerable period of time. 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 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.

[edit] Richard Pousette-Dart

Although he 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.

[edit] Color field

Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, several Abstract Expressionist / Color field artists (notably: Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Theodoros Stamos, Clyfford Still, Jules Olitski, and others) explored motifs that seemed to imply monochrome, employing large flat fields of colour in large scale pictures which proved highly influential to newer styles, such as Post-Painterly Abstraction, Lyrical Abstraction, and Minimalism.

[edit] Lyrical Abstraction

Lyrical Abstractionist painters such as Ronald Davis, Larry Poons, Walter Darby Bannard, Dan Christensen, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Ralph Humphrey, David Budd, David 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.

[edit] Neo-Dada (nascent Pop)

[edit] Robert Rauschenberg

Early in the 1950s, Rauschenberg became known for red, then black, and eventually white monochrome canvases. Some of these works explore texture and material; materials collaged onto the canvas beneath the painted layer sometimes indicate a grid-like structure. The white canvases became associated with the work 4'33" by the composer John Cage, which consisted of a length 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 th artist's control: eg. the sounds of the concert environment, or the play of shadows and dust particles accumulating on the 'blank' canvas surface. In a related work, his Erased De Kooning Drawing of a few years later, Rauschenberg erased a drawing by abstract expressionist artist Willem de Kooning.

[edit] Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns 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.

[edit] Minimalists

[edit] Ellsworth Kelly

Kelly spent a lot of time in both Paris and New York. 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 botanical watercolors in an impressive and sincerely realistic style.

[edit] Agnes Martin

Martin’s works of the 1950s and 1960s are serene meditations on “perfection,” and hence “beauty.” Typical works are white, off-white or pale grey canvases with faint evidence of pencil dragged in lines or grids across the painted surface.

See http://members.aol.com/mindwebart4/agnes2.htm.

[edit] Robert Ryman

Ryman’s works 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.

[edit] Brice Marden

Marden’s 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: grey subtle 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.

[edit] Frank Stella

Frank Stella 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” meaning on the part of the viewer, and this is perhaps most striking in his black pinstripe works of the early ’60s. Later, Stella abandoned not only monochrome, but also eventually geometric painting.

[edit] Europe

[edit] Yves Klein

see:International Klein Blue

See http://artnetweb.com/abstraction/chrome.html.

[edit] Gerhard Richter

Richter 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.

[edit] Olivier Mosset

Mosset 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.

[edit] Others

[edit] Alan Ebnother

Ebnother is an American painter who explores the heratige of momochrome painting, confining himself to the single color green. (born Alameda, California, 1952)

[edit] Monochrome Painting in the Spotlight

Samuel Beckett seriously considered devoting his life to art criticism rather than to literature after viewing the works of a monochrome painter.^{[citation needed]}
One of Barnett Newman’s very sparse (though technically not monochrome) geometric abstractions was slashed with a knife by an enraged viewer in the 1980s.
One of Barnett Newman’s paintings generated outrage and widespread ridicule (and discussion) in Canada when the National Gallery purchased a Newman painting for a large sum of money, also in the 1980s.
The 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.

[edit] External links

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