Monochrome painting

Monochromatic painting has played a significant role in modern and contemporary Western visual art, originating with the early 20th-century European avant-gardes.

[1] Ranging from geometric abstraction in a variety of mediums to non-representational gestural painting, monochromatic works continue to be an important influence in contemporary art.

The writer of a satirical manifesto entitled Manifeste de l'école amorphiste, published in Les Hommes du Jour (3 May 1913), may have had Metzinger's vision in mind when the author justified amorphism's blank canvases by claiming 'light is enough for us'.

[5][6][7] With perspective, writes art historian Jeffery S. Weiss, "Vers Amorphisme may be gibberish, but it was also enough of a foundational language to anticipate the extreme reductivist implications of non-objectivity".

[9][10] Minimal art is also inspired in part by the paintings of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, and the works of artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio Morandi, and others.

"[15] 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”).

Since the 1960s artists as diverse as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Ronald Davis, David Novros, Paul Mogensen, Patricia Johanson and others made monochrome paintings on various shaped canvases.

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.

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.