Monochromatic painting has played a significant role in modern and contemporary Western visual art, originating with the early 20th-century European avant-gardes. Artists have explored the non-representational potential of a single color, investigating shifts in value, diversity of texture, and formal nuances as a means of emotional expression, visual investigation into the inherent properties of painting, as well as a starting point for conceptual works. 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.
Paul Bilhaud, Combat de nègres pendant la nuit, 1882
Brice Marden, The Dylan Painting, 1966/1986, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Allan McCollum, Collection of One Hundred Plaster Surrogates, 1982/1990, Enamel on cast Hydrostone. Collection: Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerp, Belgium
Yves Klein, IKB 191, 1962.
Alphonse Allais was a French writer, journalist and humorist. He was also the editor of the Chat Noir, a satirical magazine.
Alphonse Allais
Alphonse Allais, Des souteneurs encore dans la force de l'âge et le ventre dans l'herbe boivent de l'absinthe. Carriage curtain, before 1897.
Marche funèbre composée pour les funérailles d'un grand homme sourd (Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man)
First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls In The Snow (1883)
