Monochrome Painting

Monochromatic painting has been an important component of avant-garde visual art throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. 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. From geometric precision to expressionism, the monochrome has proved to be a durable idiom in Contemporary art.

Monochrome painting was initiated at the first Incoherent arts' exhibition in 1882 in Paris, with a black painting by poet Paul Bilhaud entitled "Combat de Nègres dans un tunnel" (Negroes fight in a tunnel). (Although Bilhaud was not the first to create an all-black artwork: for example, Robert Fludd published an image of "Darkness" in his 1617 book on the origin and structure of the cosmos; and Bertall () published his black Vue de La Hogue (effet de nuit) in 1843.) In the subsequent exhibitions of the Incoherent arts (also in the 1880s) the writer Alphonse Allais proposed other monochrome paintings, such as "Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige" ("First communion of anaemic young girls in the snow", white), or "Récolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la Mer Rouge" ("Tomato harvesting by apoplectic cardinals on the shore of the Red Sea", red). Allais published his Album primo-avrilesque in 1897, a monograph with seven monochrome artworks. 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.

Jean Metzinger, following the Succès de scandale created from the Cubist showing at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, in an interview with Cyril Berger published in Paris-Journal 29 May 1911, stated:

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