Origins
A canvas is never empty. —Robert Rauschenberg,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 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. Although the 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.
Read more about this topic: Monochrome Painting
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
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—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. Material Differences, Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
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—Robinson Jeffers (18871962)