International Monochrome Painting - In the Vass Collection (Modern Gallery, Veszprém, 2007)

monochrome PAINTING - radical PAINTING "One must recall that a picture, before it becomes a war horse, a naked woman oran anecdote, is essentially a surface...," wrote Maurice Denis in 1890.1 This manifesto-like text should serve to remind us that the roots of monochrome painting are to be found in the late 19th century, if not earlier.2 3 In their new painting, the Nabis - who took to heart the lessons in optics and colour vision of Chevreul, Maxwell and Helmholtz - attrib­uted equal value to the entire surface of the picture, in contrast to the hierarchic composition method of earlier modes of representation. As a logical consequence to this process, when Matisse and the Fauves started to treat the painting as a colourful surface in the first decade of the 20th century, they closed the window that was opened four and a half cen­turies earlier, when the easel painting with the central perspective ap­peared and Alberti introduced the metaphor. The first truly monochrome painting, White on White, was made in 1918 by the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) as an essential, concentrated, meditative manifestation of art. Unlike the Suprematist Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) three years later used his Monochrome Triptych, which employed the three primary colours (Pure Red Colour; Pure Yellow Colour; Pure Blue Colour, 1921, oil on canvas, 62.5 x 52.5 cm, Rodchenko - Stepanova Archive, Moscow), to il­lustrate the death of art. It seems that these two approaches can be used to describe the entire history of geometric abstraction and monochrome painting, the heirs of constructivism. There is, on the one hand, a kind of art that breaks with the traditional, symbolic interpretation of the picture, as well as with illusionism in painting (Rodchenko's approach; later trends in this vein include minimalism, concrete and concept art) and, on the other hand, a different kind, which we may call meditative (Malevich), that stresses the importance of condensation in painting, the possibility of representing an infinite number of picture spaces, the relationship of the easel painting to architecture. They share a constructivist vision that sets great store by the flat surface of the picture, its being an object, and all its components. 1 "Definition de Neo-traditionisme." ArfefCr/f/gue, 1890. Quoted and translated by Ann Dumas. http://www.encydopedia.com/doc/1Gl-16862l04.html. 2 The word monochrome is derived from the Greek words monos (one) and khrôma (colour), and denotes a painting in one colour. Older dictionaries and encyclopaedias of art quote Pliny the Elder as the first to use the word when talking about the single­colour art of the Greeks, and the same sources refer to all subsequent techniques that used one colour for representation, among them grisaille (painting in shades of grey), which was developed from the technique of priming, and was a popular genre in the 19th century. Lexicons these days, however, will offer a new meaning for the word, one that gained currency in the 1950s and 1960s, apropos modern and contempo­The principles of early abstract art gained wide currency in the United States during and after World War II. Bauhaus had a crucial role in this, as it was transplanted to Chicago by László Moholy Nagy (1895-1946), who was interested in the relationship of material, composition and architec­ture. The generation of artists who can be summed up under the term ab­stract expressionism, were deeply influenced by the "improvisations" of Vasiliy Kandinsky that could be seen in American collections, as well as by the books of Johannes Itten (1888-1967) - The Elements of Color; The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color- which offered an insight into the individual's colour vision, experiments in the theory of colour, and the relationship of colour and composition. Abstract expressionism, which consisted of a number of trends, was the first artistic style to be born in the USA. A New York painters' academy, the Art Student League, was instrumental in this. Based in The American Fine Arts Building, it held summer painters' camps in Woodstock. Hans Hofmann was one of the teachers, while notable students included Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Barnett New­man, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Stella and Donald Judd. As an immediate forerunner of abstract expressionism, Arshile Gorky also had inestimable influence on the New York school. The American breakthrough took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the appearance of action painting (Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey and Willem de Koonig), which, like the psychological automatism of Surrealism, made the spontaneous action of the painter the focus of art. This method concentrated on the process of creation, and re-evaluat­ed the significance of the painting as an object. As it gained international recognition, the world of art saw its centre of gravity move from Paris to New York with shocking speed. The new capital nevertheless maintained strong links with the École de Paris. It was through interaction with Ameri­can art that the French Tachism and Art Informel emerged and became movements, with such key figures as Georges Mathieu (1921), and Simon Hantai (1922), who left Hungary for Paris in 1949. The work of the French Yves Klein (1928-1962), who also had links with gesture art, deserves a special mention in the history of this subject. rary art, the crisis of illusionist painting, the reconsideration of the picture as an entity, and reflections on the oil painting. Monochrome painting can even be traced back to Turner's light painting. Since the 1990s, a number of histories of "monochrome painting" have been published. All date the beginning to the last third of the 19th century, to caricatures that lampooned the events of the Paris Salon and announced the death of painting. One example was Alphonse Allais's Album Primo-Avrilesgue (Paris, 1897), in which he claimed to reproduce monochrome paintings. A framed, white picture field on a white ground bore the title: Anaemic Teenaged Girl Before Her First Communion In the Snow. On the other side of the brochure, the title explained that the all-black "work" depicted Black People Fighting in a Cave, at Night.

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