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

Yves Klein was the first to use the word monochrome in its current sense, in an oeuvre that emerged in the 1950s and early 1960s. One of his first works was the publication of an album, Yves Peintures (Yves, Paint­ings. Jaén, 1953), which included ten monochrome plates, purportedly the reproductions often of his works, ones he probably never made; to increase the plausibility of the scam, he offered precise details and ten different provenances, places he had actually visited, in a series of live actions, Klein created what he called anthropometric paintings, by rolling nude models covered in blue paint on the canvases. He had the colour with which he covered his objects, Sponges or his Venus de Milo, patented as International Klein Blue (though it was never produced commercially). He made giant monochrome blue paintings, and was commissioned to decorate the Gelsenkirchen Opera. He made monochrome works in other colours as well - in gold and rose. Thanks to his neo-Dadaist, con­ceptual, performance art, monochrome painting gained a new mean­ing when applied to the history of art, and the avant-garde roots of the category became more conspicuous. The experimental artistic training and practice of the Black Mountain College in New York played a vital role in the growing acceptance of American avant-garde art, thanks to such instructors as R. Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Clement Greenberg, John Cage or Walter Gropius. Joseph Albers, whose reductive painting was founded on the colour theory of Itten, also taught there. Students of the Black Mountain College included R. Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland. In certain works, the artists of what in the 1950s and 1960s became the American sequel to early 20th-century constructivism and abstraction - the various schools of New York abstract expressionism, its offshoot, Post-painterly Abstraction, then what outplaced it, Hard-Edge painting, Lyrical Abstraction, or Color Field Painting - got close to the principles of monochrome painting. (In Ad Reinhardt's black pictures, the ground produces miniature variations on the surface, which the viewer comes to sense through a long, meditative process. Color Field painting has af­finities to later monochrome art, especially in certain works of Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Kenneth Noland). Further precedents of the radical monochrome painting that emerged in the 1980s include minimalist artists like Frank Stella and Robert Mangold, or Robert Ryman, whose permutations on white mon­ochrome paintings were often displayed in the company of the radical painters. Robert Rauschenberg's early, pure white and pure black paint­ings were considered monochrome works by those around him. It was his 1951 white painting that composer John Cage reflected on with his 4'33" (1952), one long pause that can be looked upon (or listened to) as a unique work of ready-made art. The late 1970s saw the appearance of "neo-realist" endeavours which were underpinned, beside the experiences of conceptual and minimalist

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