All Black Everything: The 10 Best Monochrome Black Paintings
Hov wishes his art collection looked like this.
Image via Complex Original
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Monochromes were meant to change the world. They were meant to create a “zero point” for art, a relief from the artistic burdens of subject matter, form, and color, and to wash away all the history and traditions of painting and start fresh. The color (or non-color) black represented a void of old and a freedom for new art.
But it wasn’t that simple. Artists quickly became skeptical of the idea of this new world order that placed art outside of society and the real world, and began to make various adjustments to the original plan.
Almost a hundred years since the emergence of the flat, even, blank monochrome, in all of its utopian ideals, there are now a thousand different ways an all-black painting can look.
In honor of Black Friday, here are the 10 Best Black Paintings ever.
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Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915
After working secretly in his Moscow studio for nearly two years, Malevich unveiled Black Square along with about 30 other non-objective canvases in 1915 at his first Suprematist exhibition. Suprematism utilized only the most basic shapes and primary colors, or non-form and non-color, out of which an entirely new kind of art could be formed. This thinking became the cornerstone of all historical avant-garde movements.
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Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled (Glossy Black Painting), 1951
Rauschenberg’s experiments took the monochrome to the next level, literally, by adding a third dimension to his paintings. He texturized the surface of his canvases with paper before applying a thick coat of shiny paint.
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Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1952
Whereas Rauschenberg built up his canvases, Fontana punctured right through them. He meant to open up the painting to the space beyond and around it, to make form and color continuous with space and time.
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Louise Nevelson, Sky Cathedral, 1958
Nevelson’s large sculptures of stacked wooden objects are somewhere between furniture, sculpture, and painting. Made up of pieces of different shapes, sizes, and textures, the all black paint that covers them makes them more difficult to discern and adds a touch of mystery.
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Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1960-66
Reinhardt spent the better part of two decades focusing on his “black paintings”, which he called “A free, unmanipulated, unmanipulatable, useless, unmarketable, irreducible, unphotographable, unreproducible, inexplicable icon.” They represented an antidote to the flashy, overwhelming world of consumer goods that was emerging at the time.
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Olivier Mosset, Dollar (Black), 1998
Since the 1960s, Mosset has been interested in simple forms, single colors, and repetition, and with those basic elements he constructed one of the most powerful symbols of contemporary society: the dollar sign. Mosset has more recently mounted an exhibition entirely of identical black monochrome paintings.
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Stephanie Serpick, Black Painting 2, 2007
Serpick adds a graceful, organic element to the hard-lined geometric tradition of monochromes that somehow lightens up the ominously black canvas.
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Franko B, Untitled (Black Painting), 2007
Best known for his performance art, Franko B’s signature work is associated with the color white, speckled with his own blood. Around 2006-2007, however, he created a series of large-scale works in all black, a means of visualizing of the dark themes of death and pain that he often addresses.
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Sergej Jensen, Untitled, 2008
Rather than with form or color, the focus of Jensen’s work is on its material. The black paint in Untitled, 2008 is a means to achieving its form: as the black paint dried, the hemp canvas shrunk and snapped the stretcher bar, resulting in the dent on the right hand side.
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Kaws, Wallop, 2010
This most recent use of the monochrome also takes it the farthest from Malevich’s original ideas. Kaws puts the all-black vocabulary to use to represent a character pulled directly from our contemporary culture, melding his picture with the visual world around us rather than breaking away from it.
