Red. White. Blue.

Red

Cadmium Red: “Matisse was much taken with this strong new red, which has excellent stability. He recounts that he attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade Renoir to adopt a “cadmium red” in place of the traditional cinnabar. Matisse inherited the use of intense cadmium red, a 19th century invention, from the Impressionists. The critic John Rusell called this canvas ‘a crucial moment in the history of painting. Color is on top, and making the most of it.'” (Webexhibits)

White

Li Yuan-Chia arrived in London in the early 1960s. Considered one of the founding fathers of abstract art in Taiwan, his work combined aspects of Western and Eastern thought. He used the bare language and spatial freedom of abstraction to convey existential conditions, focusing on the situation of the individual in the universe. The surface of Monochrome White Painting includes Li Yuan-Chia’s most personal visual mark: the dot or circular form, which for him symbolized the beginning and end of all things. (Tate)

Manzoni aimed to strip any type of storytelling from painting. For him, this meant removing colour from his works. In 1957, he began to produce painting-like objects he called ‘Achromes.’ He made them by soaking his canvases in kaolin, a soft clay used to make porcelain. The kaolin removed any colour, creating ‘nothingness’. The weight of the material caused it to sag, creating folds across the surface of the canvas. He described them as ‘a white surface which is neither a polar landscape, nor an evocative or beautiful subject, nor even a sensation, a symbol or anything else: but a white surface which is nothing other than a colourless surface, or even a surface which quite simply ‘is’. (Tate)

Ryman made this painting using pigmented shellac laid over plastic and glass. It is one of about nine paintings from the same period. The strips of aluminium, which are part of the work, allow it to be attached it to the wall. Ryman pays great attention to the paintbrush marks. He uses white because he considers it less ‘emotionally charged’ than other colours. His works are about surface, texture, grain and light rather than composition. (Tate)

Bogart focuses on the physical qualities of paint in his work. Here, he has applied a thick layer of paint to the surface and pulled it to the edges. He became interested in the borders of his paintings. Bogart commented that, ‘I started to see how important the borders of a painting were … extending the material over the borders of the painting. It gave me a certain looseness or broad outline.’ He made this work after moving to a bigger studio. Keeping one of the largest rooms empty, he described how ‘the influence of this emptiness was soon noticeable in my work’. (Tate)

It might look like the artist has randomly slashed this canvas. In fact, Buthe carefully composed it. He wanted to create a powerful relationship between the grid of the stretcher and the loose fabric. He used various processes to create this effect. This includes stitching lengths of cloth together and folding, tying, and wrapping sections around and underneath the stretcher bars. This draws attention to the space in front, inside and behind the stretcher. Buthe also painted the wooden stretcher bars white to match the fabric. This helps them be seen as parts of the same idea. (Tate)

Blue

Yves Klein famously declared the blue sky to be his first artwork and from there continued finding radical new ways to represent the infinite and immaterial in his works. One such strategy was monochrome abstraction—the use of one color over an entire canvas. Klein saw monochrome painting as an “open window to freedom, as the possibility of being immersed in the immeasurable existence of color.” Although he used a range of colors, his most iconic works often featured International Klein Blue, a shade of pure ultramarine that Klein claimed to have invented and trademarked. He used materials like water, fire, and air to construct his works and staged a “leap into the void” for a self-published newspaper. (MoMA)

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