For centuries, painters have taken away color from their work as a way of enhancing it. This technique is on display in “Monochrome: Painting in Black and White” at London’s National Gallery.

As ideas for exhibitions go, Monochrome at the National Gallery sounds cussedly dull and joyless. A show restricted to painting in black and white? What an austere, hair-shirt proposition.

The monochromatic painting, which measures 9.6 x 7.3 inches (24.5 x 18.5 centimeters), was purchased by an anonymous buyer for €860,000 ($908,000) at the Christie’s sale. Although that was ...

‘Monochrome: Painting in Black and White’, National Gallery, London, until 18 February 2018 (www.nationalgallery.org.uk) ...

Paint It Black If the idea of monochrome painting occurred to anyone before the twentieth century, it would have been understood as a picture of a monochrome reality, and probably taken as a joke.

Painter Anne Appleby, who lives on a ranch in rural Montana, is highly attuned to the colors she sees in her landscape, as well as to the changing light and seasons.

The not-quite-monochrome painting looks like pleasure: a day spent laid out on an off-season California beach, fingers nested behind your head, gazing upward. Below the blue, on a naked stripe of ...

It took a while before I realized that “Red Bed” repeated many of the visual strategies from my own Red Blanket paintings of 1971: it is near-monochrome, pieced and patched with seams showing ...

The monochromatic painting, which measures 9.6 x 7.3 inches (24.5 x 18.5 centimeters), was purchased by an anonymous buyer for €860,000 ($908,000) at the Christie’s sale.

The monochromatic painting, which measures 9.6 x 7.3 inches, was purchased by an anonymous buyer for €860,000 (then around $910,000) at the Christie’s sale — more than 50 times the painting ...