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.

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.

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

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 ...