A monochromatic painting is built on a single hue, with only its lighter and darker versions doing the work. The clearest example is Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist, painted in Barcelona in late 1903 or early 1904 and now in the Art Institute of Chicago: a blind street musician in blues and blue blacks.
Monochrome, in the Tate's definition, means an artwork that includes only one color. Monochromatic is the looser word: a painting that keeps to one hue but lets it run from pale to nearly black. The Art Institute of Chicago uses it for Picasso's Blue Period, when he restricted himself to a cold, monochromatic blue palette.
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The Old Guitarist is not quite one color, though. The guitar's brown body, the Art Institute says, is the painting's only shift in color. The museum still describes the picture as a cold, monochromatic blue.
So the clearest example of the word has an exception built into it. Monochrome asks for one color, and monochromatic accepts a picture where a single hue governs everything but one brown guitar.
The brown guitar is only the first surprise. Under the blue lies another picture, painted and then covered, and the blue itself began with the death of a friend.
What does monochromatic allow, and what does it rule out?
It rules out a second hue and allows everything else…
What You'll Discover
Why one object stayed brown.
What was painted under the blue.
What made Picasso see in blue.
Where painters used only gray.