For most of European art history, white meant lead white. It was made by setting strips of lead over vinegar in pots, in sheds of fermenting manure, until the metal turned white.
White is what we see when a surface reflects every wavelength of light. Lead white covered densely, but it is highly toxic. Titanium white replaced it in the 1900s. A white painting is one where the white does the work, and below I follow what each painter makes it do.
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How These Were Chosen
A painting made the list if it passes at least one test. White is in its title or its series' name. Research or a firsthand account tells us how its white was made or laid down. Its white drew a recorded reaction. It shows white worn as a fashion of its day. Its first viewers knew what its white meant.
12. Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918)
A square of white paint sits at a tilt inside a square canvas that is white as well. There is no second color and no object to recognize.
Kazimir Malevich made it in 1918. It belongs to a run of canvases in which he set white shapes on white grounds.
The white is also a cover. White on White was painted over an existing picture, according to the Malevich specialist Aleksandra Shatskikh.
Black Square had been made the same way three years earlier. Whatever the first composition showed now lies out of sight under the white.
I spend longer on the border of the tilted square than on the square itself. Its edges wobble and soften, so I read the white inside and the white outside as one open space rather than two flat pieces.
Its first public showing came in the spring of 1919, at a Moscow exhibition devoted to non-objective art. Malevich's statement in the catalog was called simply Suprematism.
He wrote in it that he had torn through the blue lampshade that limits color and stepped out into white, where infinity lay open ahead. He had already pictured himself disappearing into infinity in a declaration dated June 15, 1918.
Malevich's first one-man show, which traced his path from Impressionism to Suprematism, opened in Moscow on March 25, 1920. It ended with the white on white paintings, followed by empty canvases. Malevich died in Leningrad on May 15, 1935.
His ashes were buried under an oak at Nemchinovka, a village near Moscow. Nikolai Suetin, a fellow Suprematist and close friend, designed the grave marker as a white cube with a black square on one face.
The grave was destroyed during the Second World War. In 1988 a new white cube, this time carrying a red square, was set up on a site next to it.
At a Glance
Artist: Kazimir Malevich (1879 to 1935)
Painted: 1918
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 79.4 × 79.4 cm (31 1/4 × 31 1/4 in)
Where to see it: Museum of Modern Art, New York
About This Painting
What is Suprematism?
Suprematism is the name Malevich gave to his own theory of painting. He defined it as "the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts." Its canvases represent no objects from the visible world.
Was White on White painted in 1917 or 1918?
The Museum of Modern Art dates it to 1918. Malevich began his white on white series in mid-1918, so 1917 is too early.
What is Malevich's White Square?
It is another name for this painting, also called The White Square on White. It was one of five White on White paintings by Malevich, and a counterpart to his Black Square.
11. Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting [three panel] (1951)
Three tall panels hang together as one picture, painted white all over and carrying nothing else. The triptych is by Robert Rauschenberg, who made the first White Paintings in the early fall of 1951.
He was then a student at Black Mountain College, an experimental art school near Asheville, North Carolina. He covered each canvas in a plain, solid white and left almost no mark of brush or roller.