Monochromatic painting has played an extreme role in modern and contemporary Western visual art, originating with the early 20th-century European avant-gardes. Artists have explored the non-representational potential of a single color, investigating shifts in value, diversity of texture, and formal nuances as a means of emotional expression, visual investigation into the inherent properties of painting, as well as a starting point for conceptual works. Ranging from geometric abstraction in a variety of mediums to non-representational gestural painting, monochromatic works continue to be an important influence in contemporary art.

Monochrome paintings should not be confused with older styles of grisaille painting using only or mainly a single colour, typically black or grey.

Monochrome painting was initiated at the first Incoherents exhibition in Paris in 1882, with a black painting by the poet Paul Bilhaud entitled Combat de Nègres pendant la nuit ("Battle of negroes during the night"), which had been missing since 1882 when it was rediscovered in a private collection in 2017–2018. It has been classified as a National Treasure by the French state. Although Bilhaud was not the first to create an all-black artwork: for example, Robert Fludd published an image of Darkness in his 1617 book on the origin and structure of the cosmos; and Bertall published his black Vue de La Hogue (effet de nuit) in 1843. In the subsequent exhibitions of the Incoherent arts (also in the 1880s) the writer Alphonse Allais proposed other monochrome paintings, such as Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige ("First communion of anaemic young girls in the snow", white), or Récolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la Mer Rouge ("Tomato harvesting by apoplectic cardinals on the shore of the Red Sea", red). Allais published his Album primo-avrilesque in 1897, a monograph with seven monochrome artworks. However, this kind of activity bears more similarity to 20th century Dada, or Neo-Dada, and particularly the works of the Fluxus group of the 1960s, than to 20th century monochrome painting since Malevich.

Jean Metzinger, following the Succès de scandale created from the Cubist showing at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, in an interview with Cyril Berger published in Paris-Journal 29 May 1911, stated:

We cubists have only done our duty by creating a new rhythm for the benefit of humanity. Others will come after us who will do the same. What will they find? That is the tremendous secret of the future. Who knows if someday, a great painter, looking with scorn on the often brutal game of supposed colorists and taking the seven colors back to the primordial white unity that encompasses them all, will not exhibit completely white canvases, with nothing, absolutely nothing on them. (Jean Metzinger, 29 May 1911)

Metzinger's (then) audacious prediction that artists would take abstraction to its logical conclusion by vacating representational subject matter entirely and returning to what Metzinger calls the "primordial white unity", a "completely white canvas" would be realized two years later. The writer of a satirical manifesto entitled Manifeste de l'école amorphiste, published in Les Hommes du Jour (3 May 1913), may have had Metzinger's vision in mind when the author justified amorphism's blank canvases by claiming 'light is enough for us'. With perspective, writes art historian Jeffery S. Weiss, "Vers Amorphisme may be gibberish, but it was also enough of a foundational language to anticipate the extreme reductivist implications of non-objectivity".

In a broad and general sense, one finds European roots of minimalism in the geometric abstractions of painters associated with the Bauhaus, in the works of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the De Stijl movement, and the Russian Constructivist movement, and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. Minimal art is also inspired in part by the paintings of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, and the works of artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio Morandi, and others. Minimalism was also a reaction against the painterly subjectivity of Abstract Expressionism that had been dominant in the New York School during the 1940s and 1950s.

The wide range of possibilities (including impossibility) of interpretation of monochrome paintings is arguably why the monochrome is so engaging to so many artists, critics, and writers. Although the monochrome has never become dominant and few artists have committed themselves exclusively to it, it has never gone away. It reappears as though a spectre haunting high modernism, or as a symbol of it, appearing during times of aesthetic and sociopolitical upheavals.