What Is Tonalism?
Art historians use the term Tonalism to describe an American artistic movement spanning from about 1880 to approximately 1920. More generally, the term (tonalism, tonalist, or tonalistic, with a lower case “t”) describes a style of painting in which color range is limited so that subtle gradations of the middle values (aka color “tones”) constitute the primary aesthetic and means of expression.

In the Barbizon Style, John Constable, Tramonto sulla Senna
In the Barbizon Style, John Constable, Tramonto sulla Senna

Historical Tonalism, rooted in the French Barbizon style, emphasized mood, feeling, evocation and suggestion; it seemed to its early practitioners closely related to musical composition (c.f. George MacNeil Whistler’s titles referencing musical terms) and poetry (George Inness originally included poems with his paintings, to the bafflement of critics).

While the historical roots of tonalism lie mostly with nineteenthcentury American painters, tonalism’s branches extend across multiple time periods and geographies. Many twentiethcentury artists worked in some measure under the influence of its aesthetic principles. Artists as diverse as Yves Klein, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt and Wolf Kahn have all been said to have painted to an extent in a tonalist mode; their works are united by a restricted (if not monochrome) palette, subtle modulations of closely related values, and a deeply conceptual and/or emotional/psychological (what used to be called “poetic”) approach. Christopher Volpe