We have reached the end of the line - there's nowhere else to go. Here the paintings bring us up short - they seem like the artist has done either very little or no work. He may present a canvas on which there is no paint - a few holes may have been knocked. The canvas may have been slashed with a knife. Fontana produced works of this type. The canvas may have been painted in a uniform color. Perhaps a huge rectangle of one color may almost cover a background of another color. Klein painted some almost perfect nothing paintings. IKB 79 shown here is an interesting example and illustrates a point that cannot be made too strongly. The image that you see, is a scanned variant of a printed image. The original painting was done in International Klein Blue, a color incorporating a resin which gave it especial brilliance. Klein even patented his new colour. But what you see is a color generated by the phosphors of your CRT screen, which are generated by parameters measured by a scanner which scanned printing inks which were mixed according to a photographic screening process which arose from a photograph of the original real color painting. If Klein's Blue is worthy of such a portentous presentation, you will never be able to see its merit from mere reproductions, since a large part of its point is in the real pigment/resin in which it was painted.

If we are to believe that this painting is sufficiently meritorious to have deserved the distinction it, and similar paintings have achieved, we must believe that the artist has made choices that would only be accessible to the few. Otherwise we could all be great painters by covering any canvas with our own choice of color. Here we guess that the shade of blue must be one of a few thousand possibilities, and that the dimensions of the canvas are likewise chosen from a few thousand possibilities. This leads to a pool of a billion or so possible pictures done in a plain color - so we can believe that it can purport to stand on the sensitivity of the artist in making this one very special choice in so many. If this can be said of so apparently simple a work, we cannot hope to debunk any paintings on the grounds that little special talent would be needed to produce them.

Other painters have adopted this style, and another particularly good example of a nothing painting is Ryman's Courier II seen below. It is painted a uniform white, and has four tacks roughly at its corners. Thin black borders of abruptly varying width appear at the top and bottom.

Some pointers to a nothing painting: