But the all-white painting is meant to be discomfortingly incomprehensible to everyone in the theater, except maybe Serge, who can't quite say why he finds it beautiful.

(The comedy is about a longtime three-way friendship bruised, perhaps irrevocably, by a dispute over an all-white painting.)

One of the evening's biggest casualties, though not surprisingly, was Robert Ryman's 'Signet 20" (1965-66), an all-white painting in thick horizontal strokes.

In one picture, a fashionably spectacled man mopes beneath an all-white painting.

With "Art," it was a friend who bought an all-white painting.

They are a little reminiscent of Robert Ryman's astringent all-white paintings from the 1960's and 1970's, but only a little.

She has made a name for herself in recent years as a purveyor of absolutely astringent, all-white, minimal-abstract paintings on Mylar, paper or wooden panels.

Her all-white minimal paintings certainly possess a particular if austere beauty, but don't allow for any development.

Cage also recognized what you might call the sympathetic music in Mr. Rauschenberg's art - the silence of the all-white paintings, for example.

Then you realize you're standing between two huge all-white multi-panel paintings, 14 feet high and 21 and 35 feet long respectively.