Alexandra Loske on the colour of nothingness

I have just finished three books that deal with bold, saturated, visceral, material colour, so writing about black has been a challenge and sometimes feels like teetering on the edge of a black hole that will swallow you up. Yet, thinking about it has also been a revelation, and reminded me that some of the art that has touched and moved me most in my life has a lot of black in it, or is indeed all about it. In 2019 I was lucky enough to have the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, to myself for a short while – a small octagonal denominational chapel, commissioned from Rothko in the 1960s by John and Dominique de Menil. In the bare interior hang 14 large paintings by Rothko in subtly varying shades of black. They both exude and demand stillness, patience, doing nothing, saying nothing – the ultimate meditative space, and perhaps the greatest complete work of art. I had come to Houston to give a lecture about the Royal Pavilion, one of the most gaudily colourful buildings in the world, only to find myself drawn into a blackness that seemed textured, velvety, soft, and appeared to be vibrating.

I was reminded of Kandinsky’s rather bleak and negative description of black in his seminal text Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910-11). ‘Black sounds like a dead nothingness after the sun has set, like a nothingness without possibility, a silence without future or hope.’ I felt the opposite in the Houston chapel, but I could also see Kandinsky’s point, who, incidentally, used black with great verve in abstract and semi-abstract paintings. It is not unusual for colours to trigger complex emotions and have contradictory associations, even in the same cultural and historical context: black is associated with anarchy, loneliness, mourning, bad luck, death, dirt, evil, and guilt, but also with elegance, reliability, steadiness, strength, individuality, and high status. Black is the colour of creation myths, of man’s fear of darkness, of the earliest of artistic techniques, and the earliest and most basic of paints and pigments. As David Scott Kastan notes, black is confusing: ‘worn equally by mourners and monarch, melancholics and motorcycle enthusiasts. It’s the colour favoured both by beatniks and by Batman. By ninjas and nuns. By fascists and fashionistas. Hamlet, Himmler, and Hepburn all wore black. So did Martin Luther and Marlon Brando – and Fred Astaire.’ You can expect me to turn up at the ROSA launch for this issue in my favourite LBD, for all the right reasons. But what is it that makes black so confusing and compelling?

The heart of darkness: where is black?

One reason may be its inherent notion of absence. Black is not strictly the absence of colour, but it certainly causes us to question what colour is. In early, linear colour concepts, black and white were placed opposite one another – as beginning and end – signifying light and darkness respectively. Black is often considered an absolute, something that has no gradation, no nuance: there is no ‘light black’ or ‘dark black’. Black is black, pure and simple, and what is not black tends to be either grey or blue. Once we are aware of this we look at ‘Whistler’s Mother’ (Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, painted in 1871) differently. But if we look closer at black, it becomes clear that it is not pure at all, certainly not in the hands of artists. Rothko’s black canvases, and many other abstract artists’ black paintings or sculptures, convey subtlety and nuance through texture and the addition of chromatic colours to black paint, and of course through the dialogue with other colours. Just look again at how Whistler painted that patterned black curtain in his ‘Mother’, and how he makes the most of the contrasting power of black and white. As for Rothko’s abstracts, if you cannot get to Houston, just visit the Rothko room in Tate Britain and let your eyes adjust and become receptive to the shades of darkness, and those feathery borders where Rothko’s colours meet.

Black in the Newtonian sense is the complete absence of light, and by extension colour, while, paradoxically, for artists, black is every colour from the paint box combined. The scientific reason is the same: Black equals darkness because it absorbs colour and light, and is therefore missing in many colour charts and treatises on colour theory. Goethe, in his Doctrine of Colours (1810), called colours ‘troubled light’, and found black the most troubling – the surface that absorbs all the colours of the visible spectrum. It rarely features in colour diagrams, unless they are conceptually three-dimensional and include a grey scale that references the amount of black (darkness) or white (lightness) in colours, or if it plays a necessary part in the classification of plants or creatures. There is a list of seven blacks in Patrick Syme’s Werner’s Nomenclature from 1821 (used for taxonomical classification), but black does not feature in Newton’s 1704 colour wheel, or Mary Gartside’s sequence of colour blots in 1805 (although she does include white).

Black, for many theorists and artists is outside the colour range, and often forms the background, a kind of ultimate reference point, a primeval darkness from which things, figures and faces appear, as if silhouetted against the vastness of the cosmos. I had a sudden realisation of this when I saw the exhibition of Mabel Pryde Nicholson’s paintings at Rottingdean Grange recently. Her figures often emerge from a dense darkness, only to shine brighter and more mesmerising for it. She had learnt from Old Masters like Rembrandt, Goya and Velázquez, of course, but the principle has been understood by many artists through the ages, whether they paint(ed) portraits, mythological or historical scenes, or flower still lifes. Black allows colour to shine, its darkness illuminates.

Chevreul spins into darkness

Despite its absence from many two-dimensional colour wheels, black is usually acknowledged in other ways in colour concepts. Moses Harris, for example, placed a simple additional diagram in his colour wheel from the 1760s, in the form of overlapping triangles of primary colours that create a black centre. There is one spectacular example of a colour diagram fully embracing black. In 1855 Michel Eugène Chevreul began collaborating with the engraver René Henri Digeon, and together they produced a set of twelve colour circles, using a four-stage printing process, the stunning Cercles chromatiques de M.E. Chevreul, based on an uncoloured circle from 1839. The first circle shows pure prismatic colours at a stage of maximum saturation. This is repeated in the second circle, but a division into 72 sections is added, which appears in all subsequent circles. A further ten circles show the development from this state of maximum saturation to almost complete darkness, with an increasing addition of black. The last few circles show astonishingly subtle shades of shades of grey and black, with just a hint of colour in each of them. This group of 12 full-page colour circles (printed again in 1861 and 1864) are unrivalled in 19th-century print culture in respect of their technical and conceptual brilliance. They are Chevreul’s visual journey to the heart of chromatic darkness.

‘Starless and Bible black’, or: how black can black be?

Black is dominant and form-giving, and has been used in drawings for millennia. The shapes of the magnificent animals in the Lascaux and Altamira caves in France and Spain are rendered in strong black lines, suggesting that the outlines were drawn first, before being coloured in with red and yellow ochre and white chalk. Black was usually sourced from charred and burnt ivory, bone or wood (essentially charcoal and soot mixed with fat or spit), but in the Lascaux cave traces of manganese oxide have also been found. This required heating manganeserich rock to a specific high temperature, which suggests that our pre-historic ancestors were already carrying out complex procedures and must have used certain tools to create deep, stable blacks.

Also thousands of years ago, we don’t know exactly when, black ink was invented in both China and Egypt, initially made from soot from burning oil lamps. It is enticing to think that from a dirty by-product some of the most sophisticated art in human history was created. Ink also became the medium for writing and eventually print culture, and by extension all books and newspapers. Black-ish soot and grease made the dissemination and capturing of human knowledge, and communication in general, possible. We may not see the world in black and white, but we have largely been reading it as such.

In the visual arts and in textile and clothing history the challenge has always been to create a deep, stable black. Until the invention of coal tar colours and aniline dyes in the mid-19th century, black – although prominent in garments in the 16th and 17th century – could only be achieved by combining several dyes, also known as ‘triple-dipping’ (the same principal as mixing up all the colours in your paintbox). An intense, rich black dye could be derived from logwood, but – similar to cochineal red or ultramarine blue – its supply was limited in Europe, as it originated in the mangrove swamps of central America.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and the search for the blackest of blacks resulted in a rather silly and at times amusing feud between two artists. In 2016 Anish Kapoor bought the exclusive artistic rights to Vantablack (‘vertically aligned nanotube arrays’), to gain a monopoly over a colour that is so dark, it makes you lose all sense of texture or space, as it absorbs almost all light. Fellow artist Stuart Semple soon challenged Kapoor, first by claiming to have invented the ‘Pinkest Pink’, and later by creating Semple’s ‘Black 2.0’ and ‘Black 3.0’, which was darker, better and a lot cheaper than Kapoor’s Vantablack. Semple has never allowed Kapoor or any of his associates to purchase it.

And so on to infinity: black in art

Black has always been a powerful and important element in the visual arts, from the earliest cave paintings to Kapoor’s dabbling with Vantablack. It often cuts through the colours and composition of a painting, shaking the visuals into action. Just think of the synaesthetic silhouettes of birds rising from the yellows and blues in Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows (1890) – you can almost hear them flutter and scream. In 1915 Kazimir Malevich exhibited a painting of nothing but a black square on a white ground, which formed part of the geometrical alphabet of his Suprematist art. He hung it like an icon in a Russian house, high up near the ceiling, assigning it spiritual meaning, and adding shock factor along the way. He was not the first to combine ideas of black nothingness with the spiritual (and would not be last, considering what Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg and others produced later in the 20th century). In 1617, the English physician Robert Fludd added a black square printed on a page in his famous work History of the Two Worlds (Utriusque cosmic maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica). Along each edge of his square the words ‘Et sic in infinitum’ (And so on to Infinity) is printed. This is the black of the creation myth, the cosmos, and perhaps the ancestor of 20th-century abstract art.

Before writing this piece, I wandered round Brighton Museum in search of examples of black in art, and found myself marvelling at a jet-black, shiny ebonised sideboard by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (early 20th century). I remembered how Mackintosh’s high-backed black chairs had impressed me as a young student, and how they seemed to structure the whiteness of their surroundings with their unflinching geometry. In the Royal Pavilion there are fine examples of furniture with an equally polished surface sheen, created more than a century earlier: Chinese black lacquer cabinets, on which gold landscapes and figures appear as if floating in space. One of the star paintings in the collection of Brighton Museum is Jan Lievens’ masterclass in chiaroscuro, The Raising of Lazarus (1631). For contrast, don’t miss the collection of abstract art in one of the Fine Art galleries on the upper floor, where you can enjoy the glowing blackness of Donald Sultan’s Three Pomegranates (1990), executed in charcoal on a white background. I recommend going in search of black in Sussex museums and galleries, but do leave enough time to let your eyes adjust to the darkness, and dare to stare into subtle nothingness.

Alexandra Loske is giving a talk at Brighton Museum on October 24 at 11.30am: From Colour Wheels to Red Scrambles: Abstract Paintings in Brighton Museum. Find out more at brightonmuseums.org.uk