TheEconomistNovember 7th 2020 731C
laude monetdied in darkest Decem-
ber in 1926 surrounded by the garden he
had created at Giverny. When Georges Clé-
menceau, the former French prime minis-
ter, arrived three days later for the artist’s
funeral and caught sight of the black-
draped coffin, he exclaimed: “No! No black
for Monet.” An old piece of cretonne was
brought down from the house to replace
the dark pall with the palette that the artist
had made his own: nature’s many greens,
lavender, water lilies and forget-me-nots.
Most colours represent different things
for different people. The hue of death in In-
dia and in some Slavic cultures is white, yet
white also means spiritual rebirth for Mus-
lims participating in the haj. Green was for
bankers in early modern Europe; in the
Kenyan flag it represents the land. Red is
the badge of loyalty and success in China
and of power and devotion in Russia. In
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s New England it was
the sign of adultery. Black, however, has as-
sociations that are universal. It is bound up
with witchcraft, the underworld, night-
time and the far side of the Moon.Physicists say it is not really a colour at
all. Because black is the result of the ab-
sence of light, Sir Isaac Newton did not see
it on the spectrum of colours in his experi-
ments with prisms in the late 1660s. Many
artists take a different view. For them black
represents an intellectual and technical
challenge; it is the high-jump of colour, a
test of their skill, ingenuity and imagina-
tion. (Black skin has its own, entwined but
distinct, artistic history, with vexed conno-
tations of power, prejudice and eroticism.)
The latest attempt to plumb these
depths comes from Anish Kapoor, a Brit-
ish-Indian artist whose work questions no-
tions of perception. He has co-opted a revo-
lutionary black material which, he hopes,will break completely new ground. “I’m
really invested in the process of what is real
and what is not real,” Mr Kapoor says.
“What is an appearance? What’s a trick?
What’s an illusion?”
The discovery in ancient Egypt, China
and Rome that writing (and, later, printing)
worked best when black was used on a
white background gives black a special
place in the pantheon of colours. But be-
fore the concoction in Europe of black ink
from gall nuts (tumours that grow on trees
where insects have laid eggs), real black
was hard to conjure up. The early artists in
France’s Lascaux caves drew crude animals
and human figures with charcoal, which
sometimes washed away. Most confected
blacks, especially fabric dyes, produced a
muddy purply-grey or brown at best.No colours any more
It was only when black pigments—made
from coal, lampblack or even burned ivo-
ry—were successfully mixed with gum ara-
bic or linseed oil that it became possible to
create the black gloss that many European
artists came to love. Caravaggio revolution-
ised Baroque painting with his studies of
darkness; yet it was the Spaniards of a gen-
eration later, when black was the colour of
high fashion, who made black painting all
their own, starting with the power portraits
of Diego Velázquez and the brooding fig-
ures that haunt the tall works of Francisco
de Zurbarán. “Black became the colour of
distinction,” Philip Ball, the author ofColour in artPaint it black
The colour black has long been the ultimate test of an artist’s ingenuityBooks & arts
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