The Economist - USA (2020-11-07)

74 Books & arts The EconomistNovember 7th 2020

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“Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Col-

our”, has said. It wasn’t only a hue in its

own right, artists realised, but an enlivener

of other colours.

The myth of Orpheus, who descends

into the blackness of the underworld to

bring his dead wife, Eurydice, back to the

land of the living, has inspired musicians,

poets and painters. None more so, perhaps,

than Samuel Palmer. Retreating from the

problems associated with the Industrial

Revolution, in the 1820s Palmer went with a

band of like-minded spirits to live in the

Kent countryside where he witnessed

nights that were blacker than anything he

had ever seen. The series of works inspired

by his nocturnal ramblings represented

something of an epiphany for Palmer. He

called them “my blacks” or “little moon-

shines”, for the intensity they project is due

almost entirely to the blackness of his

night sky, as can be seen, for example, in a

tiny picture called “Cornfield by Moon-

light, with the Evening Star”.

Unlike Palmer and other Romantics,

Monet and some of his fellow Impression-

ists banished black entirely. Édouard Ma-

net, however, took it on. When he painted

his disciple and future sister-in-law,

Berthe Morisot, in 1872, he dressed her all

in black with a matching hat. With one side

of her face lit up gloriously and the other

darkly shaded, it is her eyes that capture

the viewer’s attention; in life they were

green, but Manet made them profound by

painting them black. “Manet was the stron-

gest of us all,” his friend, Camille Pissarro,

once said. “He turned black into light.”

Until my darkness goes

In the 20th century, Pablo Picasso used

black to ask how God could possibly exist

amid so much suffering. “Guernica”, his vi-

sual poem in black-and-white about the

Spanish civil war, recalls the use of black in

Francisco Goya’s prints, “The Disasters of

War”. Perhaps the shade’s most ambitious

devotee was Kazimir Malevich, a Russian

artist who enlisted black to invent a whole

new painterly language that elevated feel-

ings over representation. He called this

movement “suprematism”.

“Trying desperately to free art from the

dead weight of the real world,” he later

wrote, “I took refuge in the form of the

square.” Malevich painted many squares of

different colours, but “Black Square” (see

picture) is the one people remember. Un-

veiled against the backdrop of the first

world war and turmoil in Russia, Malev-

ich’s “Black Square” marked a turning-

point in modern art.

Malevich was a huge influence on his

successors, especially the American ab-

stract expressionists, but time has not been

kind to “Black Square”, at least not physi-

cally. These days it is shrunken, cracked

and slightly miscoloured. All the same, the

challenge that it represented to artists is as

powerful as ever.

It was exactly a century after “Black

Square”, in 2015, that Mr Kapoor secured

the rights to make art using Vantablack, the

blackest black ever created. It is not a paint

so much as a dense coating of tiny “nano-

tubes”—“Vanta” stands for “vertically

aligned nanotube array”—which, instead

of reflecting light, traps it almost com-

pletely. (It was developed as a material that

might be useful in hiding satellites.) In a re-

cent display in his studio, Mr Kapoor’s art-

works seemed to have no shape or con-

tours. A circle of Vantablack on the floor

could be a rug-like coating or a bottomless

hole; a bowl shape could be convex or con-

cave. There was no way of telling.

During the Renaissance, artists saw that

paint could be used to portray objects in

three dimensions. Vantablack seems to re-

move the object altogether. Speaking to

Artforum, a magazine, Mr Kapoor once said:

“Imagine walking into a room where you

literally have no sense of the walls—where

the walls are or that there are any walls at

all. It’s not an empty dark room, but a space

full of darkness.” For the viewer, as for the

artist, these works are another step in the

quest for the meaning of black. 7

I

t took michelangelo four years to

paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,

but most visitors spend less than 30 min-

utes gawking at it, often while pressed

against umpteen strangers. These are hard-

ly ideal conditions for beholding artistic

genius, and the pandemic has curbed most

discretionary travel, anyway. Now, for a

mere $22,000, it is possible to commune

with these Renaissance frescoes in the

comfort of your own home.

This month the Vatican, together with

Scripta Maneant, an Italian art publisher,

and Callaway Arts &Entertainment, a pub-

lisher in New York, have released “The Sis-

tine Chapel”, a three-volume set that docu-

ments every painted inch of this vaulted

room. Eachpage stitches together hun-

dredsoftinyhigh-resolution photos, taken

over months by photographers perched on

33-foot-tall scaffoldings. The results reveal

every daub of paint and every hairline

crack in plaster. The one-to-one visuals

capture the arm’s-length perspective Mi-

chelangelo had while painting it.

But $22,000? Some of the proceeds will

go towards the Vatican Museums’ conser-

vation efforts, says Nicholas Callaway of

Callaway Arts &Entertainment. Much of

the fee covers the costs of producing these

books. The 600 English-language editions

are all bound in silk and white calf leather,

and apparently only one bookbinder in the

world—in Novara, Italy—can hand-sew

something this size. The sets are rare, too,

as the Vatican has allowed only 1,999 copies

to be made (in a decree both strict and mys-

terious, true to form). The 1,000 in Italian

have already sold out.

Eagerfora glimpse,yourcorrespondent

Renaissance art

Take me to church

The Sistine Chapel.Callaway Arts &

Entertainment; 822 pages; $22,000

A lavish set of books brings readers closer to the Sistine frescoes

High art