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Black moods

By Gabriel Ramin Schor

1 May 2006

Tate Etc. issue 7: Summer 2006

Robert Fludd

Detail of the black page from Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque

technica historia, published by Oppenheim (1617)

© Courtesy University Library, Vienna


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Gabriel Ramin Schor surveys the dark passages of black’s meaning and how artists have used it in

their work.

We talk of colours as if they were physical fixtures in our daily lives. We say they can be cold or warm,

though in doing so we draw on an ad hoc mix of vague metaphors. In his book on colour theory that

appeared in 1810, Goethe studied the psychological effect of colours. He called colour “troubled light”, and

there is a no more troubling – yet fascinating – colour than black. Could it even be called a colour? Goethewas not so sure. We see black as a surface that absorbs all the colours of the visible spectrum. And it has

always had a special aura of its own. It has also had a major influence on artists. Piet Mondrian, who

admired Goethe’s theories, used black to great effect in his abstract compositions of horizontal and vertical

axes. Here the lines were a structural, architectural framework. For him, it was a “non-colour”. Ad

Reinhardt, who made a close study of Mondrian’s work, took this position further when he said: “Black is

negation.”He saw it as the negation of all colours, the colour of pure negativity, the representation of the

impossibility of representation. The classic example of this is his series of “black paintings”, which rather

than reflect a progressive modernism, gave way to a more mystical, contemplative stasis.

The mysterious side to black has appealed to artists. For Paul Klee it was not to be rationalised: “We do not

have to understand the black, it is the primeval ground.” His comment recognised the archaic origins of

black – back to the time when man had neither tamed fire nor used it to lighten the hours of darkness. One

is reminded of the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which theenigmatic black monolith appears unexpectedly in the early days of humankind, and of the night that

follows which induces overwhelming fear and existential uncertainty in the apes. Does black actually tap

into our brain stem; is it part of our evolutionary experience? For all the progress in neurological research,

there is still no answer. All we know for certain is that in our collective consciousness it can evoke a sense

of helpless vulnerability.We talk of the Black Death, the black market and blackmail. It often connects to

irrational things or those that refuse to submit to any system of cultural certainties.

So you could say that black is subversive, in that it undermines the status quo. In his Philosophical Enquiry

into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), Edmund Burke suggests that it is

connected both with the terrible and the sublime. His sensualist aesthetic exerted a considerable influence

on future generations, such as the American Abstract Expressionists in New York in the late 1940s and

Barnett Newman in particular. His atmospherically black Prometheus Bound 1952 is the last in a series of

four paintings. The first three, from 1951 – Day before One, Day One and Ulysses – are all presented in thesame format as Prometheus Bound . The first and third are in dark blues, Day One is in red, and all three are

signed and dated. Prometheus Bound , on the other hand, is not signed. The year before he made this

painting, he had had his second one-man show in New York. It met with an extremely poor reception that

wounded the artist. Even fellow members of the avant-garde and otherwise loyal colleagues turned their

backs on him. The traumatic experience ushered in Newman’s “blackest years”, as he later called them.

During that time he withdrew completely from the art world and even considered abandoning his career. In

addition, he suffered a near fatal heart attack. Prometheus Bound , a painter’s meditation on the trauma of

being shut out, is Newman’s negative self-glorification, an abstract allegorical portrait of his own artistic

fate. It was to be seven long years before he found a way out. He had to wait until the late 1950s for a new

generation of painters to emerge who were able to understand his work for what it was. The young Frank

Stella, for instance, regarded Newman’s creations as the immediate precursors of his own famous pin-

stripe paintings.

Black has repeatedly been associated with solid and geometric forms. The best known example dates back

to the early seventeenth century in a page within volume one of Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi maioris

scilicet et minoris metaphysica (1617). The image – a black square – is presented in the context of a

metaphysical iconography of the infinite. Each of the four sides of the square (slightly distorted so that it

looks more like a rhombus) is marked with the same words: “Et sic in infinitum.” For Fludd, this image

was nothing less than a representation of the prima materia, the beginning of all creation.


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Kasimir Malevich

Black Square on a White Ground 1914–15

Oil on linen

80 x 80 cm

© State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square on a White Ground , painted almost 300 years later in 1914–15, seems

like a distant echo of Fludd’s pictorial creation myth. In Malevich’s canvas the pictorial space, perspective

and any sense of illusion are eradicated to leave just the pure black plane. This Suprematist picture, which

was to become an icon of modernism, in turn provided the springboard for Ad Reinhardt’s geometric

black paintings.


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Behind these traditions of radical non-representationalism, these celebrations of iconoclasm, we can detect

a sense of melancholy that runs through the works. This mysterious sentiment has a connection with black

that dates back to Aristotle – in the Greek language the roots of the word melancholy literally mean black

bile. Following in Aristotle’s footsteps many centuries later, Robert Burton, whose low spirits held him

hostage in Oxford, adopted the pseudonym Democritus Junior when he published his treatise The Anatomy

of Melancholy in 1621. An investigation into the state of melancholy, its history, causes and potential

remedies, it was a huge literary success – reprinted and enlarged five times during his lifetime and onceposthumously. The above-mentioned celebrations of iconoclasm were not, however, always received

without complaint, and conservative cultural critics repeatedly targeted the entirely black page in the first

chapter of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), which is

accompanied by the text: “Alas, poor YORICK!”

In the nineteenth century, the colour black featured in very different contexts. Crucial to its role was the

response to the work of Velázquez by two very different artists, Goya and Manet. For Goya, black is the

vehicle for a radical negativity in the social universe – you just have to look at his copious images of death

and disaster. In Manet’s case, it often serves to highlight the self-referentiality and autonomy of painting.

This was to be of ground-breaking importance for the course of modernism – a good example being Henri

Matisse’s French Window at Collioure (painted, incidentally, in the same year as Malevich’s black square).

It draws the viewer’s gaze through the atmospherically differentiated centre section of the painting to a

darkened balcony scene. Matisse was the master of autonomous colours who instigated an important arthistorical shift with his text Black is a Colour (1946), where he writes:

Black is a force: I depend on black to simplify the construction… The Orientals made use of black as a

colour, notably the Japanese in their prints. Closer to us, I recall a painting by Manet in which the velvet

jacket of a young man with a straw hat is also expressed by a blunt, lucid black. Doesn’t my painting of the

Marocains use a grand black which is as luminous as the other colours in the painting?


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Frank Stella

From Black Series II 1967Lithograph on paper

38.1 x 55.9 cm

© Tate

© ARS, NY and DACS, London 2006

In other words, Matisse is at pains to release black from its generally accepted identity as a purely

absorbent colour, and to establish it as a radiant one with a luminescent quality. This is a reversal of the

approach taken by the Impressionists, who, with their predominant interest in light, largely ignored it.

Kandinsky, who also liked using black lines in his work, regarded black as leading an existence somewhere

away from the “life of simple colour”, which he described either as a circular structure or in terms of its

various polarities – yellow/blue, red/green and violet/orange.


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Jenny Holzer

Black Garden 1994

Städtische Galerie, Nordhorn, Germany

© 2006 Jenny Holzer/ARS, NY and DACS, London

More recently, there has been increasing and eclectic interest in black. In some cases it has alluded to socialand political changes. Jenny Holzer’s Black Garden, a permanent installation she made for the Städtische

Galerie, Nordhorn, Germany, in 1994, was created, as Holzer has said, as an “anti-memorial” which

featured “black or very dark red plants”. It could be interpreted as the death of a world utopian view – a

melancholic reworking of Poussin’s painting Et in Arcadia ego, where Death is also present in Arcadia –

even at home in the utopia of a life beyond negativity.

If Holzer’s garden makes subtle references to a historical narrative of the meaning of landscape, a more

visually rudimentary approach can be seen in Matt Calderwood’s Tape 2004. In this video piece we see a

glowing light bulb which is slowly being wrapped with black masking tape until the screen is plunged into

total darkness. Here is one of the truly primal instances of a melancholic experience – a solar eclipse

transposed into the realms of everyday life. Whereas Calderwood’s use of blackness could be seen as a

modern parallel to all those godly Romantic paintings of sunsets, Richard Serra has consistently sought to

secularise black, shifting its meaning from a mythical colour to a substantial, physically present paint, sothat its optical characteristics seem less important than its tactile qualities, and we begin to sense its

gravitational nature (black is heavier than orange).

Sometimes black can evoke a very personal response. In my own case it relates to my acquaintanceship

with the great art critic David Sylvester (1924–2001), who I was fortunate enough to meet in the early

1990s. Several years later I learned of his death through an in memoriam piece in Tate Magazine. The text

was a wonderful interview with Tim Marlow on the subject of Francis Bacon and included a black-and-

white photograph of David, with that uniquely serious, penetrating gaze. On the opposite page – quite by

chance – was a reproduction of Jeremy Deller’s I Love Melancholy 2000. When I had finished reading it, it

was as though I could still hear his deep voice resonating with echoes of our conversations that revolved,

above all, around the work of Barnett Newman. He once told me that Newman, who he knew very well and

greatly admired, had been an “ironic tragedian”, whereas he regarded himself as a “vital melancholic”, for,

as he put it, he had “something of an erotic relationship” to melancholy. To me, Deller’s image felt like amodern reworking of Nietzsche’s Amor fati, with which he postulates an unconditional love of fate. It is

also an image in which we can enjoy plenty of other interpretations. I felt drawn to remembering the last

page of W.G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn (1995), where he remarks that in seventeenth century

Holland “it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over

all the mirrors and all canvases depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it

left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse

of the land now being lost for ever”.

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