The Story of Black

by John Harvey

42 Richard Lovelace, ‘To Lucasta, Going to the Wars’, from Lucasta: Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs &c. (London, 1649), ll. 11–12.

  TEN: Our Colour?

  1 The Model T moved by stages into monochrome. In early 1909 (the first 2,500 cars) the touring model was red or green, the runabout grey, the town car, landaulet and coupé green. In 1910 all models were brewster green, in 1911–12 dark blue and in 1913–14 increasingly black. See Bruce W. McCalley, Model T Ford: The Car That Changed the World (Iola, WI, 1994), pp. 413–21; for Ford’s ‘black’ instruction see Henry Ford, My Life and Work (New York, 1922), p. 72. Ford notes that his ‘selling people’ did not at first agree with him.

  2 I quote Le Corbusier and Léger from Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1995), ‘colour . . . the caress’, p. 206; ‘only one colour, white’, p. 115; ‘cleans, cleanses’, p. 8; Léger, p. 231; ‘the delicious brilliance’, pp. 253–4.

  3 On Premet, Vionnet and Chanel, see Valerie Steele, The Black Dress (New York, 2007); also Valerie Mendes, Dressed in Black (London, 1999); on practical issues of black-dressmaking see Simon Henry, The Little Black Dress: How to Make the Perfect One for You (Lewes, 2008).

  4 Yohji Yamamoto is quoted in Brenda Polan and Roger Tredre, The Great Fashion Designers (New York, 2009), p. 180; on Versace and Elizabeth Hurley, see Amy Holman Edelman, The Little Black Dress (New York, 1997), p. 93; on Balenciaga and Rei Kawakubo see Valerie Steele, The Black Dress, n.p.

  5 As to the changing dress of witches over the centuries, see especially T. Norris, The History of Witches and Wizards (London, 1720), which includes an early woodcut of a witch black in face and dress and with a black beast, though most of Norris’s witches do not wear black gowns, and only a minority wear black hats. For further nineteenth-century witches sometimes in black hats and seldom in black gowns see the text and illustrations to William Harrison Ainsworth’s novel The Lancashire Witches (London, 1849). The Revd Richard Harris Barham’s collections of The Ingoldsby Legends (London, 1840, 1842, 1847) followed separate publication in Bentley’s Miscellany and The New Monthly Magazine.

  6 On Schiaparelli and Balenciaga see Steele, The Black Dress; Yohji Yamamoto is again quoted from Polan and Tredre, The Great Fashion Designers, p. 180; ‘Rolf’ is quoted from Armand Limnander at ‘Viktor & Rolf Review’, 10 March 2001, at www.style.com.

  7 See ‘5 Tips to Creating The Ultimate Bachelor Pad’ (3 May 2012), at www.woohome.com; Simona Ganea, ‘A Bachelor’s Black Dream Home’ (10 May 2012), at www.homedit.com; Jordan Davis, ‘Decorative Basics for a Bachelor Pad’ (17 March 2011), at www.ask.com; and ‘Beyond the Bachelor/ette Pad: Living with Black Furniture’, at www.apartmenttherapy.com.

  8 Newman is quoted from Yve-Alain Bois, ‘On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman’, October, 108 (Spring 2004), pp. 12, 16.

  9 Quoted ibid., p. 8.

  10 Quoted ibid.

  11 Reinhardt is quoted from Barbara Rose, ed., Art-As-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (Berkeley, CA, 1991), ‘black in sunlight’, p. 86; ‘useless, unmarketable’, p. 81; ‘timeless, spaceless’, p. 83; ‘five feet wide’, p. 82; see especially ‘Black as Symbol and Concept’, pp. 86–8.

  12 Quoted from Henri Meschonnic, ‘Le Rythme et la lumière avec Pierre Soulages’, in Pierre Soulages, noir lumière, ed. Francoise Jaunin (Lausanne, 2002).

  13 Like Reinhardt, Degottex has worked against the dominant lustre of the Western tradition in oils. ‘I only find light through mattness’, quoted in Par Lydie and Nello Di Meo, eds, Jean Degottex, 1976–1978 (Paris, 2010), p. 24. Cf. Reinhardt, ‘The glossier, texturier, gummy black is a sort of objectionable quality in painting. It’s one reason I moved to a sort of dark gray. At any rate it’s a matte black’, Art-As-Art, ed. Rose, p. 87.

  14 James Elkins, Pictures and Tears (London 2004), ‘like traps’, pp. 17–18; ‘sweep forward’, p. 18; ‘playing at drowning’, p. 10.

  15 Rothko is quoted from Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York, 1957), pp. 93–4.

  16 Elkins, Pictures and Tears, p. 18.

  17 See Bridget Riley, ‘Colour for the Painter’, in Colour: Art and Science, ed. Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 31–64.

  18 Quoted in Veit Gorner and Frank-Thorsten Moll, eds, Back to Black: Black in Current Painting (Heidelberg, 2009), p. 123.

  19 Especially sinister in Poe is water: there is a presage of death in the ‘black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre’ beside the house in ‘The Fall of The House of Usher’. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the ‘dreary water lay intensely black, still, and altogether terrible’ (chap. 2), and in ‘The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade’ ‘there flowed immense rivers as black as ebony, and swarming with fish that had no eyes’. Treasure Island (London, 1883), chaps 1 and 4; also the pirates fly, of course, ‘the black flag of piracy’ (chap. 19); Blackbeard was ‘was the bloodthirstiest buccaneer that sailed’ (chap. 6); and the treasure map locates the gold ‘ten fathoms south of the black crag’ (chap. 6). Black may also be, in Stevenson, the sign of vigour and life: Dr Livesey has ‘bright, black eyes’ and a ‘black poll’ under his powdered wig (chap. 1), while Squire Trelawney has eyebrows that are ‘very black, and moved readily’ (chap. 6). The Strange Case of Dr Jekkyll and Mr Hyde (London, 1886), ‘Story of the Door’, ‘Dr Lanyon’s Narrative’. There is another ‘morning, black as it was’ later in the story, when Jekkyll tells us he enters an inn with a black countenance (‘Henry Jekkyll’s Full Statement of the Case’); Mr Hyde has ‘a kind of black, sneering coolness’ (‘Story of the Door’). Bram Stoker, Dracula (London, 1897), chap. 2.

  20 Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, Massachusetts Review, 18 (1977).

  21 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London, 1981), pp. 522, 238.

  22 Ted Hughes, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, expanded edn (London, 1974), ‘Two Legends’, p. 13; ‘grinning into the black’, ‘The Contender’, pp. 41–2; ‘in the silent room’, ‘Crow Alights’, p. 21; ‘Crow-colour’, p. 66; ‘black is the wet otter’s head’, ‘Two Legends’, p. 13; ‘Crow’s Fall’, p. 36; ‘Crow Blacker than ever’, p. 69; ‘Magical Dangers’, p. 51.

  23 Quoted in Gorner and Moll, eds, Back to Black, p. 135.

  24 Ibid., p. 107. Fuller thoughts on black can be found in the writings of the British painter Ian McKeever. He is famous especially for the luminosity of his art, but has over the last 25 years produced many black paintings. They were shown together in a retrospective exhibition at the Tønder Museum in Denmark in 2011, ‘Black and Black Again . . .’. In the book that accompanied the exhibition he quotes Matisse’s remark that black is ‘a force’ and concludes, ‘when we actually do see true black being used as a colour in a painting, it comes as a shock. It takes us by surprise because it is actively black, and carrying with it the force to which Matisse referred.’

  25 Ibid., p. 93; Henry James, The Golden Bowl [1904] (Harmondsworth, 2009), Book 6, p. 566.

  26 Gorner and Moll, eds, Back to Black, p. 113.

  A Note on Chessboards, Death and Whiteness

  1 Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (London, 1843). The passages quoted come from just before, and just after, the start of Stave IV, ‘The Last of the Spirits’. For Albrecht Dürer, see the engravings Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of 1497–8, and Knight, Death and the Devil, 1513.

  2 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London, 1920), chap. 30, ‘Snowed Up’. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York, 1851), chap. 42, ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’. On Poe see chapter Ten, ref. 17, above. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain [Der Zauberberg, 1924] (London, 1999), p. 293. There was a black element in German military tradition, associated with the regiment known as The Black Brunswickers, founded in the nineteenth century by Friedrich Wilhelm, Der schwarze Herzog, the Black Duke of Brunswick, and later renewed in the black uniform of Himmler’s fear-police, the ss. Also in The Ma
gic Mountain, Hans Castorp is told of an Italian grandfather who wore black ‘in mourning for the state of the fatherland’: this is the radical use of black, favoured by young libertarian patriots like the arditti in Italy, including Gabriele D’Annunzio, and by the Macedonian freedom-fighters in Greece known as the ‘black tunics’. Castorp’s own German grandfather wore black ‘to indicate his oneness with a bygone time and his essential lack of sympathy with the present’ – this is the reactionary use of black once prevalent among European ruling classes. For both grandfathers, see The Magic Mountain, p. 151.

  3 When Mark Twain met Tsar Alexander, he was impressed to find that he wore ‘plain white drilling [with no] insignia whatever of rank’: The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress (Hartford, CT, 1869), chap. 37. In later life Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), who had habitually worn black serge, took to wearing white: he owned fourteen white suits, which he described as his ‘snow-white full dress’ and also as his ‘don’t-give-a-damn suit’. See Michael Sheldon, Mark Twain, Man in White: The Grand Adventure of His Final Years (New York, 2010).

  4 See T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (London, 1926), Book I, chap. 20, paragraph 1.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Colour and Sight

  Berlin, Brent, and Paul Kay, Basic Colour Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley, CA, 1969)

  Boyle, Robert, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (London, 1664), Part the Second, ‘Of the Nature of Whiteness and Blackness’

  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Goethe’s Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (London, 1840; reprinted in facsimile Cambridge, MA, 1970)

  Hardin, C. L., and L. Maffi, eds, Colour Categories in Thought and Language (Cambridge, 1997)

  Helmholtz’s Treatise on Physiological Optics, Translated from the Third German Edition, ed. James P. C. Southall (Menasha, WI, 1924)

  Lamb, Trevor, and Janine Bourriau, eds, Colour: Art and Science (Cambridge, 1995)

  Newton, Isaac, Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, 4th corrected edn (London, 1730)

  Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Remarks on Colour (Berkeley, CA, 1978)

  Colour and Culture

  Bradley, Mark, Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 2009)

  Bruno, Vincent J., Form and Colour in Greek Painting (London, 1977)

  Chevreuil, Michel, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours and Their Applications to the Arts, trans. Charles Martel, 2nd edn (London, 1855)

  Eco, Umberto, ‘How Culture Conditions the Colours We See’, in On Signs, ed. M. Blonsky (Baltimore, MD, 1985), pp. 157–75

  Gage, John, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London, 1993)

  Ling, Roger, Roman Painting (Cambridge, 1991)

  Pastoureau, Michel, Blue: The History of a Colour (Princeton, NJ, 2001)

  Turner, Victor, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY, 1967)

  Culture and the Colour Black

  Carr, Gillian, ‘Woad, Tattooing and Identity in Later Iron Age and Early Roman Britain’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, XXIV/3 (2005), pp. 273–92

  Jacobson-Widding, Anita, Red, White and Black as a Mode of Thought (Stockholm, 1979)

  Metcalf, Simon, and Eric Turner, ‘The Conservation of a c. 1867 Cast Iron Hat Stand: A Dresser Design and Original Coalbrookdale Paint Scheme Revealed’, DAS: The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present, 26, at www.decorativeartssociety.org.uk

  Mollard-Desfour, Annie, Le Noir: Dictionnaire des mots et expressions de couleur, XXe–XXIe siècle (Paris, 2005)

  Pastoureau, Michel, Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ, 2009)

  Wright, W. D., ‘The Nature of Blackness in Art and Visual Perception’, Leonardo, XIV (1981), pp. 236–7

  Black Clothes

  Harvey, John, Men in Black (London, 1995)

  Hollander, Anne, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley, CA, 1993)

  Holman Edelman, Amy, The Little Black Dress (New York, 1997)

  Mayo, Janet, A History of Ecclesiastical Dress (London, 1984)

  Mendes, Valerie, Dressed in Black (London, 1999)

  Norris, Herbert, Church Vestments: Their Origin and Development [1949] (Mineola, NY, 2002)

  Ribeiro, Aileen, Dress and Morality (London, 1986)

  Routledge, George, Routledge’s Manual of Etiquette [1860] (Fairford, Gloucestershire, 2007)

  Shkolnik, Amiram, C. Richard Taylor, Virginia Finch and Arieh Borut, ‘Why Do Bedouins Wear Black Robes in Hot Deserts?’, Nature, 283 (24 January 1980), pp. 373–5

  Steele, Valerie, The Black Dress (New York, 2007)

  Black in the Arts

  Bois, Yve-Alain, ‘On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman’, October, 108 (Spring 2004)

  Elkins, James, Pictures and Tears (London, 2001)

  Gorner, Veit, and Frank-Thorsten Moll, eds, Back to Black: Black in Current Painting (Heidelberg, 2009)

  Graham-Dixon, Andrew, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (London, 2010)

  Jaunin, Francoise, ed., Pierre Soulages: noir lumière (Lausanne, 2002)

  Langdon, Helen, Caravaggio: A Life (London, 1998)

  Lydie, Par, and Nello Di Meo, eds, Jean Degottex, 1976–1978 (Paris, 2010)

  Rodman, Selden, Conversations with Artists (New York, 1957)

  Rose, Barbara, ed., Art-As-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (Berkeley, CA, 1991)

  Schama, Simon, Rembrandt’s Eyes (London, 1999)

  Wigley, Mark, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1995)

  Black and Melancholy

  Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson [1922] (facsimile edn New York, 2001)

  Gowland, Andrew, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge, 2006)

  Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London, 1964)

  Kristeva, Julia, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1989)

  MacDonald, Michael, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-century England (Cambridge, 1981)

  Race

  Bâ, Sylvia Washington, The Concept of Negritude in the Poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Princeton, NJ, 1973)

  Bindman, David, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, The Image of Black in Western Art, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA, 2010–12)

  Brace, C. Loring, D. P. Tracer, L. A. Yaroch, J. Rob, K. Brandt and A. R. Nelson, ‘Clines and Clusters versus “Race”: A Test in Ancient Egypt and the Case of a Death on the Nile’, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 36 (1993), pp. 1–31

  Browne, Sir Thomas, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (London, 1646), Book VI, chap. 10, ‘Of the Blackness of Negroes’

  Burnel, Martin, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 2 vols (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987–91)

  Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa the African (London, 1789)

  Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin White Masks, trans. C. L. Markman (London, 1986)

  Gates Jr, H. L., ed., ‘Race’, Writing and Difference (Chicago, IL, 1986)

  Jordan, Winthrop D., White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Durham, NC, 1977)

  Lefkowitz, Mary R., and Guy MacLean Rogers, Black Athena Revisited (Durham, NC, 1996)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  MY BLACK STUDIES began with a lecture on black in the nineteenth century given in Bristol in 1981, which in time became a history of the colour black in men’s dress (Men in Black, Reaktion, 1995). Following what now seems a clear obsession, I here attempt a fuller history. In the process I have sometimes travelled far from my academic home in the study of the relations between the novel and visual art, and I am sincerely grateful for the guidance kindly given by experts in fields where my need was great. I am especially grateful to Professor Tarif Khalidi
of the American University in Beirut, who has given invaluable advice on Arab and Islamic culture. Also to Professor Mark Bradley of the University of Nottingham, who has advised most helpfully on the colours, and the blacks, of ancient classical civilization; and to Professor Patrick Chabal of King’s College London for his keen advice on African and African-Gallic questions. I am grateful to Anita Desai and Eric Auzoux for advice on the gods and goddesses of India. On contemporary art I have been particularly grateful for steers and comments from Barry Phipps, Fellow and Curator of Works of Art at Churchill College, Cambridge, who also arranged for me to meet the ‘black’ painter Peter Peri.

  I am grateful above all to my wife, Julietta Papadopoulou Harvey, for insights, ideas, many patient comments, and for putting the bright colour in my life, though she is also smart in black. I want also to thank warmly my colleagues at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. One advantage – or perhaps a danger – of working in a college is that, while one seldom sees one’s colleagues in one’s own teaching area, one is surrounded by experts in other fields, who are like hospitable hosts in their willingness to feed the most wayward curiosity. I am particularly grateful to Robert Henderson, Julian Hibbard, John MacLennan, Nigel Spivey and James Wade for their guidance on physiological, botanical, geological, classical and medieval questions, and to David Tolhurst for his patience in explaining the mechanisms of sight. For advice on many points, including the neat footwork of Louis XIV, I am grateful to Professor Peter Burke. But I would also like to give a more general thanks for decades now of friendly exchange. That is why this book, imperfect as it may be, is dedicated to that generous-minded community. More materially, I gladly thank the College for the grant from the Research Expenses Committee, which helped buy scans and rights for the illustrations.

  PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the following sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations are also supplied here, not given in the captions for reasons of brevity.