by David Kastan
Yet this reversibility of perspective is calculated by the artists. It isn’t just that the paintings are identifiable representational images as well as abstract arrangements of strokes of color (figurative paintings are always both) but that these paintings actively solicit our shifts of perspective. They are pictures and they are paintings, and they insist on being both of these things. But they insist just a little bit more on being paintings.
They offer a ravishing image and lure the viewer in toward them. But paying close attention disorganizes the world they seemingly present. Only by keeping your distance, one might say, does the world stay in focus. In most aspects of our life, it is the other way around: attentiveness is rewarded with clarity, and distance distorts and disfigures. But here we recognize the world only when we misrecognize the painting, or at least when we decide not to look carefully at it.
León de Lora was wrong about Pissarro, but he had something partially right. Our perception of the paintings is trapped into toggling back and forth, but between a recognizable world of familiar objects and the blobs and strokes of color by which that world is pictorially composed. And the toggling is where the action is: it is the evidence of the painter’s control. This is art, not nature. This is art, not optics. This is art declaring, not exactly its dominion over nature and optics (that is something art never really has, no matter what painters and critics sometimes claim), but its indifference to both—recognized in the “arbitrary violet” that had seemingly been chosen as the color of the atmosphere.
We often think of painting as a window. In 1877, in the Gazette des Lettres, Amédée Descubes-Desgueraines said that the impressionists painted the world “as if seen through a window suddenly thrown open.”25 That is the illusion they encouraged. But most good painting is not a window. In fact, it is much more like a wall. It keeps us from what is “out there” rather than reveals to us what is, though for so long so much painting professed to do just that.
What seems to be light is really paint. It is paint pretending—or, maybe better, pretending to pretend—to be light. And it is oil paint. That should never be forgotten. Monet could have painted with watercolors, a medium arguably better suited to rendering evanescent effects of light than the opacity of the oil paints he used. But he hardly ever did. (Both Pissarro and Cézanne, it should be noted, often painted with them.) For Monet, it was, as the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam would later write, always “the thickness of oil / warmed by the lilac brain.”26
You cannot miss the tension between the solidity of the pigment and the immateriality of the light it is asked to represent (any more than you can avoid the gap between the time needed to apply the paint and the seeming “instantaneity,” in Monet’s word, of the scene). And this marks a big step in the history of painting as it moves in the direction of recognizing paint as its real subject. Violet was achieved by glazing cobalt blue with madder red, at least until a cobalt violet pigment, invented by the French chemist Jean Salvétat in 1859, became generally available to artists around 1890. But whatever the pigment, violet was materialized and set to work to become the color of the immaterial air.
Monet, however, was not yet ready completely to sever painting from the task of painting something (any more than Van Gogh had been). It still remained nominally in the service of some quasi-realistic illusion, even if this was, in Monet’s case, only the sparkling illusion of the atmosphere. The world for Monet and the impressionists was largely a pretext for the exploration of color, but they weren’t ready totally to give themselves up to what Kandinsky would later call its “free-working.”27 Neither, it should be said, was Kandinsky. But Monet would eventually come close.
Monet would turn from painting things in the light to painting the light of things and ultimately to painting the light itself. At the end, the lily pond at Giverny provided a structureless structure for displaying almost pure forms of luminosity—as color struggled to separate itself from shape (see Figure 30).
In his extraordinary paintings of water lilies there are few spatial clues for a viewer to rationalize the shallow space. There is neither a horizon line nor any boundary of the pond. The edges of the painting—where the image stops—seem completely arbitrary. The world is presented as a kaleidoscope of colored patches.
The simile isn’t fanciful. The kaleidoscope was designed for “the inversion and multiplication of simple forms,” as its inventor David Brewster said in 1819.28 The first kaleidoscopes worked by setting two mirrors at an angle in a tube filled with colored objects with an eyepiece at one end. The mirrors fragment and multiply the shards of color, functioning in the tube almost exactly as the sky and the water do in Monet’s water lilies. Patterns of color bounce back and forth between what Marcel Proust called the “magic mirror” of water and sky, creating gorgeous intensities of luminous color.29
Eventually artists would push these hints of abstraction all the way. There would be no more need for the lily pond. Color could be just color, and paint could unashamedly be paint—and light, it should be said, would itself come to be no longer dependent upon its usual sources and supports, freed to be only itself, as in the installations and projections of Dan Flavin or James Turrell (Figure 33).
But first there was the need for Monet and his “lilac brain.” The subsequent history of modern art—at least that history in which color triumphs over line—knows its debt to him, just as the other history, in which line wins out, recognizes its debt to Cézanne. Flavin, even before he was Flavin, so loved the Museum of Modern Art’s two water lilies paintings that when they were heavily damaged in a fire in April 1958, he sent the museum a donation in the hope of preserving whatever scraps of the canvases survived.30
And yet it is almost always Cézanne who in the conventional histories of art gets the credit for setting modern art on its way, maybe because Monet seems too frivolous compared to the austere Cézanne—or maybe it is just that color does. But this fact alone attests to how much we need Monet and the “previously unimagined, unrevealed, all-surpassing power of the palette,” as Kandinsky said while standing before one of Monet’s haystack paintings.31 Monet initiates a different history of modern art than the one we usually relate.
FIGURE 33: James Turrell, Skyspace Piz Uter, Zuoz, Switzerland, 2005
Both histories, of course, are true, at least to the degree that any history can be said to be true. Certainly, say, in Pierre Bonnard, André Derain, and Henri Matisse; Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, and Georgia O’Keeffe; Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Francis, and Joan Mitchell; and Jasper Johns, Bridget Riley, and Gerhard Richter, we can see the outline of a history of modern art that derives from Monet. But outlines are, of course, exactly what Monet taught us to distrust, beginning in Paris in 1874. On April 15.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Black is the most essential color.
ODILON REDON
BASIC
Black
FIGURE 34: Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
There is probably no more celebrated dress than the black satin sleeveless sheath that Audrey Hepburn wears in the opening scene of the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It is the most famous Little Black Dress of all time, even though it is full length. It is also the most expensive. In 2006, one of the three versions that Givenchy designed for the movie sold at a Christie’s auction in London for £467,200.
At the beginning of the film, Hepburn, as Holly Golightly, wears the evening dress as she exits from a New York City taxi on an empty Fifth Avenue in front of Tiffany’s. It is about 5:00 A.M. (and she has not risen early). Her hair is in a high bun with a small tiara in front; she wears a rope of pearls, long black gloves, and big sunglasses. She stares up at the engraved name Tiffany and Co. above the closed doors and walks to the store window. She stands there, looking at the jewels, as she eats a pastry and drinks her morning coffee from a paper cup.
That’s her breakfast at Tiffany’s.
The sophistication is a masquerade; she is playing dress-up
. A beguiling waif, Holly Golightly is a more knowing and determined Eliza Doolittle, reinventing herself as a sophisticated New Yorker. She was born Lulamae Barnes, in Tulip, Texas (a real town on Farm Road 2554, twelve miles north of Bonham in north-central Fannin County, with a population today of forty-four). She got married when “she was going on fourteen” to the local horse doctor. She spent her days paging through “a hundred dollars’ worth of magazines,” as her practical husband says, “looking at show-off pictures” and “reading dreams.”1 At fifteen, she ran away from him and from rural Texas, to try to live those dreams before they turned to ashes in her mouth.
The black dress is the stuff of those dreams, even if the transformation it effects is not even skin-deep. “She’s a phony,” one character says, but “she’s a real phony. Because she honestly believes all the phony junk she believes.”2 “Crap” is the word used by the narrator of Truman Capote’s novella.
The black dress, however, is certainly worth believing in. It isn’t “crap” or “phony junk.” It is an essential item in virtually every woman’s closet. And women more sophisticated than Lulamae completely believe in it. It would become “sort of a uniform for all women of taste,” as Vogue proclaimed in 1926. “When a little black dress is right, there is nothing else to wear in its place,” said Wallis Simpson, the American socialite whom King Edward VIII married in 1936, but only after abdicating the British throne to be able to wed her.3 Now that’s a dream Lulamae Barnes might have dreamed. All for love and an LBD.
By 1936, the LBD was already a fashion staple, having been popularized in the 1920s in large part by Coco Chanel’s iconic “Ford” design (Figure 35).
With the Little Black Dress, the color of funerals became the color of fashion, though fashion now made democratic—functional, accessible, and black—available both to the Duchess of Windsor and to Lulamae Barnes. “Ford” had become a fashion term, not just an automotive one. “A Ford is a dress that everyone buys,” said Elizabeth Hawes, an American stylist who had begun her career as a sketcher, pretending to be a buyer at the Paris fashion shows in order to copy the designs for American manufacturers.4 But two urban legends intersect in the story of the Chanel “Ford.”
As matters of fact, the Chanel dress was no more the first LBD than the Model T was available to a customer in “any color that he wants, so long as it is black.”5 In 1908, when the Model T was first produced, the car was available in red, blue, gray, and green—but not black. In 1912, it was available only in blue with black fenders. Not until 1914 did black become its sole available color, and it stayed that way until 1926, when, ironically, Ford reintroduced color choices in the very year Chanel identified her black dress with Ford’s once exclusively black cars. And Chanel was not, in any case, the dress’s first designer. Another Parisian designer, Jean Patou, had some seven years earlier introduced the iconic dress, referring to it as one of his “Fords,” though like the car itself, his simple design came in different colors, though all “alike in line and cut.”6
FIGURE 35: The Chanel “Ford”—The Frock That All the World Will Wear, Vogue, October 1926
Little black dresses, however, were well known long before they became associated with Parisian couturiers. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Henry James had repeatedly imagined women wearing one. In his novel The Awkward Age, published in 1899, the willful Duchess comments on the appearance of Carrie Donner: “Look at her little black dress—rather good, but not so good as it ought to be.”7 And in 1902, in The Wings of the Dove, Milly Theale’s “difference,” her je ne sais quoi, is unmistakably marked “in the folds of the helplessly expensive little black frock that she drew over the grass as she now strolled vaguely off.”8 Lulamae Barnes wants to be more like Milly than Carrie. She wants seemingly effortlessly to produce the effect she so self-consciously strives for. And it starts with the dress. But Milly Theale is “really rich”; Lulamae is not. She is a “working” girl, a fact she tries to make even herself forget. But that’s the beauty of the LBD. It is the dress of pure possibility. It allows everyone to imagine that social gaps can be narrowed and perhaps, if only for a moment, closed.
That is what black clothing has always done. It performs a sort of social alchemy. But it doesn’t always happen from the top down. In Renaissance Italy and Spain, black became Europe’s most fashionable color rather than just the obligatory color of mourning.9 Priests, monks, and friars had long dressed in black robes as signs of humility and penitence, as well as of their lack of interest in the things of this world. But by the late fourteenth century, black had become worldly. Wealthy merchants had begun to wear black, no doubt in part to give the impression of sober probity, but also because sumptuary regulations (laws that restricted certain luxury goods, including fabrics and dyes, to specific social classes) prevented them from wearing the rich reds and purples allowed to the aristocracy. The luxurious blacks that were initially produced for these prosperous merchants were soon adapted by aristocrats, sometimes, as is often said, as conspicuous acts of prolonged grieving but usually only because the splendid black fabrics served as brilliant foils for the gold and furs that proclaimed their position and power.
Goethe, in his book on color, had remarked that in the Renaissance “black was intended to remind the Venetian nobleman of republican equality.”10 Perhaps it was so intended, but the reality, of course, was that it served to remind everyone else of the nobleman’s superiority—a superiority proclaimed in subtle but unmistakable marks of distinction, which asserted in fabric, tone, and design what the color alone might have effaced. In the portraits of Renaissance painters like Hans Holbein, Bronzino, Titian, Velázquez, and Anthony van Dyke, it is clear that black had obviously taken its place atop the social ladder.
By the mid-1800s, when the widespread use of black in clothing actually did begin to blur the social distinctions that earlier dress codes were designed to secure, the new fashion latitude was not always looked upon as a positive sign of social progress. The nephew of the nineteenth-century translator of Goethe’s color theories wrote a strange book of decorating and fashion “hints,” in which he lamented not only that “Englishmen wear the same dress at an evening party and at a funeral” but also that “many a host who entertains his friends at dinner has a butler behind his chair who is dressed precisely like himself.” And “to add to this confusion, the clergyman who rises to say grace might, so far as his apparel goes, be mistaken for either.”11
It is confusing. Black is a color worn equally by mourners and monarchs, melancholics and motorcycle enthusiasts. It’s the color favored both by beatniks (remember those?) and by Batman. By ninjas and by nuns. By fascists and by fashionistas. Hamlet, Himmler, and Hepburn all wore black. So did Martin Luther and Marlon Brando—and Fred Astaire. It is a color that can be both recessive and excessive: the color of abjection and of arrogance, of piety and of perversity, of restraint and of rebelliousness. It’s the color of glamour, and it is the color of gloom.
Yet whatever fashion statement it is intended to make (or merely because it can make so many), black clothing is everywhere. Culture weaves the ambivalence lying at the heart of the color into its different dress codes. In 1846, Charles Baudelaire saw the ubiquitous black clothing on the streets of his Paris as “the inevitable uniform of our suffering age, carrying on its very shoulders, black and narrow, the mark of perpetual mourning.” Maybe it is true, as he said, that “all of us are attending some funeral or another.”12 Certainly all ages suffer, and our various black outfits signify how we respond. They mark how defiant or despairing, or merely indifferent, we feel in the face of that fact.
Black, however, is always the dominant color, and always provides our stable point of reference. Every year some new color is proclaimed “the new black”—and every year the old black continues to be what is most in style. “When I find a color darker than black, I’ll wear it,” Coco Chanel is reputed to have said. “Until then, I’ll wear black.” The sentiment was laconically echo
ed by Wednesday Addams, the proto-Goth daughter on the 1960s television comedy The Addams Family: “I’ll stop wearing black when they invent a darker color.”
Seemingly now they have. A British molecular engineering firm, Surrey NanoSystems, has developed a super-black material, named Vanta-black, that is darker than any previously known color, and to which the company has controversially granted exclusive artistic rights to the sculptor Anish Kapoor.13 But it is, as yet, too expensive to be used for clothing. So the old black still will have to do.
Yet, however dark black might be, ambivalence surrounds it. It is there in the language we use to name it. Latin needed two words for the color: ater and niger. Ater is the dull black, niger the one that shines, marking the difference, say, between soot and obsidian. In English there is just “black,” but somewhere in its past the same distinction lies. Like Latin, Old English has two words marking a similar difference: sweart and blaec. The visual quality they distinguish is brilliance rather than hue. But complicating this further is that blaec has an Old English twin (or maybe cousin), blac. Understandably, the two words are not always carefully differentiated, even by Old English speakers and scribes. To the degree that this pair can be distinguished at all, blaec means more or less what we today mean by black, but blac means pale, shining, and sometimes even white. Both words come from the identical Indo-European root that means “to burn,” which explains the oddity: one word is used for the carbonized material remaining after a fire, one for the fire itself.
So in the beginning, at least in the linguistic beginning, black was both dull and shiny, dark and light, black and white. None of the older words for “black” was designating exactly what we now think of as a color; none was a chromatic label for a discrete visual experience that is autonomous and abstract. Those older words describe some more complex lived experience, which explains why “black” and “bleach” can be etymologically related—and which should make us wonder how it has happened that we so easily imagine sharply polarized worlds, in which, as Jorge Luis Borges says of the black-and-white chessboard, the “two colors hate each other.”14 But they never were opponents; they were partners. “Black night, white light, inwound as one,” the poet Joaquin Miller wrote.15 And, in any case, colors don’t hate.