On Color

by David Kastan

  But the ambivalence is even more fundamental. Forget, for a moment, our words for it. Is black a color or not?

  The answer, we are usually told, is that it is not. It is the absence of color: the visual experience we have when none of the visible wavelengths of electromagnetic energy (that is, those between about 400 and 700 nanometers) is received by the eye. Things appear black when they absorb (rather than reflect) this energy. Or at least when they absorb most of it. If all of the light waves were absorbed, we would not see anything. There would seem to be nothing there. This is what excites Kapoor about Vantablack, which apparently absorbs more than 99 percent of the light waves: “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 is not an empty dark room, but a room full of darkness.”16 But black is also the visual experience when there is nothing there to absorb the light or there is no light to be absorbed. Black is the absence of color, and it is also the color of absence. As the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo punned in her diary, “Nothing is black; really, nothing is black.”17

  A physicist might say the same thing (but it would not be a pun). Physicists usually do think nothing is black. In fact they think that there are no colors at all. There is only energy. The human visual system detects and processes particular wavelengths of energy, and we give color names to the visual experiences of this processing. So they are willing to call those colors. But none of these wavelengths corresponds to black.

  For a physicist, then—well, at least for a physicist thinking about physics—it makes sense to say that black is not a color. For almost anyone else (even, say, for a physicist attending a funeral), of course it is. Almost all people would agree that a black suit has a color—it doesn’t make sense to think of the suit as colorless—and that black (in whatever language) is the color it is. But out of respect for the physicists, it can be granted that black is a different kind of color than the seven we have already discussed. Those seven are chromatic, which really means only that they are the constituent colors of light that we see in the rainbow. Black is achromatic, which means that it is a color that can’t be seen anywhere among the gradations of color that appear between red and violet. So there are (at least) two different color scales: one the spectral colors of light, and the other the tonal colors existing from white to black, which includes all the shades of gray that can be made by their mixing.

  Yet still we see black as an exclusively visual aspect of the appearance of things, just as we see green as the color of peas and emeralds and see blue as the color of blueberries and sapphires. Perhaps confusingly (though confusion about black seems inescapable), blackmail, black humor, and black markets are not among the things that we see as black. And, oddly, neither is an airplane’s black box (which, it turns out, is orange). But the letters of the words you are now reading on this page are unmistakably black, not green or blue; and so are ravens and crows, and almost all of a clarinet—and panthers, and thirty-six of a piano’s eighty-eight keys. And the night sky is black.

  Though just what that last sentence means is difficult to determine. What is it that we are seeing that looks black when we look up at night? What is the thing of which its blackness is a primary visual characteristic? The sky? Or the space beyond? Or nothing at all? A nothing that has no color? Or the color of nothing? The “nothing that is not there,” in Wallace Stevens’s words in “The Snow Man,” or “the nothing that is”? Or are we just seeing black?

  If we are not exactly sure what it is that we are seeing as black, we are nonetheless confident that it is black. It is the color of the night sky, seemingly just as blue is the color of the sky that we see on a cloudless day. But there is a difference between the blue sky and the black one. The blue of the blue sky fits reasonably neatly into our conventional understanding of how colors are produced. It is an effect of the scattering of sunlight by the molecules of the atmosphere in such a way (a phenomenon known as Rayleigh scattering) that the shorter wavelengths of the light, which correspond to blue and violet, are mainly what get absorbed and are then radiated throughout the sky. But, at whatever time of day, once one is about eleven miles above the earth (in what is known as the mesosphere), our sky appears black because there is nothing there to scatter the light.

  On the earth, the sky at night appears black, though not because there is nothing to scatter the light, but because there is not enough light to scatter. Even the billions and billions of stars in space (some of you will remember that as a quotation from Carl Sagan) do not determine or even affect the color of the night sky. Their light appears only as shimmering points set in a limitless field of black, though perhaps we might describe that field, in Milton’s phrase, just as “darkness visible” (Paradise Lost, 1.63), not really a color at all.

  But we see it as color. We see it as black. Though maybe this has nothing to do with sight. At the very least, we think of it as a color. It is black—not the absence of color (nor, as some think the combination of all colors), but an individual color like all the others, though perhaps as the color before the others existed. It is our name for the darkness that, in almost all creation mythologies, was there “in the beginning.” Genesis tells us, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night” (Gen. 1:1–5, KJV).

  The creator called the darkness Night. We call it black. We are told—and we believe—that it was there in the beginning. It is our ground zero. The nineteenth-century French surrealist poet Arthur Rimbaud claimed that he had “invented the colors of the vowels,” and in his sonnet “Voyelles,” he assigned the color to each: “A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu.”18 Critics have usually assumed that the relation between letter and color was merely arbitrary. But “A” is noir; “A” is black. That’s the color of beginning.

  Painters, however, were not always so sure, though the very first painters used carbon blacks derived from charred wood and bone for the images they drew on cave walls. But once other pigments were available, black became just another color of the palette, and a secondary one at that, used to color things that were black and for outlines and shadows. Yet painters gradually found in it something more energetic and complex. There was no longer a question whether it was a color, only of how dominant a color it could be. In certain hands it was powerful and primary, “a force,” as Matisse said.19 Look at Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, J. M. W. Turner, and Manet (particularly his wonderful portrait of Berthe Morisot).

  And perhaps above all, look at Kazimir Malevich, with his Black Square (Figure 36). Squares, actually; he painted three of them, the first in 1915, which he backdated to 1913, and the last in 1929 or 1930, though none of these is precisely a square. (He seems to have referred to the painting just as “Four-cornered Figure.”) A black quadrangle on a white ground, the initial version was exhibited in 1915 in the Gallery Dobychina in Petrograd (the once and future Saint Petersburg). It was hung high near the ceiling across one of the corners of the room, just as a religious icon might be displayed in a Russian home.20

  The once-smooth matte black paint has now faded and cracked, and an earlier Malevich abstraction has been discovered beneath it. But the painting demands to be seen as a radical beginning. Symbolically, though not in fact chronologically, it is the first of his “suprematist” paintings. This accounts for its backdating. Malevich placed the painting carefully in the art gallery and placed it just as carefully in the history of art: at the beginning of a new kind of painting, whenever it was actually first painted.

  FIGURE 36: Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

  Malevich was not the only one for w
hom a black painting generated an exaggerated concern about artistic priority. Black seems to do that. In 1966, Barnett Newman wrote a letter to an art critic who had written a piece in Vogue about Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings: “That you chose to write on Reinhardt is your affair but to have discussed Reinhardt in a whole article without mentioning my black painting, Abraham, the first and still the only black painting in history. … He never would have painted the black paintings if he had not seen my black painting.”21

  Newman at least had the good sense not to mail the letter. And in fact he was wrong. Not about Reinhardt: Reinhardt’s first black painting was indeed made after Newman’s, painted in 1953, four years after Newman’s Abraham. And not even about Malevich, since his painting, after all, is not exactly a black painting but a painting of a black (not quite) square on a white background. But wrong about his own painting being “the first.” Malevich’s contemporary Aleksandr Rodchenko (who had also scooped Yves Klein) made a series of eight black paintings in 1918, thirty-five years before Newman’s Abraham. When Newman belatedly learned about these, he insisted to friends that they were really a very dark brown.22

  Clearly there is something about black. Malevich, too, had anxiously claimed priority for his black square, though priority in his own artistic development. His Black Square needs to come first, so it can be understood as the point of origin of something radically new, as “the first step of pure creation.” Painting is no longer to be an imitation of something in the world. It is now, as Malevich said, “an end in itself,” though of course that end was a beginning.23 Malevich pointed the way, but as the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr Jr., said, “Each generation must paint its own black square.”24

  Yet this beginning also has a precedent, not merely some thirty years earlier but almost three hundred. In 1617, an English polymath—physician, philosopher, astrologer, mystic, mathematician—named Robert Fludd, a graduate of Oxford with a BA, MA, and MD, and the son of a not inconsequential official in Queen Elizabeth’s court, published the first volume of his most ambitious work: Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia (The metaphysical, physical, and technical history of both worlds; that is, the macrocosm and the microcosm).

  It is a remarkably learned (if largely unreadable) synthesis of ancient wisdom and contemporary thought about the natural world and the cosmos, about the human and the divine. Today Fludd has largely been forgotten, but in the middle of the seventeenth century it was seriously proposed that his writings should replace those of Aristotle in the curriculum of both Oxford and Cambridge Universities.

  In an early chapter there is an unusual engraving, though it will probably look somewhat familiar (Figure 37). It is a matte black, quadrilinear figure set within a white border, which could itself be understood, in Malevich’s phrase, as representing “the zero of form.” Fludd, however, is more forthcoming than Malevich about what it represents—even that it represents. Each of its sides is labeled Et sic in infinitum (And so on to infinity). It is not an abstraction. It is, like every other one of the sixty or so engravings in Fludd’s book, an image of something. This one is the image of how Fludd imagined the originary chaos existing before the creation of the world. Not the darkness of death or of demons but the black of infinite possibility. It is a representation of what Milton would call “the womb of nature,” of the infinity of “dark materials” available “to create more worlds” (Paradise Lost, 2.911, 996).

  Malevich doesn’t annotate his square, and its rigorous formal austerity might easily suggest that, unlike Fludd, he has abandoned both representation and narrative for a realm of pure form referring to nothing but itself. The painting, hanging in the position of a Russian icon, could be understood as a deliberately provocative, uncompromisingly nonreferential icon of the new modernist credo: art for art’s sake.

  FIGURE 37: Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica physica atque technica historia (Oppenheim, 1617), 26

  But that may be to miss the point (or just to get the paint). A younger Russian artist, Varvara Stepanova, saw the Black Square as a metaphysical rather than a minimalist gesture: “If we look at the square without mystical faith, as if it were a real earthly fact, then what is it?” she asked.25 For Stepanova, it was something almost exactly like Fludd’s image: not a modernist insistence upon the inescapable materiality of the art object, but a mystical image of the void that was there “in the beginning.” The Black Square is, then, not exactly nonrepresentational, but a “non-objective representation,” in Malevich’s phrase: the representation of what existed before creation, before there was anything to represent.26 The painting is Malevich’s own act of “absolute creation,” the division of the darkness from the light, a creation, like God’s in Genesis, not ex nihilo, out of nothing, but out of the dark preexisting matter that required light and form—that first “beginning,” which wasn’t exactly that.27

  Malevich seems much more like his distant precursor Fludd than he does his most obvious modern successor, Ad Reinhardt, whose austere, subtly nuanced black paintings had made Newman so very anxious. Or at least Malevich seems more removed from the painter Reinhardt said he was. “The religion of art is not religion. / The spirituality of art is not spirituality,” Reinhardt wrote, insisting that he “wanted to eliminate the religious ideas about black.”28 Yet then again, Reinhardt said that he wanted to eliminate almost everything from his paintings—color, gesture, reference, personality. His great paintings could be taken as compelling evidence of the power of negative thinking. But for all the self-conscious renunciation, he never succeeded in fully eliminating the religious ideas, which is no doubt why he so often insisted he had. Religious ideas about black just won’t go away, either the positive or the negative ones. Malevich had his painting hung in the Gallery Dobychina as an icon—because it was one, the black square showing what was there at the beginning and showing the act of creation that gives it form.

  Black. But, maybe surprisingly, matte black, that is, the dull not the shiny version. Ater not niger; sweart not blaec. But that, too, was by design. Malevich (and also Reinhardt) carefully leached the oil from his paints, thinning the black, precisely so that it would not produce a lustrous black surface. A shiny black would reflect its surroundings, but the black he wanted was a black that was only itself, the black that was there before there was anything to reflect. Fundamental. Essential.

  Really basic black.

  What was there in the beginning and what might be there at the end.

  When Malevich died, mourners carried banners printed with his Black Square. His ashes were taken in a railroad car marked with the Black Square to the village outside of Moscow where the family of Malevich’s wife lived and where a small cube with the Black Square had been created by his friend Nikolai Suetin to mark his burial place.29 The monument was destroyed during World War II, when still another darkness covered the earth.

  When Reinhardt died, Thomas Merton, the poet and Trappist monk (and arguably the most influential American Catholic of the twentieth century), wrote to the poet Robert Lax to tell him of their college friend’s much-too-early death at fifty-three. “He walked off into his picture,” said Merton, consoling himself that “Ad is well out of sight in his blacks.”30 But maybe we all walk out of sight into that black. Supposedly the last words of the nineteenth-century French novelist Victor Hugo were: “I see black light.”31

  Of course he did: the darkness visible. Black is the color of both our beginnings and our ends—and it is the dark color of Lulamae Barnes’s Little Black Dress and the color of her brightest dreams.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness.

  HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick

  White

  LIES

  FIGURE 38: Frank Stella, The Whiteness of the Whale, 1987

  W hite is the mixture of all colors.” This is the first of its lies. N
ewton’s prism had indeed shown how “white” light could be divided into a continuum of more or less distinguishable colors, which could then be refocused back through the prism to reconstruct the original white light. But, first of all, the light was never what almost anyone would normally call white. And, second, the idea of white as a combination of all colors, though true for light, isn’t true for pigments, as anyone who has ever mixed paints together will know.

  What then is white? Is it, as has been asked about black, even a color at all? For physicists, the answer (just as for black) is typically no. Colors for physicists are merely the bands of visible light produced by specific wavelengths of electromagnetic energy (this last bit is what they have added to Newton’s account). “White” light consists of the totality of these component colors. But if white is what the component colors of light combine to produce, that would seem to make white something different from any one of them, which is part of the way they justify denying that white is a color.

  And yet in this case the sum seems much more like its parts than, say, water is like the elements of which it is composed. That is, white is more like red or green than water is like a molecule of oxygen or two of hydrogen. Still, the similarity of the whole to its parts in the case of white isn’t quite enough, at least for the physicists, to override the logic of their exclusion, although for the rest of us the obvious similarity accounts for the fact that generally we are unimpressed by their reasoning.