Intro to the blacks

Black represents opposing ideas: authority and humility, rebellion and conformity, and wealth and poverty. It also signifies absence, modernity, power, elegance, professionalism, mystery, evil, traditionalism, and sorrow.

Black also implies submission. Priests wear black to signify submission to God. Yet the bad guys wear black hats.

In Western countries, black is the color of mourning, while in many African countries white is the color worn during funerals.

In the Japanese culture, black means experience, as opposed to white, which symbolizes naiveté. Thus the black belt is a mark of achievement and seniority in many martial arts, whereas white belt is a rank-less belt that comes before all other belts.

Here’s what Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), a Russian painter and art theorist, had to say: “A totally dead silence, ... a silence with no possibilities, has the inner harmony of black. In music it is represented by one of those profound and final pauses, after which any continuation of the melody seems the dawn of another world. Black is something burnt out, like the ashes of a funeral pyre, something motionless like a corpse. The silence of black is the silence of death. Outwardly black is the color with least harmony of all, a kind of neutral background against which the minute shades of other colors stand clearly forward. It differs from white in this also, for with white nearly every color is in discord, or even mute altogether.”

Black means fashionable. A black tie dinner is very formal and elegant. Black is now popular in fashion because it makes people appear thinner. In the medieval era, black was fashionable; it became the habit of courtiers and a symbol of luxury as clearly shown in this portrait of a youth in front of a white curtain, painted by Lorenzo Lotto in 1508.

The blackest black Rembrandt, Portrait of Aechje Claesdr. 1634, Rembrandt loved blacks. His sitters’ black clothes called for the most intense black pigment. Therefore, bone black is found everywhere in Rembrandt’s paintings, but is always mixed with other pigments and/or lakes. There are just a couple of exceptions. One case is the portrait of Aechje Claesdr (1634, The National Gallery, London). Rembrandt used brushstrokes of pure bone black for the darkest parts of the clothing.

In paintings...

In practice, black is considered a color, in the sense that black is the color of objects that absorb any light and do not reflect any part of the visible spectrum; Black is therefore experienced when no visible light reaches the eye. A black paint can be made mixing the three primary pigments so that no light is reflected. There are many black pigments and artists prefer one over another based on the shades of their blacks. Indeed, while carbon black, the first and the easiest to manufacture, is a dull black made of charcoal, vine black, is traditionally made by charring desiccated grape vines and stems, which produce beautiful bluish blacks. Bone black, made of burnt bones from prehistoric times, is the deepest available black. Rembrandt used it for the black clothing worn by his sitters in order to distinguish them from the already dark night surroundings.

Timeline of black pigments.