The Story of Black Read online

  The Story of Black

  Also by John Harvey

  Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators

  Men in Black

  Clothes

  Vathmedon/Stairs (with Aris Georgiou)

  The Plate Shop

  Coup d’Etat

  The Legend of Captain Space

  The Story of Black

  JOHN HARVEY

  REAKTION BOOKS

  For the fellowship,

  senior and junior too,

  of Emmanuel College,

  Cambridge.

  Published by

  Reaktion Books Ltd

  33 Great Sutton Street

  London EC1V 0DX, UK

  www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

  First published 2013

  Copyright © John Harvey 2013

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Page references in the Photo Acknowledgments and

  Index match the printed edition of this book.

  Printed and bound in China

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Harvey, J. R. (John Robert)

  The story of black.

  1. Black.

  2. Symbolism of colors.

  3. Black in art.

  I. Title

  155.9’1145-dc23

  eISBN: 9781780231433

  contents

  Introduction: How Black Is Black?

  ONE The Oldest Colour

  TWO Classical Black

  THREE The Black of God

  FOUR Black in Society: Arabia, Europe

  FIVE Two Artists in Black

  SIX Black Choler

  SEVEN Servitude and Négritude

  EIGHT Black in the Enlightenment

  NINE Britain’s Black Century

  TEN Our Colour?

  A Note on Chessboards, Death and Whiteness

  REFERENCES

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INDEX

  1 Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, c. 1500, oil on panel.

  Introduction: How Black Is Black?

  LEONARDO DA VINCI was clear about black. ‘Black is no colour’, he said. Black, however, was still a pigment on his palette, and one he used often – for backgrounds. His Lady with an Ermine (1489–90) is painted with silvery, elusive colours – except for her clear red sleeve – but behind her there is only opaque, solid blackness. She also wears a black necklace. Again in Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, a ghostly Jesus floats before us – gazing, it seems, from the world of the dead, with brown, glazed, unseeing eyes – and behind him is the solid black of coal or soot (illus. 1). So if black, for Leonardo, was not a colour, still it made the perfect background against which colour showed.1

  Other artists have been enthusiastic. Matisse said ‘black is a force’, while Renoir called black ‘the queen of colours’ and quoted Tintoretto’s ‘the most beautiful of all colours is black’. Historically there has always been the question: where does black stand in relation to colour? Black is not a colour in the spectrum: it cannot be, since the spectral colours are made of light. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed – and Goethe later came to believe – that bright colours could be made by mixing white and black. The ambiguity of black – is it thick stuff or nothingness, a colour or darkness? – has helped it to carry other opposite values: fertile soil or burned cinders; smart clothes or widow’s weeds; the sexual mysteries of the night or death, depression and grief. Beethoven spoke of a ‘black chord’ in music. No other colour has been so identified with extremes that are opposite and absolute.2

  Nor are these meanings constant. The history of this colour is like the record of an invasion. Black used to mark, mainly, the terrifying realms that lay outside human life, but over time we have brought black close to us: we have searched it out within our bodies and even within our souls. By stages this colour of death, terror and negation has come to occupy faith, art and the texture of social life. Seen in this perspective, the history of black is the history of the partial accommodation of the terrifying. Black has also loomed ever larger in the politics of race. But before addressing such themes, there are some basic issues with which I should perhaps begin: such as the relation in which black stands to light; and how we see it; and whether it is or is not a colour.

  At the end of his own discussion of black, the colour historian Michel Pastoureau wonders whether black, at last, has become ‘an average colour . . . a colour like all the others’. And black is a colour like others in the sense that we have black ink as well as blue and red ink, and black paint as well as terracotta. But black differs from other colours in that we cannot switch on a black light, while we can switch on a red or white one. Wittgenstein said that we could not, in a lamp, have a grey or brown light. But still grey or brown are made of light, while black is said to have no light. In this, black is like no other colour. Nor, in either lights or pigments, can we speak of a faint or pale black as we speak of faint red, light blue: there is only ‘saturated’ black.3

  Black is, then, at once a colour and not a colour, and both these things are often said. Actually, if black is any colour, we would have to say that it is white. For no black item is utterly black: the blackest velvet, in deep shadow, still returns some photons to us. And as Thomas Young said in 1807, ‘black bodies . . . reflect white light but in a very scanty proportion’.4 Blackboard blacking still sends to our eye a near-zero level of light which is white. And ‘near-zero’ is an exaggeration: in reality a blackboard, or a piece of black cloth, may be sending us up to 10 per cent of the light that a sheet of white paper returns to our eye. If that light were not white, but tilted to red or blue, we would not call the blackboard black, but blue-black or black-brown. For black is not truly outside the spectrum, and neither does it have a narrow waveband like red or green: rather, it is white light’s tiny brother. In laboratories there is a realm of ‘meta-materials’, of carbon nanotubes smaller than the wavelength of light, which may reflect less than 0.01 per cent of light; their applications range from solar panels to stealth jets, but even they are not totally black.

  This white light shed by black things is, however, of so low a level that often we can scarcely say we see it. This raises the question: what do we see when we see black? And like the question of whether black is light or the absence of light, there is also the question: is seeing blackness a sensation, or the absence of sensation? The problem has been that sight, as we know, depends on light, and where no photon strikes the retina we expect no signal to be sent. At the same time, we feel that we ‘see’ a black thing; it does not seem to be a hole in our sight. The great optical scientist Hermann von Helmholtz said emphatically in 1856: ‘Black is a real sensation, even if it is produced by an entire absence of light. The sensation of black is distinctly different from the lack of all sensation.’5 He was not perhaps fully able to explain this, since he also said that a black object sends no stimulus to the retina.

  Recent studies have given body to his intuition, and if anything have reversed the idea that what we see is light, not dark. Professor Sir Alan Hodgkin has noted, of the cells in the retina, that ‘it is darkness rather than light which makes the inside of the photo-receptor electrically positive and which releases a chemical transmitter to excite the next layer of cells.’ It is as if the eye’s primary need of light was in order to see where the dark places were. A distinguished neural scientist has speculated that, in the far evolutionary past, microorganisms may have needed to swim from t
he light towards the dark: at later stages, too, it may have been important to notice a dark cavity, which might mean safety – or hide a biding predator.6

  There are further stages in the neural transmission. Both the ‘rod’ cells, which see tone, and the ‘cone’ cells, which see colours, emit the chemical transmitter to which Hodgkin refers – glutamic acid – onto the bipolar cells that make up the retina’s second layer. One kind of bipolar cell sends a signal when light or colour arrives; the other kind sends a positive signal when light, or colour, is removed. The sum total of signals sent by the retina remains fairly constant (travelling up the ganglion cells to the brain). The signals say ‘light here’ or ‘colour here’, or ‘darkness’ or ‘no colour here’, giving black and dark a comparable weight to that of light and colour.

  This is the hard explanation for the intuition we have that black is a positive visual fact, and it is even possible that, in optical terms, black has a stronger presence than white. An easy test for this is to cross a piece of paper with black and white stripes of equal width. Does one see bars of whiteness against black night? Or black lines strong against white space? Though the white bars are replete with light in all wavelengths, and may for this reason look wider than the black bars, it is possible still to argue that the black bars have the stronger presence. This may be why mankind has preferred to write in charcoal on light stone rather than in chalk on slate, to use black rather than white ink and – in the 1980s – to switch the world’s computers from light letters on a dark screen to black letters on white.

  THERE IS THE other basic question of what exactly the word ‘black’, and words which we translate as ‘black’, mean. It is not hard to be sure that noir, schwarz, nero and mavro have the same meaning, as to hue and tone, as ‘black’. Figurative use may differ from language to language – dans le noir means ‘in the dark’ while ‘in the black’ means ‘in credit’, although the ‘black’ market is black both in England and in France (au noir). As to hue, some uses may seem loose: we call a bruised eye ‘black’; in Greece red wine and brown bread are black (mavro). But these might be called directional usages, indicating a move from the usual colour towards a tone nearer to black. The core meaning is understood to be black, in the sense of coal-black, black as ink (literally), and figuratively in the sense of unlucky, bad or terrible.

  Colour-words in general are ambiguous, and we should be less sure of them the further we travel from our own time and place. The cultures of the past did not have our Munsell colour array, or very many saturated colours. Also, the further back in time one travels, the less it seems that ‘colour-words’ were mainly concerned with hue. The British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone wondered if the ancient Greeks had been colour-blind because Homer used colour-words so seldom and so loosely. In Latin the adjective flauus seems often to have a yellow sense, since it is applied to honey, corn, fair hair and gold, but it may also be applied to blushes, sparkling water and the underside of olive leaves. Many words which for us name colours descend from words which referred to the broader look that things can have. The English word ‘green’ has this dimension. It derives from the Indo-European ghre- root, to grow and flourish, which gives us both words in the phrase to ‘grow green’ and also led to ‘grass’. Green is now a paint colour, and an ‘elemental’ colour in optics, but the older, broader meaning survives in our (fading) sense of green as unripe, callow, naive. Other words used once to refer more to brightness and dimness than to a particular hue. The English ‘black’ comes from the Indo-European bhleg-, meaning ‘to shine, flash or burn’, and from the Germanic blakaz, ‘burned’. The Old English blaec chiefly meant ‘dark’ but also ‘scorched’. It was in the Middle English blak that the hue sense became dominant, as the colour of soot, coal, pitch and ravens.7

  Nor is it the case that all words that have to do with colour have evolved in the direction of a single hue. The Old English salu referred to dusky darkness, shading towards the brown, whereas the modern word ‘sallow’, which describes the look of a person’s skin, would be hard to match against a Munsell chip. The whole subject of colour-words and their history is problematic, and I have tried to write with a sense of the complexities. Even when colour-words sound as though they mean the same as they do today, they still might not. Dyeing clothing black used to be difficult, and could only be done by overdyeing with woad, madder, galls and indigoes to produce a bolt of cloth which was called black, noir, schwarz or nero, but which might to us look a dirty purple. Fortunately paints and inks have usually been made from soot, whose black has not changed.

  We should not, moreover, simplify the way in which we ourselves use colour-words, which often involve much more than hue and may at times seem fragrant (as when flower names are turned into colour-words, such as rose, fuchsia, lilac or lavender, which are applied to women’s clothes more often than to men’s). Nor, as to hue, are we actually precise or even consistent: we know that ‘red’ means a London bus, but still we call carroty or auburn hair red. The word ‘black’, manifestly, is far more than being simply the name of a hue (the colour of pitch). If we refer to a ‘black hole’ in Calcutta or in outer space, we are not imagining a cavity coated with tar, but rather a darkness – which may itself be more figurative than optical, referring to death in suffocation, or the total collapse of a star. And still black is black. The ancient Egyptians made from burned wood the black paint with which they painted the hair, and outlined the eyes, of the carved wooden figures they placed in tombs; they called this colour km, the word they also used for the black fertile mud of the Nile, from which they named their country Km. The word km had a range of meanings which could include all Egypt, but it also meant ‘black’, and their black was our black, as we see in museums still.

  BUT NOR DO colours themselves depend on the words that we attach to them. Many birds have better colour vision than we do, way into the ultraviolet range. And the fact that they use saturated colours in their mating displays – including clear white and jet-black – shows that one does not need words to recognize and appreciate colours. Birds may have brilliant ultraviolet feathers which look dull grey to us. Again, a number of societies now, and more perhaps in the past, seem to have had a limited colour-lexicon, but the appreciation of coloured gems is universal. Some languages have used the same word for green, green-blue and blue, but again, everyone sees the difference between an emerald and a sapphire. Taking pleasure in colours seems general to humans with or without words; it can show in the making of beads of different coloured glass, or in wearing the brightly coloured feathers of birds, as the Incas and Aztecs used to do. It is not a simple pleasure. On the contrary, it can be finely aesthetic in places where formal aesthetics seem not to exist: for instance, in the subtle and beautiful way in which colours are combined in rugs made in villages. Berber rugs from Morocco may be subtle as well as bright in their colours, which often include black.

  Nor does the study of colour vision, or of the changing use of colour-words, explain the value that we set on colour. In the first chapter of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, two sisters share their mother’s jewels, and the puritanical sister, Dorothea, exclaims,

  It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St John. They look like fragments of heaven. I think that emerald is more beautiful than any of them.

  The casket does not include black stones – though jet, onyx, vulcanite and tourmaline were popular in the nineteenth century – but the sisters do discuss which jewels would suit best the black dress that Dorothea is wearing. Her black dress is not mourning, for her mother has been dead for many years: she wears black because she is a serious person, and because black was thought fine, even beautiful. In the event, she chooses an emerald ring with diamonds, and a bracelet to match.

  As to Revelation (21:1–27), the precious stones St John saw in the walls of heaven were red (jasper, sardius, jacinth), green (emer
ald, chrysoprasus), blue (sapphire), violet (amethyst) and yellow to orange (topaz). I do not know if St John had a colour-vocabulary with which he could describe the exact hue of each stone. But he did not need one, since he knew the stones and we can see them. In any case colour-words give limited help, since a colour in a gemstone has a different character from colour on cloth or in a spotlight or on a butterfly’s wing. And if we said that the heaven of St John was shining bright and also red, green, yellow and violet, this would give a poor idea of the transcendent wonder he sought to convey by enumerating the gems he saw in the walls, in whose beauty colour is important.

  For colour-words do not describe colours: they simply give them a name. It is not easy – or perhaps even possible – to describe a colour sensation in words. Even describing black, which might seem easy, is difficult. Saying ‘it is like seeing nothing’, or ‘like a dark night’, or ‘like being inside a cupboard without a light’, does not describe the blackness of the black bag in which I carry my (black) mobile phone. I may say, ‘it’s like soot’, or ‘like Indian ink’, but the bag does not look very like soot or like Indian ink. So I fall back on the word ‘black’, which points to blackness but does not describe it. All I can do otherwise is look for comparisons – or metaphors.

  The delight in colour, combined with the uncertainty as to what exactly colour is, means that the nature of colour has always been discussed. Plato said that sight was a fire that came out from the eye, which made colours by interacting with the fire which shone from visible things. The discussion of colour in our own time – in recent decades especially – has been extensive and systematic. Most has been generated by the book Basic Colour Terms by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, who argue that languages with few colour-words will almost always have words for the same few colours: first black and white (but including the sense of deep or dark tones versus light and also cool versus warm), then red, then yellow or green, then blue. Their thesis had been exhaustively tested, optically and linguistically, and in a qualified form it is held to be true. Their argument has done much to confirm what neurological studies also suggest: that colour vision is much the same in most fit human beings, though there is a slight variation between individuals, and in the same person at different ages; also that there is a predisposition, which is more biological than cultural, to identify certain principal colours, such as black, white, red, green, yellow and blue.8