![]() His sensualist aesthetic exerted a considerable influence on future generations, such as the American Abstract Expressionists in New York in the late 1940s and Barnett Newman in particular. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), Edmund Burke suggests that it is connected both with the terrible and the sublime. So you could say that black is subversive, in that it undermines the status quo. It often connects to irrational things or those that refuse to submit to any system of cultural certainties. All we know for certain is that in our collective consciousness it can evoke a sense of helpless vulnerability.We talk of the Black Death, the black market and blackmail. Does black actually tap into our brain stem is it part of our evolutionary experience? For all the progress in neurological research, there is still no answer. One is reminded of the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which the enigmatic black monolith appears unexpectedly in the early days of humankind, and of the night that follows which induces overwhelming fear and existential uncertainty in the apes. For Paul Klee it was not to be rationalised: “We do not have to understand the black, it is the primeval ground.” His comment recognised the archaic origins of black – back to the time when man had neither tamed fire nor used it to lighten the hours of darkness. The mysterious side to black has appealed to artists. ![]() The classic example of this is his series of “black paintings”, which rather than reflect a progressive modernism, gave way to a more mystical, contemplative stasis. Ad Reinhardt, who made a close study of Mondrian’s work, took this position further when he said: “Black is negation.”He saw it as the negation of all colours, the colour of pure negativity, the representation of the impossibility of representation. Here the lines were a structural, architectural framework. Piet Mondrian, who admired Goethe’s theories, used black to great effect in his abstract compositions of horizontal and vertical axes. It has also had a major influence on artists. ![]() And it has always had a special aura of its own. We see black as a surface that absorbs all the colours of the visible spectrum. Could it even be called a colour? Goethe was not so sure. He called colour “troubled light”, and there is a no more troubling – yet fascinating – colour than black. In his book on colour theory that appeared in 1810, Goethe studied the psychological effect of colours. We say they can be cold or warm, though in doing so we draw on an ad hoc mix of vague metaphors. We talk of colours as if they were physical fixtures in our daily lives.
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