Michel Pastoureau,
Black: The History of a Colour (trans Jody Gladding).
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-691-13930-2
US$35.00 (hb)
216pp
(Review copy supplied by Princeton University Press)

Every colour has its history, but few more so than black, and there are few so well placed to describe its trajectory through Western civilisation as Michel Pastoureau, mediaevalist, scholar of color history and author of the successful and influential Blue: The History of a Colour. Not that he is planning a series covering every colour of the spectrum: Pastoureau clarifies in his introduction that black is a special colour. This itself is a statement of some weight. Film historian Jacques Aumont likewise determines that black is indeed a colour, but at least since Newton, its physical definition has been the absence of light, and therefore of colour. But Pastoureau makes a different argument. Black has been thought of as a colour, named as a colour, and seen as one of the defining points in any colour spectrum since the dawn of time. When he concludes that, with the passing of the dominant dress codes of black (everywhere except Melbourne, it might be said), black is on the brink of becoming “A colour like all the others“ (p. 194).

Such was not the case in the past, as the scale of blue-blacks, brown-blacks, mauve-blacks, even red-blacks in the cover image taken from a painting by Etienne La Tour demonstrates. Though he is at his best on his home turf of the middle ages and the early renaissance, Pastoureau takes us back to the caves, and thence to Egypt, Greece and Rome in pursuit of the oldest blacks. This is a delicate task. Is it the case that black has an archetypal meaning derived from our earliest ancestor’s fear of the dark? Recall that the oldest images we have were made deep in caves: they belong to the era after the domestication of fire. Before then, the dark was untamed, and as Pastoureau notes, humans are not naturally nocturnal animals. Rather than plumping for an atavistic articulation of black with night, death and danger, Pastoureau demonstrates the rich ambivalences of the colour. For the ancient Egyptians, black was the colour of the fertile soil of the Nile, opposed to the arid red of desert sand. The Greeks prized rich blacks in their ceramics, the Romans black marble and the receding blacks of Pompeian trompe l’oeuil. Odin’s crows were the original black birds which the advancing Church demonised, adding for good measure all the other black animals who had served as totem to the Germanic and Celtic tribes. Such a reversal from the wisest to the most diabolic of creatures is a characteristic feature of the history Pastoureau tells. The colour of wisdom, sobriety and virtue for the reformation, it was also the colour of witches, demons and black masses for the same people in the same centuries. The anarchist flag is the same colour as Waffen SS uniforms.

The heart of the argument is that colour is a social phenomenon at least as much as it is a physical one. This is not a book on the chemistry of pigments and dyes – for that you need Philip Ball’s Bright Earth. Nor is it a history of artistic practice, where John Gage’s works are the texts to have at hand. Rather it is a cultural history, devoted to illuminating the whole spectrum through this atypical but remarkable colour. Consider the chess set: originally, red and black pieces faced each other, from India to Iran and thence to Moorish Spain. This was the colour opposition that really signified for a period of centuries. Gradually white became a third partner in the triad. Other colours remained outside this primal trinity. Mauves, indigos and blues for example were all modes of black, and for Aristotle green was the mid-point between white and black. The book is full of such details. For many readers of Screening the Past, this will be confirmation of views already held, but the wealth of detail is not only fascinating: it demonstrates the very specific configurations of colour schemas in actual moments of history and particular places. Thus the mediaeval prohibition on mixing colours, and the separation of the guilds for red, blue and black dyers, produced a very specific set of concepts about colour. In the mid-18th century, the influx of American indigos made blue an acceptable colour for clothing; while the increasing control over tannin-based dyes made grey the most highly prized colour in the late middle ages.

But technology doesn’t always drive. A particularly fascinating theme is the history of heraldry, something of a specialism of the author’s, which he argues provides the only systematic organization of colours throughout the later middle ages and into the early modern period. Six colours provided the entire palette of heraldry: black, blue, green, white, yellow and red, with green the least favoured – possibly because of its association with Islam. Though the actual colours in use varied around these names, their systemic positions were invariable. This alone would indicate a crucial quality of colour, akin to Barthes’ discussion of traffic lights: the colours have no necessary intrinsic meaning, but acquire meanings from the systems where they are used. Such then is the significance of black and white in photography and cinematography, with Citizen Kane (USA 1941) the great articulation of these two media in its stark palette.

If the book is slightly weaker from Newton on, it is excellent at placing Newton’s seven-colour spectrum in its rightful place alongside both Pythagorean mysticism and the late mediaeval spectrum (which included white and black). He notes that after Newton’s Opticks, colours were “identifiable, reproducible, controllable and measurable” (p. 147). Unfortunately only the first of these is true, and that with the proviso that Newton included two extra colours for what appears to have been exclusively aesthetic and philosophical reasons. Accurate reproduction had to wait for pantone, colorimetry is at the earliest a 19th century science, and colour somehow, as he knows in other contexts, remains perpetually out of control, scientific as much as magical. But the accuracy is otherwise near faultless (Disney’s first technicolor short is named Silly Symphony; it was actually one of the Silly Symphonies, called Trees and Flowers [USA 1932], but this is a minor slip). The hunt for good photographic blacks, and the absence of real digital blacks, lie beyond the author’s central concerns. There remains more to tell.

This is a rather beautiful book. It would not be hard to mistake it for a coffee-table tome, albeit one with a slightly unusual theme. The illustrations – 106 of them – are in fine colour, and with one exception extremely well reproduced. This is important in the particular sense that Pastoureau makes an important argument that printing, and especially woodblock illustrations, had a defining significance in the history of black. It’s a shame then that the one poor reproduction (p. 138) is of a burin engraving whose detail has been lost, probably as a result of recopying. Otherwise the book’s design lives up to the argument: and indeed advances it in its convincing use of colour, for example the excellent reproduction of van Eyck’s Man in a Red Turban (1433). Printing’s success, in the era of offset litho, in reproducing colour with some richness and fidelity is perhaps one key reason which the truth no longer exists only in black and white.

Sean Cubitt,
School of Culture and Communication, Melbourne University, Australia.

Created on: Saturday, 14 March 2009