A Colour Story

Noir

Build a room around Noir. These masterworks carry Noir at their heart — recreated museum-grade, framed and numbered to be inherited.

The Deep Dive

Black in art spans a remarkably wide material and technical range, from prehistoric carbon black made of charred wood and bone, to ivory and bone black produced by charring animal remains, to the engineered carbon-nanotube material Vantablack, which absorbs 99.965 percent of visible light. Traditional black pigments fall into two chemical families: carbon-based blacks (lamp black, charcoal, bone/ivory black) made by controlled combustion, and mineral blacks such as manganese-based pigments used since antiquity. Bone black, produced by charring animal bones in an oxygen-poor kiln, contains only 10–20 percent carbon, the remainder being hydroxyapatite and calcium sulfate, and became the dominant black in European oil painting because it is completely lightfast and compatible with virtually every other pigment. Black's role in art shifted dramatically in the twentieth century from a shadow-and-outline utility colour to a subject in its own right: Ad Reinhardt spent 1953 until his death in 1967 painting nearly monochrome black canvases built from barely differentiated tonal squares, which he considered the logical terminus of the entire Western easel-painting tradition. At the technological extreme, Vantablack (2014) and its successors represent black pushed to a near-total light-absorbing limit, provoking fresh debate about who may use radical new materials in fine art.

Symbolism

Black has carried an unusually wide and often contradictory symbolic range: mourning and death in much of the Western tradition, but also elegance, power, and formality, as in the enduring authority of black clerical, judicial, and evening dress. In religious and mystical contexts, from Islamic decorative patterning to Eastern contemplative traditions, black has signified the void, the infinite, or a state beyond ordinary representation — an association Ad Reinhardt drew on explicitly while denying any doctrinal intent. In modernist and postmodern art, black became associated with negation and radical reduction, most famously in Kazimir Malevich's Black Square (1915), which declared a zero-point of painting from which a new abstract art could begin. Contemporary techno-scientific blacks like Vantablack have added a new symbolic layer: black as spectacle, exclusivity, and the literal erasure of visible form, amplified by the public feud over who could legally use it as an artistic material.

Pigment history

The oldest black pigments were carbon blacks — charred wood, bone, or ivory — used since prehistoric times in cave painting alongside red and yellow ochre; their appeal lay in permanence, since carbon black is essentially inert and does not fade like organic dyes. True ivory black, made from charred elephant tusk scraps, produced a notably rich, cool, slightly bluish black prized by luxury commissions, but its expense meant most European painters from the seventeenth century onward, including Rembrandt and Vermeer, actually used the cheaper and more widely available bone black, made from charred cattle or other animal bones, often as an underpainting or shadow layer rather than a pure surface black. Manufacture required charring bones at high temperature in a sealed, low-oxygen environment; the resulting pigment is entirely lightfast and mixes cleanly with other colours, which is why it remained a studio staple for centuries even as 'true' ivory black effectively became a misnomer for bone black. The twentieth century brought a wholly new controversy: Vantablack, developed by Surrey NanoSystems in 2014 from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, was licensed exclusively to sculptor Anish Kapoor for artistic use in 2016, prompting rival artist Stuart Semple to create and sell a competing 'Black 2.0' paint to everyone except Kapoor, and by 2019 an even darker MIT-developed carbon-nanotube material was released explicitly to undercut Kapoor's monopoly.

Notable uses

Lascaux and Chauvet cave paintings (c. 17,000–30,000 years old), Paleolithic cave paintersCharcoal and manganese-based blacks outlined bison, horses, and other animals alongside red and yellow ochre pigments.
The Music Lesson (c. 1662–1665), Johannes VermeerBone black was detected in the black marble floor tiles, and mixed with ultramarine to tone down adjacent white tiles.
Portrait of Margaretha de Geer (c. 1661), Rembrandt van RijnBone black was used in underpaint layers mixed with ochres and in glazes to build deep, atmospheric shadow.
Black Square (1915), Kazimir MalevichA flat black square on a white ground was presented as a radical zero-point of representational painting, launching Suprematism.
Abstract Painting series (Black Paintings, 1953–1967), Ad ReinhardtReinhardt built nearly imperceptible grids of matte, tonally close black squares meant to demand prolonged, meditative viewing.
Vantablack sculptural works (2016– ), Anish KapoorKapoor obtained exclusive artistic rights to Vantablack, a carbon-nanotube coating absorbing 99.965% of visible light, to create voids that flatten perceived depth.