Black: The History of a Color

[Dave Monroe]

Black:
The History of a Color
Michel Pastoureau

Cloth | 2008 | $35.00 / £19.95
216 pp. | 9 x 9 | 106 color illus.


Black--favorite color of priests and penitents, artists and ascetics,
fashion designers and fascists--has always stood for powerfully
opposed ideas: authority and humility, sin and holiness, rebellion and
conformity, wealth and poverty, good and bad. In this beautiful and
richly illustrated book, the acclaimed author of Blue now tells the
fascinating social history of the color black in Europe.

In the beginning was black, Michel Pastoureau tells us. The archetypal
color of darkness and death, black was associated in the early
Christian period with hell and the devil but also with monastic
virtue. In the medieval era, black became the habit of courtiers and a
hallmark of royal luxury. Black took on new meanings for early modern
Europeans as they began to print words and images in black and white,
and to absorb Isaac Newton's announcement that black was no color
after all. During the romantic period, black was melancholy's friend,
while in the twentieth century black (and white) came to dominate art,
print, photography, and film, and was finally restored to the status
of a true color.

For Pastoureau, the history of any color must be a social history
first because it is societies that give colors everything from their
changing names to their changing meanings--and black is exemplary in
this regard. In dyes, fabrics, and clothing, and in painting and other
art works, black has always been a forceful--and ambivalent--shaper of
social, symbolic, and ideological meaning in European societies.

With its striking design and compelling text, Black will delight
anyone who is interested in the history of fashion, art, media, or
design.

Michel Pastoureau is a historian and director of studies at the École
Pratique des Hautes Études de la Sorbonne in Paris. He is the author
of many books, including Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton) and
The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8717.html

Introduction

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8717.pdf

Cf. ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=59993

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69698

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0105&msg=55316