Black: The History of a Color

"In the beginning was black," Pastoureau opens — and then immediately complicates it. Black has always carried powerfully opposed meanings at the same time: authority and humility, sin and holiness, rebellion and conformity, wealth and poverty. No other colour in the Western tradition has been simultaneously the colour of priests and fascists, ascetics and fashion designers.

The history moves through several sharp reversals. Early Christianity made black the colour of hell and the devil — but also of monastic virtue and penitence. In the medieval period it became the habit of courtiers and a mark of royal luxury, a complete inversion of its earlier meaning. Then the printing press changed everything: the world began to think in black and white, and Newton announced that black was no colour at all — a claim that haunted European art and perception for centuries. The Romantics reclaimed it as the colour of melancholy. The twentieth century made it dominant: in art, photography, film, and eventually fashion, where it became the universal neutral that is somehow never neutral.

This is the earliest book in Pastoureau's colour series, and arguably the densest — black has been doing more cultural work for longer than any other colour, and the book reflects that.

Part of Pastoureau's colour history series, alongside Blue, Red, Green, and Yellow.

Published by Princeton University Press, 2008.