The Color Black: Antinomies of a Color in Architecture and Art

This visual and textual essay explores architecture's relationship with the colour black through concurrent developments in visual art, encompassing Rembrandt, Rothko, Georgia O'Keefe, Norman Foster, Theaster Gates, and more.

This publication traces a theoretical and visual narrative of the relationship of art and architecture with the colour black through two engaging essays by acclaimed architect and critic Mohsen Mostafavi and the Marxist German art historian Max Raphael (1889–1952). Bringing together a rich inventory of images, Mostafavi considers architecture’s connection with the colour by considering parallel developments in global art practices – with references ranging from Japanese screens to Rothko, Georgia O’Keefe to Kara Walker, Peter Celsing to Derek Jarman. Alongside these renowned touchpoints, he draws on Raphael’s little-known and highly distinctive text The Color Black: On the Material Constitution of Form, based on a selection of old master paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Contemporaneous with the evolution of black paintings by New York’s Abstract Expressionists, Raphael’s essay offers a strikingly different approach to the same multivalent subject. Raphael offers an invigorating model of criticism, which, in John Berger’s words, ‘leads us from the work to the process of creation which it contains’.

This book presents Mostafavi’s and Raphael’s complementary and luminous essays side by side, the latter published in English for the first time in a compelling translation by Pamela Johnston. They are completed by conversations with Swiss architect Peter Märkli, whose use of black is informed by Raphael’s writings, and the artist Theaster Gates, whose work explores the aesthetic and political possibilities of the colour. Juxtaposing the present with the recent and distant past, this book provides a many-layered reading of the colour black – and of colour more widely – in relation to contemporary architectural thinking and practice.

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