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Black Exhibition at National Gallery of Australia

Lee Krasner Untitled 1953 oil, collage, gouache sheet 57 x 76.2 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1983 © Lee Krasner/ARS
Lee Krasner Untitled 1953 oil, collage, gouache sheet 57 x 76.2 cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra – Purchased 1983 © Lee Krasner/ARS

Black exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia attempts to challenge prior ideas and feelings behind the colour black. I got in touch with Shaune Lakin, the curator of “Black”, for an in depth look behind some of the ideas behind the exhibition.

Q: What was the core idea behind getting this collection together?

A: The exhibition reflects a range of curatorial approaches that are informing the display of works from the collection at the NGA. This is by no means the first exhibition to examine the place and the significance of black to art history, and I think recent exhibitions and publications on the subject reflect a more general interest in the place and function of materiality in a period in which our experience of the world has become increasingly dematerialised.

Q: This is an interesting exhibition in the sense that it focuses around a single colour and the different, and sometimes unexpected, meanings of each piece. Is this exhibition attempting to challenge some prior misconceptions about the colour black?

A: More than any other colour, black is a material property – it can absorb light to the extent that we can pay attention to its material presence in a way that can be difficult otherwise. This is why, as the exhibition shows, the colour was of such use to artists such as Lee Krasner, Franz Klein and Phillip Guston, as well as Soulages and Motherwell, since it allows for a concentration on mark making without the risk of distraction faced by other pigments. But I also think the contemporary interest in blackness might reflect the colour’s potential to provoke. While black can certainly be an alienating property, it can also generate or activate a wide range of responses. It is hard to remain passive in the face of a black object.

The exhibition is not necessarily interested in the history of artists using black, but rather focusses on how black has figured in twentieth-century practice, notably work by American, European, Australian and Japanese artists because this work is well represented in the collection. Each of the works in the exhibition has been selected on the basis that black is an integral part of the intention of the work. So whether black is evident in the form of pigment, ink or silver, it forms a vital component of each work in the exhibition. However, for a number of artists in Black, the pigment itself held or holds particular power or significance. These include Pierre Soulages, for whom the use of black is closely tied to the colour’s primordial associations. He remains committed to the proposition that the colour black returns art to its essential origins, both formally and metaphorically. He talks about black as the colour of ’the origin of painting’, and by that he means the first recorded moments of human mark-making – lines and areas of tone inscribed on cave walls, using black pigment derived from burnt organic matter. Robert Motherwell is similarly interested in the ‘prehistoric’ associations of the pigment – that it is a colour which up until recently was made from charred or burnt organic material, just as it had been for humanity’s first mark makers. As with Soulages, for Motherwell there is a kind of ‘essentialness’ to black, it can’t be mixed.

Q: While the pieces are pleasing to look at, the colour black seems get lumped in with a lot of negative connotations why do you think this is?

A: The attitudes we bring to black are very ambiguous. Black can be understood as a puritanical colour, representing goodness, virtue and obedience; at the same time, it can suggest wisdom, creativity and wealth. In other contexts, black carries entirely negative associations: it suggests evil and disease, totalitarianism and anarchy, mourning and melancholy. Most fundamentally, black can represent the end of something and a new start.

Perhaps reflecting these unstable meanings and associations, black played a highly significant role in the story of twentieth-century art. In many ways, it was the primary colour of twentieth century art. For many artists, black marked a new, revolutionary beginning for art—an art-for-art’s sake that was liberated from the need to represent the world. For others, black returned art to its primordial roots—both in reference to the charcoal, soot and ebony, which were used to make prehistoric marks and objects, and to the fact that black is often derived from the most basic organic materials such as burnt bones and carbon.

Black also found a place in twentieth-century art for its capacity to elicit strong feelings or associations, whether poetic or political. This was especially so in Europe during the first decades of the century, when black assumed great revolutionary potential, and during the 1950s and 1960s, when abstract painters in Europe and America found in black the perfect expression of postwar chaos and uncertainty. It’s true to me that no other colour or tone quite so readily evokes such divergent feelings as does black.

Q: Is there a specific time period when we first started to see the colour black used differently than it had been previously? And are we seeing further changes by current artists in the way they’re using the colour?

A: Malevich’s Black squares (1915–30) are the iconic expression of black’s revolutionary capacity to signal an end and a new beginning, and these works announced a radically new sense of black’s symbolic power. Across four paintings and a series of prints, drawings and books, Malevich insisted that the sole focus and subject of art should be art itself—colour and shape. The Black square was ground breaking. In its wake, for many of the twentieth century’s great abstract painters and sculptors, black came to embody the prospect of art existing in and of itself, in Malevich’s terms ‘free … from the dead weight of the real world’.

Q: Looking at the range of pieces on display in this exhibition, do you have a particular favourite that you would recommend for people to come and see?

A: I love the the French painter Pierre Soulages’s painting, Painting, 195 x 130 cm, 6 August 1956 (1956). It’s a magnificent experience, to become lost in black’s thickness! For Soulages, black reflects his desire to rid painting of all unnecessary distractions. Since the 1940s, Soulages has produced black paintings, using clearly defined black brushstrokes that contrast with the whiteness of canvas and also by covering completely the support with thick black paint. For Soulages, black returns art and our experience to their most basic states. Referring to the charcoal used to make marks in caves, Soulages reminds us that ‘black is the colour of the origin of painting—and our own origin’, noting that before each of us was born ‘we were in the dark’.

Black exhibition runs until the 26th of July at the National Gallery of Australia.

Free Admission.

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