The Color Black

156 pages, english

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 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.
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. This book presents Mostafavi's and Rapahel's complementary and luminous essays side by side, the latter published in English for the first time in a 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.