One could hardly say that there is nothing to read on the history of colors, yet one might argue that most of what has been published reiterates a minor litany of sorts, namely, an antagonistic narrative, deeply embedded in the canonical values of Western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Kant, with recurrent flare-ups crystallised around a few proper nouns that disguise with symmetry the academic hierarchy between drawing and color: Florence and Venice, Poussin and Rubens, Ingres and Delacroix. The long-standing reputation of color as an element resisting quantification, a secondary element emblematic of ineffable quality, has contributed, well after Newton’s discovery of color-as-quantity, to the mythologies of art-making and artistic sensibility. Many books have, in the past two decades, refreshed the mainstream narrative of color through different angles. In a suspenseful investigation mixing natural history and political intrigue, Amy Butler Greenfield’s A Perfect Red (New York: HarperCollins, 2005) unfolded the quest for a precious Mexican bug necessary for the making of a more permanent red; David Batchelor’s anthropological essay, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000) focused on the long-standing repression of color in cultural production. And of course, John Gage’s monographs, Color and Meaning (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000) and Color and Culture (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), have surveyed the various philosophical and scientific theories on color and color perception, setting them in tension with the complicated history of their circulation and adaptation in the field of the visual arts, since Gage considers “art as the most vivid surviving manifestation of general attitudes towards color expressed in visual form” (Color and Culture, 7).

Black: The History of a Color does not quite share Gage’s view regarding the supremacy of artistic testimony when it comes to color. The monograph is Michel Pastoureau’s most recent book in English, and it covers, given the author’s disciplinary background as a social historian, a wide range of practices and uses of color; consequently, it rests on a more unstable ground (a situation that in actuality could be considered as a requirement for anyone who chooses color as an object of historical investigation). As Pastoureau acknowledges in the preface where he addresses the multimedia and interdisciplinary aspects of his topic, not every field of inquiry is as fruitful for his task, and he considers the area of dyes, fabric, and clothing to be more pertinent than painting and artistic creations, because, “this is probably where we find issues of chemistry, technology, and materials most inextricably bound with social, ideological, and symbolic stakes” (17).

Pastoureau is a medievalist and expert in the field of heraldry: a determinant domain in the construction of his interest for chromatic issues. Indeed, the study of coats of arms reveals a nearly grammatical use of colors. Especially in the last decades, he seems to have steadily complemented his publication of scholarly articles in journals with a prolific production of well-illustrated books that target unusual topics for a larger audience: from a glossary of colors in the contemporary world (Les Couleurs de notre temps, Paris: Bonneton, 2003) to a study of the shifting meanings associated with some emblematic animals (Les Animaux celebres, Paris: Bonneton, 2001). To French-speaking readers familiar with these earlier books, this monograph on black will often appear repetitious. Even for English-speaking readers who will have read only Pastoureau’s earlier well-received book Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), there will be a long list of déjà-vu episodes: the antagonism between the chromophilic Abbott Suger and the chromophobic Saint Bernard; the regulations segregating the dyers of blue and the dyers of red; etc. Of course, if dwelling in the history of colors is a demanding endeavor, arbitrarily selecting one in view of an isolated treatment is an even trickier route, since a color does not only fluctuate materially and symbolically through time, but within a given society it also functions contextually and, albeit not always systematically, in relation to other colors. Yet, given this inherent difficulty and the fact that it is likely to foster repetition, perhaps with a more careful editing of the book, its reader could have been spared encountering four times before page 56 that the negative connotations attached to the raven were predicated on its reputation as a carrion-eater. One may indulge in the fragmented reading that coffee-table books solicit without suffering from chronic memory deficiency.

Framed by lexical considerations on how color and color perceptions are relayed and refined by language (as shown in the opposition between matte/bright that structures the chromatic terminology in several ancient languages), or on how idiomatic expressions bear testimony, to this very day, to the symbolic undertones that fashion our relation to colors, Pastoureau’s historical narrative predictably unfolds, from Lascaux to the present; but it is more layered, more elegantly erudite, when discussing the period between 1000 AD and the formulation of Newton’s theories in the second half of the seventeenth century. The former date represents the withdrawal of the ambivalence associated with the color black during the preceding millennia (black was previously a marker of both death and fertility) and its quasi-systematic demonization that lasted more than three centuries; the latter signals the unambiguous repudiation, in turn repelled by the twentieth century, of black from the realm of color. (In this sense, the book’s subtitle, The History of a Color, even if it repeats the specifications already attached to Blue, functions differently—more as a position and an argument than as a descriptive statement, given the unstable recognition of black as a color.) Within this timeframe, a reappraisal of black also takes place, from the mid-fourteenth century on, especially within the sartorial code which was and remains the site of oxymoronic connotations: once a color only worn by monks as a sign of humility and poverty, shortly before the Black Plague and following the sumptuary laws regulating the economy of proto-fashion, black, a color free from restraining regulations, is appropriated by clerics, professors, men of finance, and, ultimately, aristocrats and princely courts. After centuries of satanic black, the color climbs the social ladder, and more efficient techniques for fixing the dyes and producing better blacks ensue. (Art historians will be on familiar ground with the rekindling of a question that has long preoccupied them: which comes first, the will or the know-how? Pastoureau, like Gombrich and others before him, is adamant that it is the wollen.) The color acquires a new permanence, whereas before, black dyes were impermanent and rapidly gave way to brownish or greyish hues (a situation that, to a lesser degree, is still a concern today, unbeknownst to Pastoureau it seems, when it comes to washing black clothes, as any historian used to doing the laundry might attest). Hence, between 1360 and 1650, a shift occurs from humble black to ostentatious black, while there is also a gradual rise of a moral black, first connected to public authority but spreading further with the chromophobic stance of the Reformation and its aftermath. The color recovers its pre-Romanesque ambivalence and reconciles with its contradictory meanings: an enduring fate if one considers that in modern times black will come to connote both order (police uniforms) and transgression (the black flag of anarchy, to mention only one example).

There is no doubt that the narrative is compelling and multi-layered as it moves back and forth with great ease within a linear development, even if the argument appears less convincing, and more impressionistic and anecdotal when it gets to the eighteenth century and beyond. But I would argue that it is not the historical narrative per se (the adventures of black through ambivalence, disgrace, empowerment, and transgression) that makes the book so interesting, nor is it the charming digressions that regularly provide the reader with informative bits of color trivia. Why was Little Red Riding Hood wearing red? When did crossbreeding engineer a pink pig in lieu of the traditional black species? What military improvement caused the invention of coats of arms? To underline the book’s impressive interdisciplinary grounding does not even do justice to its more specific achievement. The strength of Black resides in the way Pastoureau constructs the color through a series of connections between matter and media: fabric and clothing as they frame subjectivity through mundane appearance and religious convictions; ink and the printing press as they shape the Gutenberg galaxy and the triumph of black-and-white pairing; charcoal and the steam engine as they define the industrial city. These punctual encounters are what the book uses to produce and decline the many facets that support the richness, density, and complexity of black as a color in history. With these articulations, readers rediscover black not just as a shifting constellation of meanings or an array of practices and uses but in its material embodiments and through the very sensations they bring to mind and memory.