WHEN THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS banned the color black from their palettes, it was with good reason. A lot of dull painting of their time had admixtures of black. What art historians have now called “the brown school” of painting featured dark tones not far from blackishness.
The study of pigment colors and the science of the light spectrum were just taking off in France and elsewhere at the end of the nineteenth century. And for all anyone knew, black was not a color, but the absence of color.
The story is more complicated, of course. The common name Ivory Black once was literal: The black carbon was made from burnt ivory, trimmings from the widespread ivory comb industry. Then ivory became rare and expensive. So paint makers turned to burnt animal bone.
The original ivory black leaned brown, or warm, and the same with animal bone. Oddly, though, black mixed with yellow produces a kind of green, suggesting black is a kind of blue. Indeed, some expert painter today will counsel that black is an utter blue.
The chemical ingredients on today’s Ivory Black tubes tell the story. All such “ivory” blacks are demarked PBk9, meaning burnt bone. This is the Winsor & Newton designation, for example. However, the Ivory Black of the Rembrandt brand adds in PB29, which is Ultramarine Blue. Thus, the warm or cool, brown or blue, leaning of a black paint depends on the manufacturer. For most purposes, these variations may not be detectable in practice.
When a black is called “blue black,” as in the Winsor & Newton brand, it is simply more Ultramarine Blue mixed with “bone black” (PBk9). In turn, the paint-making company Gamblin markets its Portland Grey as two whites mixed with Mars Black and Raw Umber, giving it a presumably warm flush.
Those other famous blacks—Lamp Black and Mars Black—have sources other than bone. Lamp, as the name denotes, comes from the carbon produced by burning organic oil—a method Cennino Cennini documented in fifteenth-century Italy. This typically has a bluish leaning. Mars Black, by contrast—a very dense black (with high tinting power and to be “used with care”)—is produced from iron oxide (also called Iron Oxide Black). Depending on how it’s used—again, always with care—it can have a bluing or browning effect. It is the most opaque black.
Whether black is a color or not may still be open to debate. But we can clearly see the range of possibilities. Painters have discovered these, and acted according to preference. One top New York portrait painter puts Ivory Black on his palette. To produce a black line or object, however, he mixes intense red-and-green, or intense blue-and-brown. He only uses the black to “gray” his bright colors. Many painters produce their richest black by mixing either Thalo Green with Alizarin Crimson or Transparent Oxide Red (a brown) with Ultramarine Blue Deep.
While painting a photo of my wife the other day, pure Ivory Black proved its merits, and surprisingly (since I usually don’t put it on the palette). In this painting, she sits reading with a bright lamp and wall behind her. This makes her profile a dark silhouette. Moreover, she is wearing a sweater with black and she sits on a black couch. I mixed my red-green-blue-brown blacks in pursuit of that utter richness, which never seemed to come. When I pulled out the Ivory Black, and put it on straight, the painting began to sing. The optimal contrasts of dark and light were easily achieved.
On artists talk boards, black is a common topic of comparison, confusion, and mild cynicism about how paint-making companies, while denoting “Ivory Black” on the label, simply mix whatever is cheapest to get the desired effect. Fortunately, we can say that nearly all black can lean blue or brown. Painters of yore, in fact, painted blue skies by mixing white with black. The key take-away, I suppose, is that black can be dangerous. It reliably grays colors, but also dulls. It can be a menace on the wet palette, and deep in the brush, if not respected.
In the wake of Impression, some might say “black is for losers.” Its use in modern art, however, is often unheralded. At large exemplary exhibits of Picasso and Matisse I was surprised how much black they used, especially for linear work. Some of Matisse's paintings—arguably not his best—are mostly black line compositions with some muddied color thrown in. To be sure, there is nothing like bold black strokes to give a painting a sense of contrast and definition.
To appreciate painterly black, one need go no further than Rembrandts "The Philosopher," a large, record-setting (record-setting in terms of price, that is: $6 million) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The philosopher emerges, Rembrandt style, from acres of black. The painting is perhaps 70-80 percent black, cracked and scuffed under its otherwise thick varnish.
To see pure black, though, on your next cavern tour, when the guide has taken you a quarter mile underground, and then turns out the lights—let your eyes adjust, and that is pure black as best humanly observable. It’s an illuminating experience.