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

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’.