119
Royal”
of
1943 were made with ‘pure black on blue’. The background darks
of “La Robe Jaune et la Robe Écossaise” of 1941 were ‘black on red’; and the
black of “Danseuse, fond noir, fauteille rocaille”
of 1942 was specified as
‘ivory black’
. Other blacks in the series were
simply described as noir, but in a
striking paradox, the grey dress in “L’Idole”
of 1942 is characterized as ‘black
white’
. An even greater paradox, perhaps, is the original stencilled print of
1943 which served as the title-page to the album, where, above the title “De la
Couleur”
initialled by Matisse, and above two landscape-like strips of yellow
and brown, rises a multi-rayed sun which is entirely black.
“On Colour”
included a short untitled essay by Matisse on the relation-
ships of modern painters to tradition, which barely mentions colour. It has
been suggested that, as Matisse wrote to Tériade in 1944, he was too ex-
hausted to write on a subject which ‘disgusted’ him. But
a year after the
“Verve”
article, Matisse wrote in another review a short note on black as a
colour in its own right in which he appealed to the example of Japanese prints,
of Manet, and of a painting of his own, “The Moroccans”,
painted more than
thirty years earlier.
A remark in a treatise on colour by the nineteenth-century Japanese
draughtsman, painter and printmaker Hokusai – which could well have been
familiar to Matisse, since it had been published in
a French translation in an
1895 article on Hokusai’s technical treatises – also listed a whole range of
blacks: “There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous
black and matt black, black in sunlight and black in shadow. For the old black
one
must use an admixture of blue, for the matt black an admixture of white;
for the lustrous black gum
[colle] must be added. Black in sunlight must have
grey reflections”.
Here, with the addition of a highly reflective medium,
black may have lus-
tre or brilliance; but it was in modern French painting that Matisse detected
that even matt black, as in his black sun in
Verve, was not simply used as a
colour, but specifically as a colour of light.
Gage J. Matisse’s Black Light // Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism.
University of California Press. Berkeley; Los Angeles; California, 2000. P. 228–230.
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