The myth of Orpheus, who descends into the blackness of the underworld to bring his dead wife, Eurydice, back to the land of the living, has inspired musicians, poets and painters. None more so, perhaps, than Samuel Palmer. Retreating from the problems associated with the Industrial Revolution, in the 1820s Palmer went with a band of like-minded spirits to live in the Kent countryside where he witnessed nights that were blacker than anything he had ever seen. The series of works inspired by his nocturnal ramblings represented something of an epiphany for Palmer. He called them “my blacks” or “l(fā)ittle moonshines”, for the intensity they project is due almost entirely to the blackness of his night sky, as can be seen, for example, in a tiny picture called “Cornfield by Moonlight, with the Evening Star”.
有關(guān)俄耳甫斯的神話故事啟迪了許多音樂家、詩人和畫家,故事中,俄耳甫斯降臨暗黑冥界,將亡妻歐瑞狄刻帶回人間。也許塞繆爾·帕爾默就是其中最典型的代表。19世紀(jì)20年代,為了擺脫工業(yè)革命引發(fā)的問題,帕爾默和一群志同道合的人來到肯特鄉(xiāng)村生活,在那里他目睹到的深夜比生平見過的所有東西都要黑。夜間漫游激發(fā)了他的創(chuàng)作靈感,他創(chuàng)作了一系列刻畫他的頓悟的作品。他稱這些作品為“我的黑夜”或者“小月光”。比如在他微小的繪畫作品《晚上的星與月光下的玉米地》中,我們之所以能看到他描繪的耀眼光芒,幾乎完全是因?yàn)橐箍盏暮诎怠?/p>
Unlike Palmer and other Romantics, Monet and some of his fellow Impressionists banished black entirely. Edouard Manet, however, took it on. When he painted his disciple and future sister-in-law, Berthe Morisot, in 1872, he dressed her all in black with a matching hat. With one side of her face lit up gloriously and the other darkly shaded, it is her eyes that capture the viewer’s attention; in life they were green, but Manet made them profound by painting them black. “Manet was the strongest of us all,” his friend, Camille Pissarro, once said. “He turned black into light.”
與帕爾默和其他浪漫主義畫家不同的是,莫奈和一些印象派畫家完全摒棄了黑色。但愛杜爾·馬奈卻接受使用黑色。1872年,當(dāng)他為自己的學(xué)生兼未來弟媳貝爾特·莫里索畫像時(shí),他讓她穿一身黑色,還給她配上一頂相配的帽子。莫里索的一側(cè)臉光彩絢麗,另一側(cè)臉則暗淡無光,而她的眼睛最為奪目;她的雙眼實(shí)際上是綠色的,但馬奈卻畫成黑色,讓雙眼更為深邃。馬奈的朋友卡米爾·畢沙羅曾經(jīng)說過:“馬奈是我們當(dāng)中最厲害的畫家,他把黑色變成了光?!?/p>
In the 20th century, Pablo Picasso used black to ask how God could possibly exist amid so much suffering. “Guernica”, his visual poem in black-and-white about the Spanish civil war, recalls the use of black in Francisco Goya’s prints, “The Disasters of War”. Perhaps the shade’s most ambitious devotee was Kazimir Malevich, a Russian artist who enlisted black to invent a whole new painterly language that elevated feelings over representation. He called this movement “suprematism”.
20世紀(jì),巴勃羅·畢加索用黑色作畫發(fā)出質(zhì)疑:世界多苦難,上帝緣何存在?他在作品《格爾尼卡》是一幅以黑白色調(diào)講述西班牙內(nèi)戰(zhàn)的視覺詩歌,讓人聯(lián)想起弗朗西斯科·戈雅的版畫《戰(zhàn)爭(zhēng)的災(zāi)難》中對(duì)黑色的使用。俄國(guó)藝術(shù)家卡齊米爾·馬列維奇可能是運(yùn)用陰影創(chuàng)作作品的最熱忱的擁躉,他發(fā)明了一種全新的運(yùn)用黑色的繪畫語言,這種語言提升了人們對(duì)意象的感知。他稱這場(chǎng)運(yùn)動(dòng)為“至上主義”。
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