Dark Colors
Works dominated by deep, low-value colour, such as blacks, browns and shadowed blues, whatever their mood.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Dark Colors are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
A dark palette is a matter of value, not necessarily of mood. Deep tones make whatever light remains more intense, which is why Caravaggio set figures against near-black grounds around 1600 and why Rembrandt's late portraits emerge from warm brown shadow. Spanish painters from Francisco de Zurbarán to Francisco Goya, in his Black Paintings (1819–23), used darkness for devotion and for dread.
In the 20th century darkness became a field to explore rather than a setting. Ad Reinhardt's black paintings of the 1950s and 60s hide faint crosses of nearly black colour that appear only with slow looking, Mark Rothko's late canvases turned to maroon, brown and black, and from 1979 Pierre Soulages based his outrenoir paintings on the way light reflects off ridged black paint. Look for the subtle shifts of hue and texture inside apparently uniform darkness.