Black and White

About Black and White

Working without colour concentrates attention on line, tone, texture and light. For much of history the choice was practical: woodcuts, engravings and etchings print in black ink on white paper, and Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia I (1514) shows how much mood a single ink can hold. East Asian ink painting made the range from dense black to watery grey an art in itself, and 20th-century Japanese calligraphers such as Shiryu Morita pushed it towards abstraction.

Photography was monochrome by necessity until colour film spread in the mid-20th century, and many photographers stayed with it for its graphic force. In painting the restriction became a statement: Kazimir Malevich's Black Square (1915), Franz Kline's broad black strokes on white in the 1950s and Bridget Riley's early Op Art canvases, such as Movement in Squares (1961), all make contrast their main material.