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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 “little 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”.
有关俄耳甫斯的神话故事启迪了许多音乐家、诗人和画家，故事中，俄耳甫斯降临暗黑冥界，将亡妻欧瑞狄刻带回人间。也许塞缪尔·帕尔默就是其中最典型的代表。19世纪20年代，为了摆脱工业革命引发的问题，帕尔默和一群志同道合的人来到肯特乡村生活，在那里他目睹到的深夜比生平见过的所有东西都要黑。夜间漫游激发了他的创作灵感，他创作了一系列刻画他的顿悟的作品。他称这些作品为“我的黑夜”或者“小月光”。比如在他微小的绘画作品《晚上的星与月光下的玉米地》中，我们之所以能看到他描绘的耀眼光芒，几乎完全是因为夜空的黑暗。
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.”
与帕尔默和其他浪漫主义画家不同的是，莫奈和一些印象派画家完全摒弃了黑色。但爱杜尔·马奈却接受使用黑色。1872年，当他为自己的学生兼未来弟媳贝尔特·莫里索画像时，他让她穿一身黑色，还给她配上一顶相配的帽子。莫里索的一侧脸光彩绚丽，另一侧脸则暗淡无光，而她的眼睛最为夺目；她的双眼实际上是绿色的，但马奈却画成黑色，让双眼更为深邃。马奈的朋友卡米尔·毕沙罗曾经说过：“马奈是我们当中最厉害的画家，他把黑色变成了光。”
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世纪，巴勃罗·毕加索用黑色作画发出质疑：世界多苦难，上帝缘何存在？他在作品《格尔尼卡》是一幅以黑白色调讲述西班牙内战的视觉诗歌，让人联想起弗朗西斯科·戈雅的版画《战争的灾难》中对黑色的使用。俄国艺术家卡齐米尔·马列维奇可能是运用阴影创作作品的最热忱的拥趸，他发明了一种全新的运用黑色的绘画语言，这种语言提升了人们对意象的感知。他称这场运动为“至上主义”。
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