Black: The History of a Color

$35.00 at Whitney Museum of American Art.

Black — favorite color of priests and penitents, artists and ascetics, fashion designers and fascists — has always stood for powerfully opposed ideas: authority and humility, sin and holiness, rebellion and conformity, wealth and poverty, good and bad. In this beautiful and richly illustrated book, the acclaimed author of Blue now tells the fascinating social history of the color black in Europe. In the beginning was black, Michel Pastoureau tells us. The archetypal color of darkness and death, black was…