THE FIRST BLACK PAINTING WAS A JOKE

When we think of a black painting, we tend to think of something serious. Malevich. Ad Reinhardt. Rothko. Soulages. Black as emptiness, infinity, death, light, transcendence.

But one of the earliest black monochromes was a joke.

In 1882, the French playwright and poet Paul Bilhaud exhibited a small canvas painted entirely black in the first exhibition of the Arts Incohérents, a wonderfully irreverent group organized by the writer and publisher Jules Lévy. The Incohérents had no interest in behaving themselves. Their exhibitions were conceived partly as a parody of the official Salon, and included visual puns, altered objects, parodies of famous works and pictures made by people who supposedly did not know how to draw. As the Musée d’Orsay rather nicely puts it, for the Incohérents, “seriousness” was the enemy. (Musée d'Orsay)