Pierre Soulages is the artist I think of first when I think of black paintings.

I have seen his work in several settings over the years, and I remember being overwhelmed at first by the blackness. It dampened my spirit. I don’t know quite how else to put it. There was simply too much black.

And then, almost despite myself, I began to see the light.

It caught the edge of a ridge of paint. Then another. A streak appeared where a tool had dragged through the surface. As I moved, the light moved with me. I could suddenly see that Soulages was drawing with light.

The black wasn’t there to create a void. It was there to give the light something to catch on.

When I was a child, I took art lessons at the Museum of Modern Art. After class I would go through the collection. I did this every week, so certain paintings became almost like acquaintances.

I remember the first time I came across one of Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings. My first reaction was more or less: WTF.

I can’t remember now for sure, but there may have been a Larry Bell box nearby and possibly a white painting by Robert Ryman. I may be telescoping different visits. Bell’s glass box, which glistened like a gas leak, was a helpful comparison. It had already made me alert to the surface. Reinhardt’s painting seemed to be doing something entirely different.

So what was it?

Goya's Black Paintings were not his first encounter with black.

Years before he painted those extraordinary images on the walls of his house outside Madrid, black had already carried the weight of The Disasters of War, the print series he began during the Peninsular War. They are some of the most horrifying images of war ever made. Bodies are mutilated. People are hanged. Women are attacked. Families flee. People starve. There are no heroic generals on horseback, no glorious battles, no suggestion that war ennobles anyone.

Years ago, I took my “steppish” daughter to the Guggenheim. I never married her father, hence the qualification, but she has been in my life since she was a child.

We wandered into a side gallery that held several paintings by Kazimir Malevich. I don’t think I had taken twenty steps before she began peppering me with questions. Did Malevich know Picasso’s work? What other artists did he know about? Had he seen Duchamp? Was this before or after the Russian Revolution?

Frank Stella did not arrive at the stripe because he liked stripes.

He arrived at it because he was trying to solve a problem in painting.