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VINCENT VAN GOGH:
Excerpts from the Letters
BLACK AND WHITE ARE COLORS
To Emile Bernard, Arles, second half June 1888
A technical question. Just give me your opinion on it in your next letter. I am going
to put the black and the white, _just as the color merchant sells them to us, boldly on
my palette and use them just as they are. When-and observe that I am speaking
of the simplification of color in the Japanese manner-when in a green park with
pink paths I see a gentleman dressed in black and a justice of the peace by trade
(the Arab Jew in Daudet in Tartarin calls this honorable functionary zouge de paix)
who is reading L'lntransigeant . . .
Over him and the park a sky of a simple cobalt .... Then why not paint
the said zouge de paix with ordinary bone black and the Intransigeant with simple,
quite raw whites For the japanese artist ignores reflected colors, and puts the flat
tones side by side, with characteristic lines marking off the movements and the
forms.
In another category of ideas--when for instance one composes a motif of
colors representing a yellow evening sky, then the fierce hard white of a white
wall against this sky may be expressed if necessary-and this in a strange way-by
raw white, softened by a neutral tone, for the sky itself colors it with a delicate
lilac hue. Furthermore imagine in that landscape which is so naive, and a good
thing too, a cottage whitewashed all over (the roof too) standing in an orange
Held-certainly orange, for the southern sky and blue Mediterranean provoke an
orange tint that gets more intense as the scale of blue colors gets a more vigorous
tone-then the black note of the door, the windows and the little cross on the
ridge of the roof produce a simultaneous contrast of black and white just as
pleasing to the eye as that of blue and orange.
Or let us take a more amusing motif: imagine a woman in a black-and-
white-checked dress in the same primitive landscape with a blue sky and an orange
soil-that would be a rather funny sight, I think. In Arles they often do wear
black and white checks.
Suffice it to say that black and white are also colors, for in many cases
they can be looked upon as colors, for their simultaneous contrast is as striking as
that of green and red, for instance.
The Japanese make use of it for that matter. They express the mat and
pale complexion of a young girl and the piquant contrast of the black hair
marvelously well by means of white paper and four strokes of the pen. Not to
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