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From the nineteenth century onward, artists from Francisco de Goya to Norman Lewis have produced series of works they called “black paintings.” Now popularly associated with the pantheon of mid-twentieth-century abstract painters such as Joan Mitchell and Jackson Pollock, and through exhibitions like Black Paintings: Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella (Haus der Kunst, 2006-07), black paintings now occupy a critical position in American Modernism and the history of painting at large. Yet, as pervasive as the terminology has become, black paintings’ rich lineage has only begun to be fully articulated. Recent discussions of blackness and black abstraction have enriched political and artistic consideration of works and exhibitions by artists like Kerry James Marshall and Glenn Ligon, deepening the historical and cultural questions posed by black paintings.

This session includes papers that reconsider twentieth-century American black paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, and Wally Hedrick. These papers consider these works' affective and rhetorical resonances in terms of race, opticality and invisibility, language, and political action, framing a selection of the many valences that surround black paintings’ powerful presence in modern painting.