Anish Kapoor has the exclusive rights to paint using Vantablack, the blackest black that has ever existed – but other artists are keen to use it

Colour is precious. Colour can drive you mad – especially if you are an artist. The colours that artists use can be as expensive as gold – which installationist Richard Wright painted on to a wall in Tate Britain to win the Turner prize - or as lethal as arsenic, which in the Romantic age was used to make the beautiful but deadly Scheele Green.

The colour currently ruffling artistic temperaments is black - but not just any black. This is the blackest black ever. Vantablack, developed by British company NanoSystems to use on stealth satellites reflects almost no light at all.

Vantablack nanofabric: 'the new black' to end all new blacks? Read more

Painters are outraged that Anish Kapoor, the British sculptor who designed the blood-red Orbit tower for the London Olympics, has exclusive rights to the artistic use of this revolutionary new colour. NanoSystems has confirmed that he alone can paint it Vantablack.

“We should be able to use it,” complains portraitist Christian Furr. “It isn’t right that it belongs to one man.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest International Klein Blue … the Blue Man Group daub themselves in Yves Klein’s bespoke colour. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/EPA

This is not the first time an artist has claimed a unique bond with a particular colour. In 1960, the French artist Yves Klein took out a patent for International Klein Blue (IKB), a deep, matt shade of blue that he developed with a Paris paintmaker and used in a series of monochrome blue paintings. He splashed it on to nude models in a performance piece that was sexist even by 1960s standards. Klein died in 1962, but IKB lives on. Derek Jarman used it in his film Blue and performance artists The Blue Man Group cover themselves with it.

Kapoor has been working with Vantablack since 2014. It is a clever move by NanoSystems to associate their material with the greatest colourist in 21st-century art. With all due respect – not much, really – to the minor painters who are kicking up a fuss, Kapoor is an ideal artist to experiment with this freaky black. He loves deep, dark, sensual colours. In some of his most beguiling works, he fills holes and voids with colour to create the powerful illusion that you are looking at a flat surface, until you put your hand into the empty blue space. In other works, conversely, he paints the ground such an unreflecting black that it appears to be a hole leading deep into the earth.

This creator of sublime chromatic effects is just the guy to make Vantablack look like the new black. But artists can’t be blamed for getting their heads in a twist over a colour. Black itself has always tantalised painters. In the 18th century, leading artists including Benjamin West and Joshua Reynolds paid through the nose for the right to use “Titian’s shade”, a mixture of ivory black and Prussian blue that was supposed to be the Venetian master’s secret colour. It was in reality a con trick concocted by a painter called Ann Provis, who had a good laugh at the men of the Royal Academy.

Long before Klein created IKB, painters and their patrons paid through the nose for the rarest of pigments, lapis lazuli. This mineral that creates the colour ultramarine has only ever been found in Afghanistan. In the middle ages, it was mined there and traded at enormous prices to create European images of the blue heavens. Gold leaf was then daubed on it to make stars.

Colour is magical, colour is divine - you can’t blame Anish Kapoor or his critics for going mad for Vantablack.