Blue: To Infinity and Beyond

Inspired by ‘A History of the World in Three Colours: Blue’ BBC4 documentary by Dr James Fox

Since the dawn of mankind, we have looked out to the distant horizon or up into the sky and wondered what is out there. Blue is the colour that embodies our insatiable curiosity for the unknown.

Venice: 1000BC, a boat arrived at the port with a precious cargo of the strangest object the Venetians had seen: a bright blue rock. Arabs brought this blue rock, Lapis Lazuli, from a distant land that is now Afghanistan. They traded it for gold and returned home, leaving the Italians to perfect a method of turning the incredibly hard rock into pure blue pigment for paint. In his documentary Dr James Fox visits a contemporary Italian artist who describes this process of refinement “a testament to the importance of art that they worked so hard to make it as beautiful as possible”. The Italians called the colour ‘Ultramarine’ which means ‘from beyond the sea’, from a land unknown.

Ultramarine was used in moderation by monks to decorate illuminated manuscripts, but in 1303 Giotto went against moderation when he decorated the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. He painted the entire ceiling a deep blue and dotted it with golden stars and saints. Giotto represented heaven in blue and it quickly came to represent the colour of the unknown paradise; he had rendered the colour sacred. From then on the church tried to restrict the use of the colour blue. Only the Virgin Mary was allowed to be depicted wearing it. The church’s control of Lapis Lazuli inflated its price until it became more expensive than the gold the Arabs had traded it for.

The church succeeded in its control of the use of ultramarine until 1523 when Titian smeared it all over the canvas of Bacchus and Ariadne. No longer just for the Virgin Mary, he clothed a pagan Greek goddess in it, and even an anonymous female reveller! The church was outraged. Three years later Titian struck again, this time with a painting which sees St Peter take the centre stage draped in a splendid blue robe, whilst the Virgin Mary is pushed to the side with only a scrap of blue cloth about her waist. Pesaro Madonna was blasphemy in paint in the eyes of the church, but the damage was already done; Titian had liberated blue, it became the colour of freedom.

During the Romantic era of the 18^th Century blue took on another guise, due to the publishing of a book by Novalis called Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The eponymous young hero becomes obsessed with the search for a blue flower, yet his search takes place only in his mind. The book may have been largely forgotten, but at the time was highly influential in transforming blue into the embodiment of the unattainable.

The 18^th Century also gave birth to the saying ‘blue devils’ meaning a bout of depression and delirium. In the early 20^th Century ‘blue devils’ inspired the naming of the ‘Blues’ style of music, it’s why when we’re down we say we’ve ‘got the blues’. Furthermore, the 20^th Century saw the instigation of a psychological analysis of the link between blue and depression. One of the first to explore this connection was famous psychiatrist Carl Jung with his analysis of Pablo Picasso. After the suicide of his best friend, Picasso spent three years repeatedly painting about the tragedy, using a palette almost entirely of blue. Jung hypothesised that Picasso was expressing his deepest emotions through the medium of blue because it was the colour of death in Ancient Egypt, of hell and of the unknown. This act of catharsis led to the group of paintings we call Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’. As his emotional wounds began to heal, Picasso gradually reintroduced other colours into his paintings.  
The Cote d’Azure in the1940s, amidst the glamour and excess of Nice one young man looked up at the blue sky and dreamed of escape. His name was Yves Klein. After many varied career attempts, Klein decided to be an artist. Ever since his childhood he had been obsessed with blue, for him it symbolised ‘the void’: deep seas, infinite skies and spirituality. Klein believed that monochrome could be an "open window to freedom, as the possibility of being immersed in the immeasurable existence of colour." He took his obsession further when he enlisted a chemical technician called Edouard Adam to engineer the purest blue possible, which he achieved by mixing a new colourless medium with the ultramarine pigment. He named this substance International Klein Blue (IKB), and proceeded to paint objects and whole canvases in this single, penetrating hue. Klein experimented with performance art and in one infamous trick photograph he appears to leap out of a window. Klein died tragically young; in life he was constantly trying to escape; in death he was finally free.

It was from an unexpected source that our concept of blue finally changed. In 1967 the Apollo 8 space mission sent a group of astronauts to orbit the moon. Once in orbit they were instructed to take photographs of the moon’s surface. Upon returning from the dark side of the moon one man took a photograph of something never seen by human eyes before: our blue planet Earth. Dr James Fox explains how this photograph, ‘Earth Rise’, circulated around the globe and lead us to realise the irony of it all: “Blue was the colour of the great beyond, the unknown, but when we finally breached that horizon, we found that blue was the colour of home.”

Related links:

A History of Art in Three Colours website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01l9mf

Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel: http://www.cappelladegliscrovegni.it/index.php/en/the-scrovegni-s-chapel/history-of-scrovegni-s-chapel

Titian’s Pesaro Madonna: http://www.italianrenaissance.org/titian-pesaro-madonna/

Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/titian-bacchus-and-ariadne

Carl Jung’s 1932 article on Picasso: http://web.org.uk/picasso/jung_article.html

About Novalis: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/novalis.htm

Yves Klein biography: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-klein-yves.htm