The Secret Lives of Color

by Kassia St. Clair

  In the Victorian language of flowers, heliotrope often signified devotion, which is partly why it was one of the few colors women were allowed to wear after the death of a loved one. The cult of mourning reached its zenith during the nineteenth century, with ever more elaborate social rules governing what people, particularly women, could wear in the months and years following the death of a relative or monarch. Heliotrope, and other soft shades of purple, were required wearing during half-mourning. For widows, who endured the most serious degree of grief, half-mourning was reached only after two years of wearing plain, matte black dresses; for remoter relations, mourning was less severe and subdued colors were allowed from the beginning. A serious outbreak of influenza over the winter of 1890 resulted in a rash of black, gray, and heliotrope being worn the following year.3

  While this hue’s fortunes have suffered something of a collapse in the real world, it has had a distinguished literary afterlife. Badly behaved characters are often described as wearing the color. The deliciously immoral antiheroine of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, Mrs. Cheveley, makes her entrance in heliotrope and diamonds, before swashbuckling her way through the remainder of the play and commandeering all the best lines.4 Allusions to heliotrope also crop up in the works of J. K. Rowling, D. H. Lawrence, P. G. Wodehouse, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad. The word is pleasurable to say, filling the mouth like a rich, buttery sauce. Added to which, the color itself is intriguing: antiquated, unusual, and just a little bit brassy.

  Violet

  In Paris in 1874 a group of artists founded the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, &c. and began organizing their first show. They wanted the exhibition to act as mission statement, rallying call, and, most importantly, a snub to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which had just rejected their work for the prestigious annual Salon. The founder-members of the new group, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, and others, thought the old, academic style of art was too dull, too staid, and too coated in a unifying layer of honey-colored varnish to capture the world as it really was and, therefore, to have any value at all. The establishment was equally scathing about the impressionists. In a biting review for Le Charivari newspaper, Louis Leroy accused Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, of not being a finished painting at all but a mere preparatory sketch. Many more such criticisms were aimed at the fledgling movement over the following years, but one constant theme concerned their preoccupation with a single color: violet.

  Edmond Duranty, an early admirer of the impressionists, wrote that their works “procédent presque toujours d’une gamme violette et bleuâtre” (“almost always proceed from a violet and bluish range”).1 For others, this violet tinting was more troubling. Many concluded that the artists were, to a man, completely mad, or at the very least suffering from a hitherto unknown disease, which they dubbed “violettomania.” It would be as difficult to persuade Pissarro that the trees were not violet, joked one, as to persuade the inmate of a lunatic asylum that he wasn’t the pope in the Vatican. Another wondered if the artists’ fascination with the color was a result of the impressionists spending too much time en plein air: the violet tint could be the result of a permanent negative afterimage caused by looking at sunny yellow landscapes for too long. Alfred de Lostalot, in a review of one of Monet’s solo shows, hypothesized that the artist might be among that rare number of people who could see into the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. “He and his friends see purple,” wrote Lostalot. “[T]he crowd sees otherwise; hence the disagreement.”2

  Their preference for violet was the result of two new-minted theories. One was the impressionists’ conviction that shadows were never really black or gray, but colored; the second concerned complementary colors. Since the complementary color to the yellow of sunlight was violet, it made sense that this would be the color of the shade. Soon enough, though, this shade had transcended its role in the shadows. In 1881 Édouard Manet announced to his friends that he had finally discovered the true color of the atmosphere. “It is violet,” he said. “Fresh air is violet. Three years from now, the whole world will work in violet.”3

  Ultramarine

  Cobalt

  Indigo

  Prussian blue

  Egyptian blue

  Woad

  Electric blue

  Cerulean

  Blue

  During the 1920s the Catalan artist Joan Miró produced a group of paintings that were radically different from anything he had done before. One of his “peinture-poésie,” a large canvas created in 1925, remains almost completely blank. In the top left-hand corner the word “Photo” is rendered in elegant, swirling calligraphy; over on the right there is a popcorn-shaped daub of forget-me-not-colored paint and underneath, the words, in neat, unassuming letters, “ceci est la coleur de mes rêves” (“this is the color of my dreams”).

  Just two years previously, Clyde Keeler, an American geneticist studying the eyes of blind mice, had made discoveries that indicated Miró might be on to something. Inexplicably, although the mice completely lacked the photoreceptors that enable mammals to perceive light, their pupils still contracted in response to it. It would be three-quarters of a century before the link was definitively proven: everyone, even the nonsighted, possesses a special receptor that senses blue light. This is crucial because it is our response to this portion of the spectrum, naturally present in the highest concentrations in early daylight, which sets our circadian rhythm, the inner clock that helps us sleep at night and remain alert during the day.1 One problem is our modern world, filled as it is with spot-lit rooms and backlit smartphones, overloads us with blue light at odd hours of the day, which has negative effects on our sleep patterns. In 2015 American adults reported getting an average 6.9 hours of sleep on a work night; 150 years ago it was between 8 and 9 hours.2

  Westerners have a history of undervaluing all things blue. During the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, reds, blacks, and browns reigned supreme; the ancient Greeks and Romans admired the simple triumvirate of black, white, and red. For the Romans, in particular, blue was associated with barbarism: writers from the period mentioned that Celtic soldiers dyed their bodies blue, and Pliny accused women of doing the same before participating in orgies. In Rome wearing blue was associated with mourning and misfortune.3 (Exceptions to this ancient aversion to blue are more common outside Europe; the ancient Egyptians, for example, were evidently very fond of it [here].) It was largely absent too from early Christian writings. A nineteenth-century survey of color terms used by Christian authors before the thirteenth century reveals that blue was the least used, at a mere 1 percent of the total.4

  It was during the twelfth century that a sea change occurred. Abbot Suger, a prominent figure in the French court and an early champion of Gothic architecture, fervently believed colors—particularly blues—to be divine. He oversaw the reconstruction of Saint-Denis Abbey in Paris in the 1130s and ’40s. It was here that craftsmen perfected the technique of coloring glass with cobalt [here] to create the famous ink-blue windows that they took with them to the cathedrals at Chartres and Le Mans.5 At around the same time, the Virgin was increasingly depicted wearing bright blue robes—previously she had usually been shown in dark colors that conveyed her mourning for the death of her son. As the status of Mary and Marian-centered devotion waxed in the Middle Ages, so too did the fortunes of her adopted color.

  From the Middle Ages the pigment most commonly associated with Mary was the precious pigment ultramarine [here], which remained the most coveted, bar none, for centuries. This was not the only substance to have a huge impact on the history of blue, however: indigo [here] was also decisive. Although the first is a pigment made from a stone and the second a dye wrung from fermented plant leaves, they share far more than you might imagine. Both required care, patience, and even reverence in their extraction and creation. While colormen and painters were laboriously grinding and kneading the one, dyers would b
e stripped to the waist beating air into nauseating vats of the other. The pigments’ expense helped stoke desire and demand in a dizzying cycle that ended only with the creation of synthetic alternatives in the nineteenth century.

  Although it was traditionally the color of sadness, many cultures, including the ancient Egyptians, Hindus, and the North African Tuareg tribe, have included a special place for blue and blue things in their lives. A large number of businesses and organizations use a dark shade for its anonymous trustworthiness in their logos and uniforms, perhaps little considering that its history of brisk respectability began with the armed forces, particularly the navies (hence navy blue), who needed to dye their clothes with a color that would best resist the action of sun and sea.

  At the end of the twelfth century the French royal family adopted a new coat of arms—a gold fleur-de-lis on an azure ground—as a tribute to the Virgin, and Europe’s nobility fell gauntlet over greaves in their rush to follow suit.6 In 1200 only 5 percent of European coats of arms contained azure; by 1250 this had risen to 15 percent; in 1300, one-quarter; and by 1400 it was just under one-third.7 A recent survey conducted across 10 different countries on four continents found that blue was people’s favorite color by a considerable margin.8 Similar surveys conducted since the First World War returned similar results. It seems blue, once considered the color of degenerates and barbarians, has conquered the world.

  Ultramarine

  In April A.D. 630, Xuanzang, a Buddhist monk on a journey to India, made a 1,000-mile detour into Afghanistan. He had been lured far out of his way by two immense carvings of the Buddha hewn just over a century earlier directly into the side of a mountain in the Bamiyan Valley. Both were decorated with precious ornaments. The larger one—174 feet from heel to crown—was painted with carmine; the smaller, older one was draped in robes painted with the region’s most famous export: ultramarine. In March 2001, nearly 1,400 years after Xuanzang’s pilgrimage, the Bamiyan statues were declared false idols by the Taliban government, surrounded with dynamite, and destroyed.1

  Although now so remote, the site of the Bamiyan Buddhas was once on one of the busiest and most influential trade routes ever known. The Silk Road, which runs through the mountains of the Hindu Kush, was used by the caravans that shuttled goods between East and West. Ultramarine was first bumped along the Silk Road by donkey and camel in the form of lumps of lapis lazuli. When these reached the Mediterranean coast in Syria they were loaded onto ships bound for Venice, and thence traded throughout Europe. Even the word ultramarine, from the Latin for “beyond”—ultra—and “sea”—mare—indicates that this was a color worth going the extra mile for. Cennino Cennini, the Renaissance Italian painter and author of Il libro dell’arte, called it “illustrious, beautiful and most perfect, beyond all other colors; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would not surpass.”2

  The story of this blue begins deep in the ground. Lapis lazuli (“the blue stone” in Latin) is now mined from countries including China and Chile, but the overwhelming majority of the intense, night-colored rock that was used for ultramarine pigment in the West prior to the eighteenth century came from a single source: the Sar-e-Sang mines, tucked in the mountainous folds of Afghanistan, some 400 miles northeast of Bamiyan. Like the Buddha statues, the mines were famous; Marco Polo, who visited in 1271, wrote of a “high mountain, out of which the best and finest blue is mined.”3

  Although lapis lazuli is thought of as a semiprecious stone, it is really a mixture of minerals. Its deep blue color is thanks to lazurite, while the delicate traceries of white and gold are silicates (including calcite) and fool’s gold (iron pyrite) respectively. Nuggets of the stone were used for decorative purposes in ancient Egypt and Sumeria, but no one seems to have used it as a pigment until much later. Not only is it difficult to grind, but because lapis contains so many impurities, the result can be disappointingly grayish. Turning it into a usable pigment is an exercise in extracting the blue lazurite. To do this, the finely milled stone is mixed with pitch, mastic, turpentine, and linseed oil or wax, and then heated together to form a paste. This is then kneaded in an alkaline lye solution—“just as,” wrote Cennini, “you would work over bread dough.”4 The blue gradually washes out into the lye and sinks to the bottom. It takes a few successive kneadings, each drawing out progressively grayer solutions, to remove all the color; the final extraction will produce only a pallid color known as ultramarine ashes.

  The oldest examples of lapis being used as a pigment are found in a small number of fifth-century wall paintings in Chinese Turkmenistan and some seventh-century images from a cave temple at Bamiyan. The earliest known European use is in the San Saba Church in Rome, dating from the first half of the eighth century, where ultramarine was mixed with Egyptian blue [here]. (At this time Egyptian blue was the ancient world’s preeminent blue, though it was soon to be superseded by ultramarine.)5

  Not only did the long journey from the mines increase the pigment’s price, it also affected how—and even if—ultramarine was used. Italian artists, particularly Venetians, who were first in the European supply chain and could procure the pigment at its cheapest, were relatively profligate with this precious pigment. This is evident, for example, in the vast swathe of star-strewn sky in Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, painted with ultramarine in the early 1520s. Northern European artists had to be thriftier. Albrecht Dürer, the foremost printmaker and painter of the German Renaissance, used it occasionally, but never without complaining bitterly of the cost. When buying pigments in Antwerp in 1521 he paid almost 100 times for ultramarine what he paid for some earth pigments.6 The difference in price and quality meant it made more sense for artists to buy pigments from Venice if they were working on prestigious commissions. Filippino Lippi’s 1487 contract for the frescoes in the Strozzi Chapel at Santa Maria Novella in Florence included a provision that a portion of the fee be set aside for when “he wants to go to Venice.” There was a similar clause in Pinturicchio’s 1502 contract for the frescoes in the Piccolomini Library in Siena: 200 ducats were reserved for a Venetian pigment expedition.7

  The reasons for all this fuss were both practical and emotional. While many other blue pigments are tinged with green, ultramarine is a true blue, occasionally bordering on violet, and is extraordinarily long-lasting. It was also prized because of the esteem in which the raw lapis lazuli was held. The color’s rise in the West also coincided with the Renaissance’s increasing preoccupation with the Virgin Mary. From around 1400, artists increasingly depicted the Madonna wearing ultramarine-blue cloaks or gowns, a material sign of their esteem and her divinity.8 Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato’s The Virgin at Prayer (1640–50) seems as much a tribute to ultramarine in all its intensely midnight beauty as to Mary. While she sits, head modestly bent so her eyes find the floor, it is the thick, creamy folds of her blue cloak that capture the viewer’s gaze.

  The precise use of this pigment was a key point in many surviving contracts drawn up between artists and their patrons. The 1515 contract for Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna of the Harpies stipulated that the Virgin’s robe be painted with ultramarine “at least five broad florins the ounce.” Some patrons purchased the pigment themselves to control its use; a 1459 document suggests that while Sano di Pietro was working on a fresco on a gateway in Siena, the town authorities kept hold of his supplies of gold and ultramarine. They weren’t always wrong to be suspicious. Almost four centuries later, when Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones were painting a set of murals in the library of the Oxford Union in 1857, a potful of ultramarine was upset amid the “jollity, noise, cork-popping, paint-sloshing, and general larking about.” Their patrons were horrified.9

  To add salt to the wound, there was, by this time, a good alternative. In 1824 the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale in France offered 6,000 francs to anyone who could create an affordable synthetic ultramarine.
10 Four years later the prize was awarded to Jean-Baptiste Guimet, a French chemist. (Although Christian Gmelin, a German rival, announced he had happened on a similar recipe the previous year, the prize money remained with Monsieur Guimet, and the new formula was known thereafter as French ultramarine.)11 To create the synthetic, china clay, soda, charcoal, quartz, and sulfur are heated together; the result, a green, glassy substance, is pulverized, washed, and reheated once more to create a rich blue powder.

  French ultramarine was exponentially cheaper. In some instances the real thing could, ounce for ounce, sell for 2,500 times more than the synthetic.12 In the early 1830s the original cost 8 guineas an ounce (equivalent to just over 11 weeks’ wages for a male laborer), while French ultramarine cost between 1 and 25 shillings per pound. By the 1870s French ultramarine had become the standard. Despite this, the interloper still faced initial resistance. Artists complained that it was too one-dimensional. Because the particles were all the same size and reflected light in the same way, it lacked the depth, variety, and visual interest of the real thing.

  The French postwar artist Yves Klein agreed. He patented International Klein Blue in 1960 and used it to create his hallmark: the lustrous, textured blue canvases known as the “IKB series” after the color. (It was these seemingly simple monochromes that Klein later proudly called his “pure idea.”) While he loved the intensity of the raw powdered ultramarine, he was disappointed with the dullness of the paint made from it. He worked with a chemist for over a year to develop a special resin medium. This, when mixed with the synthetic to form IKB, allowed the pigment to approach the clarity and luster of the original.