The Pen Friend

by Ciaran Carson

  Feeling blue

  I’m writing this in blue ink with an American Waterman’s Ideal fountain pen made in 1927, the year that Lee Miller, aged twenty, was about to step off a sidewalk in New York into the path of an oncoming car, when she was saved by a passer-by. When her panic had subsided, he introduced himself to her as Condé Nast, the owner of Vogue magazine. I’m writing this with the Waterman’s Ideal because its swirled faded green and amber colours are like those of a dress you wore in Paris, made of a billowy moiré tulle, that shimmered as you walked. You’d bought it for a song in the Friday Market, a copy of a Dior number you’d seen in a 1947 Vogue. And the pen also goes well with your postcard, the rusts and metallic grey-greens of the Turbine Hall of Bankside Power Station before its conversion to the Tate Modern Gallery in 1997. Not to mention the tawny fleck in one of your green eyes.

  At first I took your message, Feeling blue, to be a reference to a song, but when I thought of it in the context of the Tate Modern, I knew that you meant me to think of Yves Klein’s IKB 79, which hangs at this moment in the Tate Modern, and which we both saw in the old Tate in October 1982. It consists of nothing more than blue paint applied to a canvas-covered plywood panel some five feet by four, one of almost two hundred such monochrome paintings made by him before he died from a hereditary heart condition in 1962, aged just thirty-four. Klein had left these works untitled, but his widow posthumously numbered them IKB 1 to IKB 194, a sequence which did not reflect their chronological order, possibly because even she could not determine when each had been composed. The letters stand for ‘International Klein Blue’, registered by Klein as a trademark in 1960. He had long been fascinated by the incandescent luminosity of pastel colours. In the early 1950s, noting how the glow of pigments in their powder forms invariably dimmed when mixed with oil to make a paint, Klein had begun a quest to find a means of preserving what he called the ‘affective magic’ of the colour. In 1955 he found the solution: a colourless fixative called Rhodopas M60A, manufactured by the Rhône-Poulenc chemicals company, consisting of a vinyl chloride resin, thinned with ethyl alcohol and ethyl acetate. When M60A was mixed with a pigment and applied to a surface, the highly volatile ethyl derivatives would evaporate, leaving behind the pure colour suspended in the transparent resin.

  Klein’s all-blue paintings were first seen in Milan in 1957, where he exhibited a series of eleven such works. To a casual observer they all looked the same, but Klein assigned different prices to them, claiming that each reflected not what the painting ‘looked like, but the intensity of feeling that had gone into making it’. The blue was a feeling blue. In any case, the pieces were not identical, said Klein; and I am reminded of my father’s observation regarding the blades of grass on the lawn of Botanic Gardens, that every one is different from its neighbour because, despite appearances, nothing in the world is the same as anything else. The blue world of each painting, said Klein, although the same blue and treated in the same way, presents a completely different essence and atmosphere. None resembles any other – no more than pictorial moments resemble each other – although all are of the same superior and subtle nature, marked by the immaterial, said Klein.

  Your card is postmarked Nice, where Klein was born in 1928. Blue always evoked to him the Côte d’Azur. When he embarked on his Blue project, he searched for some time before finding a suitable canvas, a cotton sailcloth used for the canopies of Paris street-market traders. He liked its artisan quality, its association with both sky and sea. Every piece was a unique textural field of nubs and bracks and flaws. As he proceeded with the IKB series, the individual panels began to come out differently. Some were utterly flat and thinly painted; many were dry and grainy, or lush and velvety; the surfaces of others were undulating, swirled, grooved, rutted, or embossed. Though every moment in time had its unique quality, all could be absorbed by blue, said Klein.

  I knew little about Klein’s work, or the philosophy behind it, when I first saw IKB 79 with you, but I was immediately attracted by its intensity of colour. Only in subsequent, closer viewings did I realise that its surface was not entirely uniform, but had a dimpled, translucent shimmer like that of distemper paint, though I do not know how much this might be due to the passage of time. It reminded us both of the stained glass in York Cathedral, and I was not surprised to discover that Klein had been influenced by the ethereal blue of the stained glass in Chartres Cathedral. Klein espoused a peculiarly mystic brand of Catholicism, immersing himself in Rosicrucianism, and becoming a Knight of the exclusive Order of the Archers of St Sebastian. One of his most sumptuous works is the votive offering he made for the shrine of St Rita of Cascia, a Perspex box containing rose pigment, blue pigment, and gold leaf. Viewed in this light, IKB 79 is a religious icon. Through blue and beyond blue, said Klein, he felt himself grazed by the quivering of the absolute, a tangible representation of celestial space.

  Klein had visited Hiroshima in 1953. As he was being shown around the city he remarked on the beautiful, cloudless blue sky, and was told that the atom bomb had dropped out of just such a sky on 6th August, 1945. In that immaculate summer light of 1953, the few relics of the city’s most defining moment – that of its erasure – stood out clearly amidst the ongoing work of reconstruction. The ruined dome of the once beautiful Art Deco Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall, still left partly standing when everything around it had been levelled to the ground, had been preserved as an admonitory feature, as were the white shadows imprinted on hard surfaces by things and people vaporised by the explosion. Etched into the wood of an electric pole were the bold, serrated leaves of a Fatsia japonica, which reminded Klein of reports he had heard of the patterns burned into the skin of some women, from the shapes of flowers on their kimonos. He learned that in the immediate aftermath of the explosion people supposed they had been the victims of a Molotoffano hanakago – a ‘Molotov flower basket’, the Japanese name for the self-scattering cluster-bomb known to the Americans as a ‘bread-basket’. When the full extent of the devastation began to be realised, a rumour circulated that an aircraft had dusted all of Hiroshima with a special magnesium powder so fine as to be invisible, which exploded like a gigantic photographic flash when ignited by a spark from an overhead power cable. At the Red Cross Hospital, word went around among the staff that there must indeed have been something very peculiar about the bomb, because on the third day the second-in-command had descended to the basement, and, opening the vault where the X-ray plates were stored, found the whole stock exposed as they lay. Only gradually did the truth emerge, and then it was not believed by many.

  Klein’s visit to Hiroshima was by the way. He had gone to Japan principally to study judo. He became an expert practitioner of the art, being awarded the fourth dan black-belt on 14th December 1953. He had long been fascinated by how the body cuts a shape in space, leaving behind innumerable, invisible impressions of itself on the air. Although the principle of judo was not one of staccato aggression, but of a seamless flow, Klein recognised that its repertoire of actions could be broken down into a series of pivotal moments. In his book Les Fondements du Judo, published in 1954, he analysed the syntax of judo movements in meticulous detail, accompanying them with hundreds of still photographs derived from film footage taken in Japan: illustrations of the importance of timing, of recognising the split second when the opponent’s equilibrium can be turned to disequilibrium, his apparent greater strength to weakness. Learning to fall, one learned to overthrow. Gradually, through practice and inner visualisation, the most effective attitudes were remembered by the body, so that its responses to attack became second nature.

  Klein was deeply affected by Hiroshima. He paid homage to the ghostly presences of its atomic silhouettes in a piece he called Hiroshima. This was one of a series of ‘anthropometries’, made by spraying blue pigment around live models posed on a large sheet of white paper, who, when they removed themselves, left behind a shadowy, retrospective choreography of body-shaped spaces. At the back o
f Klein’s mind were apparitions of the Virgin Mary; the miraculously preserved bodies of saints, particularly that of St Rita of Cascia; the ‘mummies’ of Pompeii; and the faint impressions left by a person on a judo mat.

  As you know, Nina, blue is a favourite colour of mine. You remember that first day I showed you around the Municipal Gallery, when we looked at Gerard Dillon’s Yellow Bungalow. Then, by way of contrast, I showed you, as my father had first shown me, the Gallery’s most prized exhibit, J.M.W. Turner’s Dawn of Christianity, subtitled Flight into Egypt. I had always loved the blue of the sky in this painting, which is inspired by the Gospel story according to St Matthew: ‘And when they were departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in sleep to Joseph, saying, Arise, and take the child and his mother, and fly into Egypt, and be there until I shall tell thee. For it will come to pass that Herod will seek the child to destroy him’ – a text my father would habitually quote to me each time we saw the painting, as I did to you, for it was ingrained in my memory. And I told you that my father would explain to me that Herod was an agent of the Roman Empire, comparing its jurisdiction in the Holy Land to that of the British in Ireland. I saved you the gory details of my father’s account of the Massacre of Innocents that followed, but when I mentioned that the Catholic Church considered the Innocents to be martyrs, you asked if one could be a martyr without full knowledge and complete consent. You’d make a good Jesuit, I said, you know they were trained to be devil’s advocates, to see both sides of an argument. Yes, you said, I know, it’s useful to imagine what it must be like to be somebody else, to see things from another’s point of view. And we gazed into Turner’s opalescent blue sky, below which the fugitive Holy Family were almost indecipherable details in a dream landscape. My father would say that blue signifies a detachment from the things of this world, I said, an inclination of the liberated soul towards God. In other words, it was the colour of flight.

  Years afterwards, I discovered that these were precisely the attributes that Yves Klein ascribed to his trademark blue. He had always been fascinated by the concept of flight. Today, said Klein, the painter of space must actually go into space, but without aeroplane, parachute, or rocket. He must be capable of levitating. From his judo experience, Klein believed that levitation – he liked to think of it as a form of ascension, a victory over death – was indeed possible, through a regime of breathing exercises designed to free the body – physically, mentally, and spiritually – from the constraints of weight. In October 1960 the French journal Dimanche carried a photograph of Klein which became known as The Leap into the Void. It shows Klein, dressed in a business suit, soaring into space just off the ledge of a mansard roof, his torso and head turned towards the sky and his arms extended outwards in a convincing simulacrum of flight. The setting is a nondescript Parisian street, empty except for a man on a bicycle who has just passed by, his back to the viewer, oblivious to the marvellous event. When I first saw a reproduction of this photograph I was struck by the quotidian beauty of the scene, the crooked kerbstones, the empty bus-shelter, the tarred roadway patched and laddered with repair-work, light glinting off the leafy trees and the iron railings of a garden. How wonderfully the cyclist defies gravity, how intricate are the folds and puckers of his overcoat, caught in mid-flap behind him! Klein’s Leap into the Void might have been a camera trick; but the street is miraculously real.

  I write this in blue ink, the colour of liberation, the colour of France. You remember that week in Paris, Nina, you told me about Lee Miller. We were in Cimetière du Montparnasse, where Samuel Beckett is buried, except he was alive then, and we walked the avenues between the tombs and sepulchres and monuments as they glittered in the immaculate Paris light. We stood at the grave of Baudelaire as you recited his poem ‘Parfum Exotique’ – l’odeur de ton sein chaleureux, the odour of your warm breast – and we stood silently a while by the grave of Jean-Paul Sartre, who would be joined in four years’ time by Simone de Beauvoir; and then we went to Man Ray’s grave, Man Ray who was once a lover of Lee Miller. A string of coincidences, if you like, you said. Imagine, 1927, New York, Lee Miller’s about to step in front of a car, and of all people, of all the millions of people in New York, she’s saved by Condé Nast, who owns Vogue magazine. A few weeks later she appears on the front cover of Vogue, full face, with the lights of New York behind her, lovely Art Deco cover, she’s wearing a blue cloche hat, and she’s got this look, uninhibited yet relaxed, a look of worldly sophistication. Someone who knows who she is, yet the viewer can project her own fantasies on to her. Edward Steichen, the great photographer, takes a real shine to her, that’s when she starts to get interested in photography, she watches how it’s done, how an image is created. Then Condé Nast pulls some strings for her, gets her a research assignment in Paris with French Vogue, she’s to go and look at Renaissance paintings, make detailed drawings of costume adornments, buckles, buttons and bows, haberdashery, as it were, and Steichen gives her an introduction to Man Ray. Man Ray, he was born Emmanuel Radnitzky, decides at the age of fifteen he’s going to be Man Ray, anyway, Paris in the 1920s, he’s at the forefront of the whole Surrealist enterprise, there’s Paul Éluard and André Breton, there’s Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Magritte, Picasso, and there’s Man Ray – what must it have been like?

  Lee Miller goes and looks at the buckles and bows, and decides that drawing them is a bit silly, why not photograph them instead? All she has is a folding Kodak, she has to take close-ups in bad light with low-speed film, but she learns how to do it. She knows now she wants to be a photographer. She goes to see Man Ray, calls at his apartment, but the concierge tells her he’s just left for Biarritz. She goes to a nearby café, Le Bateau Ivre, she’s sitting there all disappointed sipping a Pernod, when who walks in but Man Ray. She tells him she’s his new student, he says he doesn’t take students, and anyway he’s leaving Paris to go on holiday, and she says, I know, I’m going with you, and she does, and they end up living together for three years. Ends up driving him near crazy. But at the beginning, she’s going with Man Ray, she’s the talk of Paris, there’s images of her all over the place, a glass manufacturer designs a champagne glass modelled on her breast, as photographed by Man Ray. She gets her own apartment, look, over there, and you pointed to a high mansard roof in a street that overlooked the cemetery, 12 rue Victor Considérant, you said, she sets up a studio, gets to photograph high society, the Duchess of Alba, Duke Vallambrosa, the Maharanee of Cooch-Bihar, whoever, it’s like something out of Proust. And one thing leads to another.

  Skip to 1940, she’s in London, she gets to know the Mass Observation people, you know, Jennings, Gascoyne, Spender, all these poets and photographers, she’s at all their mad soirees, and they all idolise her because the Mass Observation thing was really a Surrealist enterprise, and here’s Lee Miller who was at the heart of it all in Paris, worked with Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Picasso, all the big names. Of course, by now Mass Observation’s a propaganda tool, they’re in league with the Ministry of Information, they assess the morale of the civilian population, see what might perk them up. So a few strings are pulled, she gets a photography job in British Vogue, they called it Brogue. And Brogue’s doing the British stiff upper lip thing, photographs of well-bred, elegantly dressed ladies, aloof from the terrors of the Blitz, even when their offices were bombed it didn’t rate a mention in the magazine, the show must go on. Lee gets a bit restless, starts to look around for something to do on the side, she meets up with the American broadcaster Ed Murrow, they collaborate on a book, he writes the text, she takes the pictures, they call it Grim Glory, Pictures of Britain under Fire. I got a second-hand copy a few years ago, cost me a small fortune, but it was worth it, I can see some of those photographs still, one of a bomb-damaged typewriter, she called it Remington Silent, the keyboard’s all twisted, the ribbon’s unspooled all over the place, it looks like some kind of Surrealist object, but really it’s a very simple shot, there’s no tricks with it. It just shows it as it is, a
typewriter that’s been in the war. Then there’s one of a terrace of grand houses in Knightsbridge, it’s got a house-sized gap blasted right through the middle of it, you can see the back of another terrace through it, but the top storey with the mansard windows is still intact, she called that one Bridge of Sighs. Or maybe Murrow made up the captions, I don’t know. Personally I find the captions a bit sentimental, the pictures speak far more clearly.

  Then she meets the photographer David Scherman, she teams up with him, in more ways than one, eventually. Brogue gives them assignments with a bit more grit to them, seems the Ministry of Information people, or the Mass Observation people, whatever, they want Brogue to change its slant. Lee comes up with some great photographs, the ATS searchlight operators, women, they’ve got this padded body armour on, they look like gladiators. Londoners sleeping in the Tube stations, she makes you aware of fabric and texture, the folds and furrows in the blankets, there’s a sculptural quality to the rows of people wrapped up for the night, yet they’re still people, you can see how the light falls on an old man’s hand, a child’s face. There’s a great one of a barrage balloon that’s settled in a field, terrible caption, they called it Eggceptional Achievement, because there’s a pair of geese standing in front of it, like they’ve just produced this wonderful giant silver egg, a Surrealist thing, except it’s not. It’s real. That’s the beauty of the pictures, they show how things pressurised by exceptional circumstances, by war, take on interesting new shapes, you said.