On Color

by David Kastan

  Color theory often insists that green and red are opponent colors.15 Irish history, however, tells us that the opponents are green and orange. In Ireland they represent the separate but forever interrelated histories of the Protestant and Catholic communities on the often-troubled island. They are colors that, at least until very recently, always clash. They cannot be merely matters of aesthetic preference or color theory. They express partisan religious and nationalistic commitments, though the religious and the nationalistic do not always perfectly align. Protestants can be nationalists, and Catholics can be unionists. But usually orange is the old orange and green the old green.

  FIGURE 21: The flag of the Republic of Ireland

  Although each has now become the recognizable symbol of a political party eager to achieve power with ballots instead of bullets, the colors still represent an almost tribal set of loyalties and hatreds. The national flag of the Republic of Ireland is a tricolor of green, white, and orange: the green represents the Catholic population, the orange signifies the Protestant, and the central band of white expresses the hope that the two communities can live together in peace (Figure 21).

  Visually, the central band of white serves to keep the sections of orange and green apart. Politically, that had always been a good idea. It was mainly the separation of orange and green sectarians that kept the peace between the two communities. Josef Albers, however, taught generations of art students about the inevitable interactions of color and the fallibility of our perceptions.16 Colors are transformed by the colors around them, undoing our preexisting certainty about both what colors are and what they mean. This happens everywhere that we see color—sometimes even in Ireland.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Reno Dakota

  There’s not an iota

  Of kindness in you.

  You know you enthrall me

  And yet you don’t call me;

  It’s making me blue:

  Pantone two-ninety-two.

  THE MAGNETIC FIELDS, “Reno Dakota”

  MOODY

  Blues

  FIGURE 22: Derek Jarman in front of a screen showing Blue during the final mix, De Lane Lea Studios, London, 1993

  Colors have long been linked with human emotions. The connection existed long before Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” in 1966. In 1841, James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer imagined “red-skins” who could turn “green with envy,” which is an idiom in various languages—­although envious Hungarians apparently turn yellow, while those who “turn green” are angry, not unlike the Incredible Hulk.1

  More commonly, angry people “see red,” as bulls are supposedly roused to anger (but in fact it is not the color but the waving of the matador’s cape, to say nothing of the barbed darts stuck in the bull’s shoulders, that produces the animal’s response). In Britain, though, if you are merely annoyed, you can be “browned off,” an expression whose roots can be traced back to the late fifteenth century, when to be “in a brown study” meant to be pessimistic or discouraged.

  It is mainly only delighted English speakers who get “tickled pink,” although other familiar color phrases are widely shared across languages, usually because they are tied to observable physiological reactions. Faces sometimes turn “purple with anger” or “white with fear”; we become “red in the face” when we blush with embarrassment or heat up in rage but “blue in the face” when we are unsuccessful in convincing someone of something we care about.

  Cowards, more metaphorically, show a “yellow streak,” which seems inevitably to run down someone’s back (except in the case of “yellowbellies”). Optimistic people have “rosy” temperaments, while moods can also be “black,” both taking their color from the medieval theory of human physiology in which an excess of black bile was thought to be responsible for melancholy temperaments, just as red blood dominated in those who are what we now think of as “sanguine.”

  Emotions obviously have their own rainbow, but of the many colors of its spectrum, blue is predominant. It has become what William Gass called “the color of interior life.”2 Bob Dylan got “Tangled Up in Blue,” as well he might, given the extraordinary range of emotions and values that get associated with the color. In English, blue is both titillating (blue movies) and puritanical (blue laws); out of control (talk a blue streak) and purposefully restrained (blue penciled); startling (a bolt from the blue) and reassuring (true blue); sometimes intimidating (blue blood) though at other times condescending (blue collar); it can be joyful (my blue heaven) and gratifying (blue ribbons), and yet, as often as not, disappointed and frustrated (blue balls).

  Above all, blue is sad, forlorn, depressed, and melancholic, though this bit of color-coding seems to have been made initially by Europeans.

  Since the late fourteenth century, blue has been the color of dejection or despair. Most likely the connection is based upon some obscurely sensed analogy with what is medically known as cyanosis (cyan comes from the Greek word for blue): that is, the recognizably blue discoloration of the skin in the absence of adequately oxygenated blood. A “blue baby” is not a boy (and boys, in any case, weren’t inevitably dressed in blue until the 1940s); rather, it is a newborn of either sex suffering from a potentially fatal heart condition.

  In Chaucer’s “Complaint of Mars,” forsaken lovers with “wounded” hearts cry “blue tears,” and almost five hundred years later, George Eliot in Felix Holt still would describe a skilled card shark as someone who “can make a man look pretty blue” after his wallet has been emptied. Occasional bouts of melancholy were often characterized as “blue devils,” as in Herman Melville’s “Merry Ditty of the Sad Man”: “There’s nothing like singing / When the blue devils throng.”3

  People have blue moods and fall into blue funks, the latter becoming colored mainly from the use of the phrase in Tom Brown’s School Days in 1857.4 But blue had already come to seem so inevitable in its connection to various intensities of unhappiness that it could retire as an adjective and be reborn as a noun, no longer an attribute of a feeling but the feeling itself. It became what you feel, not how. You were no longer in a blue mood; you were just blue.

  Artists seemed unusually susceptible to it. In 1741, the English actor David Garrick admitted to his son that he was “far from being quite well,” while still insisting that he was not yet “troubled with the blues”; though in 1827, the American painter and naturalist John James Audubon was willing to admit to his wife that he actually “had the blues,” as he wrote while he was in Great Britain arranging for the printing of his magisterial Birds of America.5

  But neither ever sang the blues, which only became a musical genre in the late nineteenth century in the rural American South. Invented by African Americans, the ex-slaves and sons and daughters of former slaves, the blues mixed work chants, folk songs, and spirituals to produce a music of loss and of longing. It’s the other side of the coin of the joyful noise of gospel music. In 1908, an Italian American, Antonio Maggio, published a ragtime piano tune called “I Got the Blues,” the first printed song with “Blues” in the title, but the first real blues songs to be published were Hart Wand’s “Dallas Blues” and W. C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues” in 1912, though people had been singing the blues—well, probably forever.6 What marked these new blues songs was what musicians called “blue notes,” those uncanny microtonal slides and bends that make the music resemble a human voice, though often expressing emotions too subtle for mere words.

  The sounds of the blues spread from the fields and levees of the Deep South to the cities of America—to Beale Street in Memphis to Bourbon Street in New Orleans and north to Rush Street in Chicago. And then the blues crossed racial boundaries, became both electrified and gentrified, but even then the blues still were “nothing but a good man feeling bad,” as an old blues song had put it. The playwright August Wilson claimed in 1997 that he had once written the world’s shortest short story, called “The Best Blues Singer in the World”: “The streets that Balboa walked were his o
wn private ocean and he was drowning.”7 That’s the story. And that’s the blues.

  Pablo Picasso painted the blues. The works of his so-called Blue Period (1901–4) are somber, largely monochromatic paintings in gloomy shades of grayish blue. In the painting usually now known as The Tragedy, three bare-footed figures, seemingly a family dressed in rags, shiver at the water’s edge (Figure 23). The man and the woman each stand with their arms crossed against the cold. The young boy reaches out with his right hand to touch the man’s leg, but rather than a gesture of comfort and connection, it seems more like that of the man in Picasso’s Blind Man’s Meal, cautiously feeling for the wine jug, unable to see where it is on the table. In The Tragedy, the man and woman look down; the boy seems to be staring, if indeed his eyes can see at all, somewhere past the woman’s right hip. Although the three figures stand together, they seem lost in themselves, isolated by and in the unnamed tragedy of the title.

  The painting registers rather than represents a tragedy. There are no clues here to what has happened. Picasso just paints the sadness. Jaime Sabartés, an artist himself and one of Picasso’s close friends, said that Picasso’s greatness came from being “able to give form to a sigh.”8 He does it here with color. Blue. A blue sigh that is thin, empty, and cold.

  FIGURE 23: Pablo Picasso, The Tragedy, Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1903

  Much later, Picasso would say “I started painting in blue” after hearing of a friend’s suicide in Paris in the winter of 1901.9 The claim neatly fits the chronology—Carlos Casagemas shot himself on February 17 of that year. But it doesn’t quite fit the facts. For his first Paris show (with the Basque artist Francisco Iturrino) at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in the summer of 1901, Picasso showed loosely painted, often stridently colored canvases, most of which were produced in a flurry of creativity in the weeks before the opening. Like the extraordinary La Nana, these paintings ambitiously reconfigured the world of Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In the self-portrait (Yo, Picasso), with its confidant stare and splashes of vivid orange, the nineteen-year-old Picasso announced (both in Spanish and in paint) that there was a new sheriff in town.

  Soon, however, for whatever reason, his palette changed. The blues came to dominate both the pigments of his canvases as well as own emotional state, reflecting his growing depression, and no doubt adding to it, since these new paintings did not sell as well as had the ones he had shown at Vollard’s, with their more chromatically adventurous palette. When several of the muted blue paintings appeared in a group show in Paris in November 1902, the catalog described them as “cameos showing painful reality, dedicated to misery, loneliness and exhaustion.”10

  Accurate enough, but hardly an inducement to sales. Picasso continued to give form to his sighs in various cool shades of blue, but not everyone was moved. In 1905, an influential French critic, Charles Morice, acknowledged Picasso’s “extraordinary gifts” but found the sentiment of his paintings not just visually uninviting but emotionally false. He disapproved of how these early works seemed to “revel in the sadness” they depicted “without feeling it.”11 Morice saw Picasso as a mere sentimentalist, what Oscar Wilde had once defined as “one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”12 For Morice and some others, Picasso’s Blue Period paintings seemed the work of an immensely talented young artist but one who was indulging himself. Perhaps he was, like all sentimentalists, too willing to congratulate himself on his capacity to feel (and too eager to flatter his viewers’ sense of their own) rather than engaging and prompting genuine emotions.

  But now that just seems wrong. Possibly misled by Picasso’s technical virtuosity, it took time for critics to recognize that the paintings did originate deep within a realm of felt grief. Or perhaps it only took time to get past the age’s discomfort with feeling itself—to resist what seemed the shame of sentimentality. Later Wyndham Lewis would sneer at these Blue Period paintings as Picasso’s “fit of particularly sentimental blues” (a “fit,” which, for many art historians, would eventually be justified for having led Picasso back to Cézanne’s own “blue” period and setting him on the road to cubism).13 But sentimental or not, these paintings now can be seen as a legitimate form of the blues, unsparingly confronting us with his portraits of nameless Balboas drowning in their own privates oceans of sorrow and grief.

  But blue isn’t all about the blues. There are those blues that relieve that desolation, or that at least permit us to forget it for a while. There is a wonderful Miles Davis album from 1959 called Kind of Blue, and whatever kind it is, it is probably the best jazz album ever recorded. Nabokov loved the “blues,” although those blues are small butterflies (Lycaenidae: subfamily Polyommatinae), many of which are actually brown. And, of course, there are the many shades of blue that reliably delight, comfort, and reassure, not just as some alternative to the blues that express our inevitable sorrows but as an assertive indication of their limits—that they have limits. “The grief is quarantined,” says the Nobel Prize–­winning poet Wislawa Szymborska, “The sky is blue above.”14

  Blue is ambiguous; all colors are. The “something blue” that brides often wear as an accessory, along with something old, new, and borrowed, is not of course a sign of sadness (though divorce rates might suggest it could usefully serve as a warning of the possibility) but rather of fidelity. This tradition seems to be a bit of Victorian sentimentality, appearing in print first in 1883; yet the idea of blue as something “true” is at least two hundred years older than that.

  “True blue” begins to appear as a proverbial phrase in England in the seventeenth century. John Ray’s Collection of English Proverbs, published in 1678, lists “He’s true blue, he’ll never stain,” which is explained: “Coventry [a city in the English Midlands] formerly had a reputation for dyeing blues; insomuch that true blue became a Proverb to signify one that was always the same.”15 Coventry blue stayed blue. Like true love, it did not fade. Or at least it didn’t quickly fade, unlike so many other dyes. But true blue is often misremembered, just as true love often is. Both get imagined as more intense and vivid than they were in fact. True blue inevitably becomes “too blue,” as Brian Massumi says.16 True love? Well, we can dream.

  The positive valence of blue is, however, always potentially there to be enjoyed. The great nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin said that it was a color “appointed by the deity to be a source of delight.”17 Joan Miró made a painting in 1925 with a splash of bright blue on the right of the canvas, beneath which he has written: Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves (This is the color of my dreams). But blue may even be more than delight and more than a dream: it can be the very color of transcendence. In Exodus 24:10, Moses, Aaron, and the elders ascend Sinai and see clear blue sapphire beneath God’s feet, a wondrous intensification of the blue sky above them. Vishnu’s blue skin, the healing power of the blue Buddha, the blue turbans worn by many Sikhs, the blue stripes of the Jewish prayer shawl, and the glorious Blue Mosque in Istanbul all suggest how nearly universal is this connection with transcendence. It awakens in us “a desire for the pure, and, finally, for the supernatural,” said the often mystical Kandinsky.18 But the feeling is also validated by the colder logic of color theory. “We love to contemplate blue,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe recognized in 1810 in his work on color perception, but “not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.”19

  The sumptuous blues in Giotto’s frescos in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and, on a much smaller scale, in the right panel of the Wilton Diptych (c. 1395–99), showing the blue-robed Virgin with Child surrounded by eleven blue-robed angels, demonstrate the effect (Figure 24). Each has a recognizable narrative and depends upon a well-known iconography, but whatever the story, each is essentially about the magnificent blue that “draws us after it.” The color in each overpowers not only the narrative but also the form. In the Giotto frescoes the brilliant, undifferentiated blue is what painters and visual
psychologists would call a “ground,” while the somewhat more modulated blues in the Wilton Diptych color and model the figures; but in both the blue itself becomes the story. What is most important is what the philosopher Julia Kristeva has called its “chromatic joy.”20

  The blue in both is a pigment made from ground lapis lazuli, a semiprecious stone first found in what is now Afghanistan. The intense pigment came to be known as ultramarine, because it came from “beyond the sea” (which is what “ultramarine” literally means). Cennino Cennini, an early fifteenth-century painter living in Florence, calls it the color “most perfect, beyond all other colors; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would not still surpass.”21 Titian, famous for his extraordinary reds, also knew the perfection of this blue, as in the brilliant ultramarine sky of his Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–23).

  FIGURE 24: Giotto, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, c. 1305

  Ultramarine wasn’t only a luxurious color; it was the most expensive pigment any painter had ever used, more expensive even than gold. (Not until 1826, when a synthetic version was developed in Paris, did it become widely affordable for painters.) In one sense, then, it is clear why the costly ultramarine would be used to decorate a private chapel for a noble family or paint the Virgin Mary. Nothing could be more appropriate.

  But there is something paradoxical here. This runs counter to the underlying spiritual economics that fundamentally define Christianity. It teaches that great riches come to naught (Rev. 18:17). As Peter Stallybrass has brilliantly observed, Christianity insists upon the transformation of the materially valueless into the spiritually priceless.22 The pregnant wife of a poor carpenter turns out to be a virgin and the mother of God. The helpless infant born in a dirty manger is Christ.