by David Kastan
The expensive pigment, however, aligns the material and the spiritual. It is the sign of the very worldliness that Christianity would challenge and replace. And yet the intense blue compels the eye, woos us from the world. It pulls us toward the infinite.
It is the color that does this, rather than the subject matter. In the twentieth century, Yves Klein would make that color his subject. Klein’s own Blue Period made up the last half of his short, intense career.23 He explored—and exploited, for that is what he also, always, did—the quality of the blue that excites and inspires. A series of early “Monochrome Propositions” in various bright colors gave way to paintings almost all in a rich ultramarine, a color “darkly, deeply, beautifully blue,” in the words of the romantic poet Robert Southey.24 This became not just Klein’s signature color but a color that bears his name: International Klein Blue. Though it is often said that he patented the color, what was actually patented (and not by Klein but by a French pharmaceutical company he worked with) is the polyvinyl acetate binder that contains the pigment. In William Gibson’s novel Zero History, the marketing magnate Hubertus Bigend wears a suit of the brilliant color. “Is that Klein blue?” an employee asks, “it looks radioactive.” Bigend coolly replies, “It unsettles people.”25
In Klein’s art, however, the color does something different: it seduces people. It isn’t radioactive; it is radiant. International Klein Blue is a color that it is vibrant and voluptuous, ravishing and irresistible. Klein was an often self-regarding showman (think about, for example, his release of 1,001 blue balloons into the air as “aerostatic sculpture” in 1955 or, three years later at an opening, serving the guests a blue cocktail of Cointreau, gin, and a blue dye that for several days colored everyone’s urine blue), but he nonetheless made gorgeous minimalist paintings. He confirms Kazimir Malevich’s axiom: “Only dull and impotent artists screen their work with sincerity.”26 Klein made paintings of pure color, with the emphasis as much on the adjective “pure” as the noun. Paintings of a blue at its maximum intensity, a blue not unlike Giotto’s blue or that of the Wilton Diptych, which functions as a material register of the immaterial.
Klein did not invent the monochrome (though, as with so many artists of the 1950s, he had a willed amnesia about what had come before). Credit for that should probably be given to the Russian constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko, whose black paintings in 1918 and whose three “Pure Color” paintings in 1921 isolate a pigment. But for Rodchenko, there was no interest in transcendence; indeed his Pure Color paintings are designed to expose it as a fantasy. “I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, yellow. I affirmed it is all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane and there is no more representation.” This was “the end of painting” in both of the senses of how he used that phrase.27 This was the complete realization of painting’s telos as he understood it: the logical end point of the drive to understand what painting essentially was about. Here was painting freed from its mystifications, stripped down to its essentials, color and plane. But this was also chronologically the end of his career as a painter. After completing these paintings, he never again painted on canvas, turning to various forms of applied art.
FIGURE 25: Yves Klein during the filming of The Heartbeat of France, with hand-painted International Klein Blue, Düsseldorf, 1961–62
For Klein, however, there always was more (more mystification, anyway, though not much more of his life; he died at thirty-four, after his third heart attack). Paint was for him the portal to the infinite—at least to the infinite of his ambitions. “The blue sky,” he would say, “was my first monochrome,” and as a teenager he pretended to sign it. He even claimed that he hated birds “because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.”28 Yet his blue on the canvas was even more lustrous and intense than the sky. It was a color we had only previously seen in dreams.
Picasso’s thin blues are melancholy, almost despairing; Klein’s robust ones are exuberant, almost ecstatic. From opposite directions, however, each artist comes dangerously close to something merely melodramatic and sentimental in his simplifications—and the extraordinary achievement of each largely rests on the narrowness of the escape.
Exactly as it does for Derek Jarman, the third of the twentieth century’s great visual blues artists. Jarman, a British painter, poet, and filmmaker, tested positive for HIV at the end of 1986; he died of AIDS in 1994. His last film was Blue. It is a masterpiece.
It is not, however, an easy one to watch. In part it is because there are no images, just seventy-nine minutes of an unchanging deep blue screen. While you can look away without missing anything, you just can’t look away. The blue compels your vision, and its soundtrack threatens to break your heart. Blue is not exactly a motion picture, but it is unquestionably a moving one.
The blue is International Klein Blue. Initially, Jarman had merely filmed one of the Klein paintings in the Tate Gallery, but he didn’t like the look of the blue when it was projected on screen. As Jarman’s movie reached its final production stage, Technicolor recreated the color in the laboratory.29 The luminous field of blue suggests at once the infinite and a void. Everything and nothing. The soundtrack of the movie is a montage of words, music, and sound effects. There is no narrative, but there is a history: the history of a man going blind; the history of a man, not living with AIDS, but, as Jarman knew, dying from it.
The soundtrack is a collection of fragments, appropriate for a body that has fallen apart. Memories: “sitting with some friends at this café,” “walking along the beach in a howling gale,” “at home with the blinds drawn,” and mostly, and most unbearably, “in the hospital.” Scraps of poems; remembered (or forgotten) quotations; diary entries; bits of philosophical musing; and the hint of a story of a boy whose name is Blue, which ends, as everything does, in death: “I place a delphinium, Blue, on your grave.”30 These are fragments that Jarman has shored against his ruin.
All that is whole is the glowing blue image on the screen (see Figure 22).
There is a soundscape of noises: words, music, chimes, waves, drips, heartbeats, all measuring the time that is running out, ticking “out the seconds, the source of a stream along which the minutes flow, to join the river of hours, the sea of years, and the timeless ocean.” Into the blue, the blue that exists with “no boundaries or solutions.” Different voices—Nigel Terry’s, John Quentin’s, Tilda Swinton’s, and Jarman’s own—tell Jarman’s story, which is not only his own. “I hear the voices of dead friends,” and he speaks for them. “I have no friends now who are not dead or dying.” The truth is: none of us does.
But this is not despair. In one sense, Jarman’s Blue can be seen as an elegy for himself, something like John Donne’s Death’s Duel, the poet’s own “funeral” sermon that he preached at Whitehall shortly before he died in 1631. Jarman’s film is, however, a sermon without faith—or with faith, but faith only in love and in art. And that might well be faith enough. But Blue also is a love story with a happy ending: “Deep love drifting on the tide forever.”
It is an impossible film; it is an irresistible film. An imageless art film about a gay artist dying, which is maybe unwatchable but also unforgettable. The paradoxes of blue itself: Picasso’s blue and Yves Klein’s, “the black blue of sadness” and “the fathomless blue of Bliss.”
At the end, Jarman lived Picasso’s blue but embraced Klein’s—that deeply saturated blue that promises everything, although perhaps provides nothing but the promise. His interest in Klein had begun long before Jarman had been diagnosed with AIDS. In the spring of 1974 he had seen Klein’s paintings in a show at the Tate, and enchanted by those luxurious blues, he began to think about “a blue film for Yves Klein,” a film originally to be called Bliss.31
It would take another thirteen years, when Jarman’s eyesight began to fail, before he would again think seriously about the project. “Blue flashes in my eye”: the symptoms of the failing body; the
symbols of “an open door to soul.” Always the paradox. That’s how it goes: “out of the blue” and “into the wild blue yonder.” As Jarman said: “Blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.”
Bliss, now tentatively retitled International Blue, was still imagined as “the Yves Klein story in sound and jazzy be-bop” set against an unchanging blue screen, though Jarman realized that this might well make the film impossible to fund. But ironically, by the time Jarman was ready to make the film, late in 1992, the concept of an imageless screen permitted BBC Radio 3 to provide some of the needed money for the project. Now, however, it had become Jarman’s own story, not Klein’s. Blue was first shown at the Venice Biennale in June 1993 and released in London that September. On September 19, 1993, it was simulcast on BBC’s Channel 4 and on Radio 3. Radio 3 listeners were invited to send in for a large International Klein Blue postcard to look at during the broadcast.32
Jarman thought of Klein as “the great master of blue.”33 Certainly that is more nearly true of Klein than of Picasso, who ultimately came to care more about line than about color (that, after all, is the commitment of cubism). Klein, like Jarman, thought line to be a prison. Yet too often Klein seems either a romantic or a fraud (you can’t be both). Jarman is neither. Jarman, it turns out, really is the great master of blue. “The blood of sensibility is blue,” he wrote. “I consecrate myself / To find its most perfect expression.” In the film it seems he has succeeded, though it is so very hard to look.
CHAPTER SIX
Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.
TOM ROBBINS, Jitterbug Perfume
DY(E)ING FOR
Indigo
FIGURE 26: Jenny Balfour-Paul, Indigo Dyer in San, Mali, 1977
Has anyone ever actually seen the color indigo? While it is impossible to know the exact colors that people see, remarkably (and yet it seems almost never to be remarked), no one, at least in English, seems to have used “indigo” as a word naming a specific color before Newton did. But Newton was convinced that the light that his prism had shattered into individual shards of color had to contain seven pure colors. So he added orange and indigo to the five he thought were “original.”1 The first took its name from a fruit (see Chapter 2), the second from a dye. Other people had already come to see the first one (or, more precisely, to see it as “orange”); people still aren’t so sure about the second. But Newton saw it, or claimed he did, and he called it “Indigo” or, as he sometimes spelled it, “Indico.” And the word has come to name a color that no one is really sure is there to be seen.
But the real issue may be not whether indigo actually appears in the visible spectrum. It is whether indigo is a color at all. For almost everyone, it wasn’t. At least it wasn’t until about 1672, when Newton decided it was. Only then did it become one of “the dyes of heaven,” in Sir Walter Scott’s fine phrase for the colors of the rainbow.2 Before then, however, indigo was just a dye, and a dye not of heaven at all but one very much of the earth—or worse, as some would come to think, of hell. And even after Newton “saw” it as a color, it stubbornly remained a dye. “Every body does, or should know,” as Philip Miller wrote in the eighteenth century, “that Indigo is a Dye used to dye Wool, Silk, Cloths, and stuffs, blue.”3
Technically, a dye is a coloring agent that bonds with the molecules of the material to be colored. Pigments are also coloring agents, but they differ from dyes in that they don’t bond with the material; they are small particles of color held in some suspension, forming a film that attaches itself to the surface of the substance to be colored. Pigments, one might say, are applied to materials; dyes are absorbed by them.
Both forms of colorants were first developed from natural sources, almost all no doubt discovered accidentally.4 The root of a flowering plant and the bodies of a scale insect were the sources of two dyes (madder and cochineal) used to color things a wide range of shades of red. Glands of a sea snail were used to produce Tyrian purple, and a pigment called pink was used to color things various other colors, usually yellow, but strangely never pink. Indigo and woad (a common plant whose active chemical is the same as that in indigo, though in lower concentrations) were both used to color things an extraordinary variety of blue shades, from a “pearl” blue that was almost white to a “midnight” blue so nearly black that it was sometimes called “crow’s wing.”5
For centuries, indigo was just a dye that colored things blue, and then one day it became a color in its own right. It is odd to think about the concept of a new color, though paint companies and cosmetic manufacturers are inventing new ones all the time. Pantone “introduced” 210 “new colors” in 2016. But if colors, at least for humans, are the particular visual experiences triggered by the detection of electromagnetic waves between about 390 and 700 nanometers, there are no new colors to be seen, only new colors to be named. Any new color is just a thinner segment than has previously been recognized of an infinitely divisible continuum. It isn’t new; it was always there. So why not indigo? Although inserting it into the rainbow might seem a much bolder move than painting your breakfast nook Mango Mojito. Or maybe not.
No one before Newton seems to have seen indigo in the rainbow—or to have seen it anywhere else. No one else seems to have thought that “indigo” was a color name, with the possible exception of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a French merchant who traveled widely around Persia and India in the middle of the seventeenth century. In 1676, in his popular Six Voyages, published first in French and then quickly translated into English, as well as Dutch, German, and Italian, Tavernier writes about coming across a heterodox community of Christians, living near the River Jordan, who, he says, have “a strange Antipathy toward the Blew Colour call’d Indigo.”6
Admittedly this sounds as if Tavernier thinks “indigo” is a color, a shade of blue. Quoted out of context, it would seem to be evidence that it was a color name. But then Tavernier says that indigo is something that the members of this sect “will not so much as touch.” As Tavernier uses the word in his account, “colour” is just a synonym for “dye.” These “Sabians” believed that the Jews, trying to prevent the baptism of Jesus, had “fetch’d a vast quantity of Indigo … and flung it into Jordan,” hoping to pollute the river; and as a result, “God particularly Curs’d that Colour.”7 It is the indigo dye that is fetched, flung, and cursed by God, rather than one of the seven rainbow colors, which were the symbols of God’s covenant with humanity after the Flood and the evidence of the miracle of color itself.
Newton enabled indigo to find its place as a color in the rainbow. Indigo was visible (or so he said) but immaterial. The immateriality was critical, for Newton’s great achievement in thinking about color was to shift the understanding of it from matter to light. But with indigo it is hard to escape its stubborn materiality, and no less hard to think about what it means to think that it is visible—except as a wide range of shades of blue.
The name “indigo” comes from a Greek word that means “from India.” What came from India was a plant, Indigefera, as well as a tradition of dye-making (although the etymology may ignore an even earlier history of indigo’s use in the ancient Near East, as Jenny Balfour-Paul has suggested).8 But from wherever these sprang, the plant and the tradition eventually would make indigo the most valuable and most widely used “dyestuff” in the world, and indigo-dyed cloth almost universally beloved. The dyed cloth is wonderful, not only in the seeming magic of its appearance—the cloth emerges yellowish green from the dye bath and turns a brilliant blue as it hits the air—but also in the way the color becomes softer and subtler over time, as anyone (that is, everyone) knows who has had a favorite pair of faded blue jeans.
The dye had been known and used for thousands of years. Some have suggested that Herodotus, writing sometime in the fifth century B.C.E., might possibly have been referring to indigo when he describes a dye used in the Caucasus near modern-day Azerbaijan. The dye, he says, was made from crushed leaves steeped in water, producing a color as durable as
the fabric itself, as if it “had been woven into it from the first.”9 But certainly in the first century C.E., the Roman Pliny in his Natural History explicitly mentions indico, which he describes as a black pigment or a dye “out of India,” which diluted produces a “wonderful lovely mixture of purple and azure.”10 And by the end of the twelfth century, Marco Polo on his travels in India had witnessed, or at least had been told about, the preparation of the dye: “They procure it from a certain herb, which is taken up by the roots and put into tubs of water, where it is suffered to remain till it rots; when they press out the juice. This, upon being exposed to the sun, and evaporated, leaves a kind of paste, which is cut into small pieces of the form in which we see it.”11
The usual “form” in which Europeans saw it was as a solid lump of dyestuff, so that one of the earliest English dictionaries in 1616 would mistakenly define “indigo” as “a stone brought out of Turkey, wherewith dyers use to dye blue,” and that error would be often repeated over the next hundred years (Figure 27).12
Indigo, however, was derived from a plant, as Marco Polo had correctly reported, though he ignores—or just didn’t know about—some of the less pleasant, and often noxious, details of its complicated manufacture. The dye has to be extracted from one of the various indigo-bearing plants in several stages, since the dye by itself doesn’t exist in nature. The harvested sheaves would indeed be submerged in water and left, not exactly to “rot,” but to ferment (the subtle difference between the two forms of organic breakdown being basically whether the result is considered to be desirable or not). The fermentation process was normally encouraged by the addition of some alkaline substance to the vat, usually lye made from wood ash, although in Japan, composting was the preferred method to produce the fermented plant material.