“Art is blue”: how a shade captivated our senses | Culture | EUROtoday

When requested what your favourite shade is, there are good causes to suspect that your reply might be none apart from blue. Not due to divination expertise: the vast majority of Western residents agree with that opinion. In a survey of two,000 folks for the lengthy vendor Color psychology (Editorial GG), by the German Eva Heller, 46% of males and 44% of ladies selected it as their favourite, whereas only one% of males and a pair of% of ladies said that they didn’t prefer it. Green, compared, had 16% followers amongst them and 15% amongst girls. Asked in regards to the emotions that their favourite impressed in them, the themes of the survey agreed in associating it with eminently optimistic feelings: sympathy, concord, friendship, belief. Although lots of the members associated it to chilly, intelligence and the masculine, in custom this has been, opposite to the arbitrariness imposed on infants’ garments, an emblem of the female: Iris (lily), Celeste or Sapphire are girls’s names.

With its 111 shades of blue electronic mail to Chagall, from Copenhagen blue to midnight, this shade dazzles: every single day you see blue denimsvehicles with that paint multiply on the road and, unfold on the partitions of our houses, it instills a chilled impact, as Heller relates. Blue, as in that capsule, is the colour of issues that don’t change. There is just one place the place blue is just not favored, and that’s the plate. In its a number of incarnations it appears divine: huge, deep and creative.

Countless writers, painters, filmmakers and musicians have sung their odes to the blue muse: Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse and Helen Frankenthaler have been fixated on him, he vibrates within the exaltation of the fervour of the Azul by Rosa Regàs, it’s thrilling to see life exit within the blue nights by Joan Didion and within the Tangled Up in Blue Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan. In the enduring Azul from the movie trilogy three coloursby Krzysztof Kieślowski, the filters and objects are bathed in blue to evoke the lead motive of the seek for freedom that the movie champions. The melancholy carried by the air of the blues African American comes from its that means in English: blue alludes to the darkish feeling of melancholy (and in addition, like inexperienced right here, to pornography).

In the Spanish language, the poet Rubén Darío wrote in History of my books that blue is “the colour of dreaming, the colour of artwork, a Hellenic and Homeric shade, an oceanic and firmamental shade, the coeruleum, which in Plinio is the easy shade that resembles that of the heavens and sapphire.” In that 1916 essay, the Nicaraguan thus turned his sights to his magnum opus, the celebrated book of stories and poems from 1888 that, with the evocative title of Azul…dressed in that dye, inaugurated the era of literary modernism in Spanish, a withdrawal of the self towards the interior protected by the search for formal beauty and symbolism.

Walking alongside the letters, that movement permeated all the arts. Victor Hugo had already stated that “art is blue” (art is blue), and on that premise and under the influence of Darío’s book it was inaugurated in 2019 at CaixaForum Blue, the color of modernisma journey in the wake of that color in the painters and incipient filmmakers of the period between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. With works by Santiago Rusiñol, Joaquín Torres García and Gustave Courbet, that exhibition proved that yes, naturally occurring blue and its then-new artificial tones, such as Prussian blue, turned out to be a favorite color of modernism. The European Renaissance also revered the fabulous lapis lazuli and, in the 20th century, explorers such as the neo-Dadaist Yves Klein made a name for themselves in their near-mystical search for the purest blue, materialized in the IKB, the International Klein Blue.

Installed in an abysmal vision of blue, one of the three primary colors along with red and yellow, it does not currently cause the same impression that it generated on the modernists, nor did they come to it with the same predisposition as their predecessors. As the curator of that CaixaForum exhibition, Teresa M. Sala, explains, “the perception of colors changes.” And he explains: “It is not the same now as when electricity did not exist, or when the palette began to expand through artificial pigments during industrialization.” And, above all, as Goethe already introduced in his color theory (GG Editorial), it is convenient to separate the color optics discovered by Newton from the psychology of its perception, something that all contemporary artists and designers assimilated over time.

Subject to the oscillations of taste and fashions, the perception of color is a matter of sense, that of sight, and also sensitivity, that of which Rubén Darío gave lyrical touches in his description of the “color of dreams”, but which the historian Michel Pastoureau would point out indirectly in works such as his monumental Blue. History of a color (Flipscope): It could not be said that it is a Hellenic or Homeric color. As Daniel Entrialgo also remembers in the recent When the sea was not blue (Espasa), the author of the Iliad describes the sea as the color of wine, and due to the imprecision of the terminology they used and the infrequency of its artistic expression, scholars at the end of the 19th century came to the question of whether Greeks and Romans were blue-blind.

It is now known that the senses of ancient civilizations worked exactly like ours, so it is crucial not to ignore “the distance, sometimes considerable, that exists in all times, all societies and all individuals, between the “real” color (if that adjective means anything), the perceived color and the named color,” as Pastoureau writes. For the Romans, in addition to the fact that the blue pigment was difficult to obtain and fix with the nature they had at their disposal, was added the circumstance that they related it to the barbarians, in such a way that there was not a single tone that was acceptable to them. “It is unaesthetic when it is light and disturbing when it is dark, [porque] It is often associated with death and hell,” says Pastoureau.

Listed as one of the wonders of Marco Polo’s travels, if there is a mythical variant of the color blue, it is ultramarine, obtained, as the Italian designer Riccardo Falcinelli explains in Cromorama (Taurus), of “the discount to powder of a semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli, which arrives in Europe in ships from distant international locations, from ‘past’ the Mediterranean.” Although there are deposits of lapis lazuli in mines in Chile, Zambia and Siberia, its fundamental origin is in the mountains of Afghanistan.

On a risky trip in search of that almost magical rock, British journalist Victoria Finlay traveled to the home of the Bāmiyān Buddhas in 2000, shortly before the Taliban destroyed those colossal figures accompanied by frescoes decorated in blue. “The ultramarine still shone—barely—on the ruined walls,” Finlay recalls in Color. History of the color palette (Captain Swing), “and it was extraordinary to think that this was the first known use of the pigment.”

When in 2019 the Prado Museum restored one of its best-known worksThe Annunciation painted by the early Renaissance master Fra Angelico around 1430-1432, the recovered luminosity of the lapis lazuli that decorates the vaults and the mantle that cover the Virgin was a true discovery: the pigment, until then opaque and flat, came to life in its most intensely brilliant and deep tone. “The difference lies in the quality of the ultramarine and the technique used by the painter,” says Almudena Sánchez, the hand in charge of that restoration. Two excellent qualities of which The annunciation can brag. “Starting in the 17th century,” adds Sánchez, “lapis lazuli is used much less, replaced by azurite, but this tends to alter over time.” Seeing its extraordinary performance after 600 years, it is not surprising that ultramarine holds the record for being the most expensive color of all time.

Although blue did not establish itself as a favorite until the 17th and 18th centuries, finally appreciated, as Pastoureau says, as “a beautiful color, the color of the Virgin and of kings” and thus rivaling red, from a newly discovered pigment from the Paleolithic era to its use in Egyptian temples, Chinese porcelain or Gothic stained glass, blue appears to us as a fascinating color whose traces can be traced throughout the course of history. As Benjamín Labatut narrates in A terrible greenery (Anagrama), has even changed its course: the first modern synthetic pigment, Prussian blue, gave rise to the hydrogen cyanide used to make the lethal pesticide Zyklon, and was used by Nazi leaders such as Hermann Göring to commit suicide before receiving their punishment. Today it flies as the color of peace, embodied in a blue flag, and in clothing throughout the ages it has been the most popular dye, extracted from the indigo plant.

Its symbolism, maybe above different colours, unfolds like an unfathomable enigma, a chromatic circle with out starting or finish, as demonstrated by the very broad imprint it has left on the humanities, and which continues to this present day inscribed within the work of present creators such because the late Matthew Wong. Now that our eyes shine on a regular basis with the blue that the screens replicate in our pupils, maybe the time has come to go exterior and observe the sky in full shade once more, with its shades of cloud grey, daybreak orange or twilight violet.