“SUPPOSE I WERE to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color,” reads the first line of Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets,” her 2009 book-length lyric essay about the color blue. “Bluets” — the title refers to the delicate, diminutive wildflower but also to the abstract artist Joan Mitchell’s magnificent 1973 painting “Les Bluets” — is an elliptical exploration of heartache, the bluest of blue experiences, in the guise of a scholarly, metaphysical and emotional enchantment with one particular hue. “Each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent,” Nelson writes of her affinity for the color, which she began to see everywhere.
When I read “Bluets” a decade ago, Nelson’s book activated my own blue sensors. I began to notice not only the color — apparent on computer screens and hospital scrubs, holiday lights and pharmaceutical pills — but also just how many visual artists (Derek Jarman, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh), musicians (Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell, Elvis Presley) and, especially, literary writers had explored it in various forms. “Every dozen years or so,” Nelson deadpans, “someone feels compelled to write a book about it.” There’s Joan Didion’s 2011 memoir, “Blue Nights,” and William H. Gass’s 1975 “On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry” (reprinted by New York Review Books in 2014) and Rebecca Solnit’s 2005 autobiographical meditation, “A Field Guide to Getting Lost,” which touches on multiple blue phenomena, from the Mississippi River cyanotypes made by the photographer and cartographer Henry Peter Bosse to the vivid shade of paint developed by the conceptual artist Yves Klein. “Why blue?” I wondered. Where are the many monographs on green and yellow, the treatises on more esoteric shades like violet or tangerine?
I became a magnet for all the other blue books out there: Kate Braverman’s strange and spectacular 1990 book of short stories, “Squandering the Blue”; Michel Pastoureau’s 2001 cultural study, “Blue: The History of a Color”; Jean-Michel Maulpoix’s lovely 2005 edition of “A Matter of Blue,” a collection of prose poems in translation; David Coggins’s charming, illustrated 2018 “Blue: A St. Barts Memoir”; and Amy Key’s achingly honest 2023 “Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone.” Over time, as my pile of blue grew, I felt like the satin bowerbird, which decorates its elaborate dwelling with scavenged blue trinkets, like gallon milk jug tops and candy wrappers. When I heard about Imani Perry’s new book, “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People,” in which she examines the ways that Black life is “a story of encounters with deep blue” — from slavery on indigo plantations in the Deep South to the creation of blues music — I decided it was finally time to take the measure of blue.
WHY, INDEED, HAVE writers been so drawn to the color? According to surveys, blue is by far the world’s most popular hue, regardless of geography or gender — mostly owing to our favorable associations with it, or so researchers posit. Not surprisingly, people love cerulean skies and aquamarine seas, moody gemstones — sapphires, lapis lazuli, the 45.52-carat Hope Diamond — and blue inventions, like denim jeans and ballpoint pens. But as Perry notes, “blue is contrapuntal. It is itself and its opposite: sweet and bitter.” It has long been associated with melancholy — we get the blues, after all. A modern abbreviation of “blue devils,” the term dates to the 17th century and refers to depression, as well as to the hallucinations of alcoholism’s delirium tremens. In several of their respective etchings, both George and Isaac Cruikshank personified that affliction as menacing blue demons.
As I pondered the writerly obsession with blue, I happened upon an Instagram post by the novelist and critic Vince Passaro. He’d put up a photo of a notebook page blotted with squares of sapphire fountain-pen ink, accompanied by a caption that said he, too, was “trying to write something coherent about blue,” so I phoned him to ask about it. “I think writers are pulled toward blue as a subject because it is the most metaphorical of colors,” said Passaro, whose 2021 novel is called “Crazy Sorrow,” a blue title if ever there was one. “And like complex metaphor, it demands deeper consideration than other colors require or can sustain.” Klein felt similarly, noting, “Blue has no dimensions. It is beyond the dimensions of which other colors partake.” Fascinated by infinitude, the artist used blue — the color of the ocean and sky, in all their mysterious vast blueness — to convey it, making roughly 300 monochrome paintings in his signature International Klein Blue.
Not unlike the ocean — beautiful and tranquil one moment; stormy, choppy, even deadly the next — blue is metaphorically elastic, one might even say capricious. Didion writes of blue nights, the long twilights in the days around the summer solstice, as a metaphor for the passage of time, for aging, illness and death (“the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness”) and the loss and sadness they herald. For Solnit, the “deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue of the horizon” represents the rather more pleasant sensation of desire, yearning, pining — “the color of where you can never go.” And for Gass, blue, in all its bawdy and whimsical permutations (“afflictions of the spirit — dumps, mopes, Mondays — all that’s dismal — lowdown, gloomy music …”) lays bare the workings of language itself: “A random set of meanings,” he writes, “has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects.”
Its appeal is global: Blue was used in ancient Egypt, both in ceramics made of the glazed material known as Egyptian faience and on statues, wall paintings, objects and tombs painted with Egyptian blue, the oldest known synthetic pigment; it is a key color in Islamic art and architecture (though the Prophet Muhammad’s favorite was said to be green); and it predominated in Chinese porcelain starting around the 14th century, when cobalt was imported into the country. The color began appearing in Western art in the Middle Ages, when it was used in the jewel-toned stained-glass windows of Chartres and other Gothic cathedrals, and to depict the rich ultramarine robes of the Virgin Mary in paintings. Made from ground lapis lazuli, the paint was difficult and costly to produce.
By the early 19th century, the color had become more widely available — first through the synthesis of Prussian blue, then via the discovery of the mineral-based cobalt blue, as well as artificial ultramarine — and it was almost requisite for a serious artist to at least dabble in blue. Choosing blue, for many artists, is about placing oneself in dialogue with the greats. During his well-known early Blue Period, a young, impecunious Picasso painted people on the margins in somber, saturated blues. Unwell and nearing the end of his life, Matisse, too, produced a famous blue series: his fluid “Blue Nudes,” a group of abstract cutouts in a vibrant royal blue. As Louise Bourgeois, who made numerous fabric sculptures and works on paper in blue, put it, “The color blue means you have left the drabness of day-to-day reality to be transported into … a world of freedom where you can say what you like and what you don’t like.”
Even the word itself is oddly pleasing. Set “blue” alongside almost any other word and you conjure a phrase more lyrical, romantic, sophisticated or just compellingly weird than you started with. Braverman employs such a trick in “Desert Blues,” her short story about a woman descending into a blue-tinged madness. She repeats variations on “blue” no fewer than 85 times (“blue grids,” “paralyzed blue air,” “nights of the pitch blue haunting”); yanking the color from its quiet, celestial associations and rendering it sinister, “the infected blue of acid rain and nuclear winter and cancer treatments,” she writes.
“I need more words for blue,” Amanda Shires sings in “Take It Like a Man,” her haunting 2022 ballad about facing the consequences of one’s actions. But it’s a wry, winking lyric because blue is always sufficient. No matter how many times you invoke the word, blue never loses its incantatory power.
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