Deeper Dive: Blue Across Art History

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Announcer: This is a Getty podcast.

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Lilit Sadoyan: Hi, I’m Lilit Sadoyan, the host of OMMM, Our Museum Mindfulness Meditation podcast, Getty’s first video podcast. Welcome to this Deeper Dive, where we explore the themes of our weekly episodes with experts in everything from paintings conservation to mountain climbing.

Victoria Finlay: And he does that with his uses of different blues to capture that moment when it goes from light to dark, and it’s kind of like—as you stand in front of it, you feel transformed.

Sadoyan: This week, we did a blue light visualization focused on Edvard Munch’s Starry Night. I spoke with Victoria Finlay, author of the book The Brilliant History of Color in Art, to explore the history and nuances of the color blue. Now let’s dive in.

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Victoria, thank you so much for joining me today.

Finlay: Oh, thanks for inviting me.

Sadoyan: Of course. Victoria, you spent some time at the Getty Center back in 2013 writing this book, The Brilliant History of Color in Art. What was it like being at the Getty and looking closely at Munch’s painting over an extended period of time?

Finlay: So I was at the Getty for five weeks, and I’m guessing that quite a lot of people listening might have had a bit of a dream of one day living at a museum, and I got to do it.

I, um, spent quite a lot of time obviously at the library and talking to some of your colleagues about the works, but I did always, every day, I went into the galleries and I would look. Sometimes I would spin around the galleries, but really the most helpful thing was to concentrate on one or two paintings only.

And I was extremely lucky. I was lent this huge magnifying glass, and I was allowed—’cause the guards recognized me—to go really close in and start examining the paint and the colors and how things played against each other. And then I would walk back, and then I would walk forward. And one of the paintings that I chose, not knowing I would be invited to do this many years later, was Starry Night.

And the reason that I looked at it was twofold, really. I was there to study color, and therefore, I really looked at the paintings that seemed to kind of encapsulate the use of color and how it could be really magical in art. Um, but also, he uses shades of blue that seem to answer the question, how would you paint a starry night?

I mean, you wouldn’t just have a kind of dark canvas and then dot little, little stars on it. You want mood, you want, you want to capture, and he does that with his uses of different blues to capture that moment when it goes from light to dark, and it’s kind of like as you stand in front of it, you feel transformed.

Sadoyan: Oh, that’s beautiful.

And Victoria, you write about this in your book. Blue carries such a rich, symbolic, and emotional history across cultures that has shifted over time. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of blue and what it meant by Munch’s time?

Finlay: Blue was always quite a hard color for human beings to make. With—they wanted it in clothing. The traditional way to do it was through an indigo vat using some leaves from plants that came from the Indian area. Um, and it was very complicated, and you’d have to be quite meditative around that vat. Um, in terms of pigment, the traditionally beautiful blue was called ultramarine. It meant beyond the seas, and it came from one mountain in Afghanistan, so it was very rare to, when it was found in Europe.

Um, later on in the 1800s, the—after the French Revolution, there was a sense that it wasn’t really fair that only rich artists and patrons could have this fine blue, so they did a competition to make, um, a kind of synthetic version of it. They did it. It was won by the French, um, and therefore it was called French ultramarine, and that is the synthetic color that Munch used.

But still, there was always a sense that blues were kind of reserved colors, um, that they captured in them a sort of sense of sacred. And so, although no longer was it necessarily used for the Virgin Mary, because it was the most expensive color, it was nevertheless seen as sacred. Munch was very much taken by the Theosophy Movement, which was a movement that arose in the 1880s, arrived in Norway in 1893, but it would had been in Sweden just before.

And it was a sense that the world that we see now is not the real world. It’s, it’s an illusion. Everything is an illusion. And to break through the illusion or to experience the world in a more real way, you need a kind of ecstatic or deep or spiritual encounter with it, and colors were seen to be one of the ways in which you could do that.

So the blue colors that Munch was using were seen as devotional colors. Um, the first one, the light one, is kind of devotion to a noble ideal, and the darker one was pure religious feeling. So as he would have painted, he would have been aware that that was the color of spirituality as well as the color of, frankly, the night sky.

Sadoyan: And what about the emotive potential of color, and specifically blue, in his painting?

Finlay: What happens is that he—he gives a darker line for the horizon, but above the horizon, he’s mixing the blue with a kind of purple. And for me, when I was looking in the body of the painting back, back there, fascinated by it, it was to that purple band just below the Jupiter, um, planet that we see. In that, there is a sort of sense that in the borders, I think, the sense of spirituality can be.

Sadoyan: Hmm. And how about on a more personal level for you, what does the color blue represent?

Finlay: I’ve written several books about colors, so when I give book talks or presentations, I’m often asked, “What’s your favorite color?” And my favorite color is the conjunction of sky blue with orange, because I think that at that moment, when you see those two colors together, something else is happening.

There’s a sort of—the color is acting on the other color, and it’s quite exciting, and I always feel myself drawn to that. We have, in Britain, we have a movement called the Scottish Colorists Movement, and I was... went to a show at the Royal Academy, and I was looking, and it was at every point that there was something orange against something blue.

So I find it a very exciting, um, color, blue, and I’m always drawn into it.

Sadoyan: Lovely. Thank you so much for sharing your brilliant ideas about the color and the history of blue and, um, some of your personal reflections as well. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Finlay: Oh, it was a great pleasure. Thanks.

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Sadoyan: To find the related meditation and see images, transcripts, and additional resources, visit our website at getty dot edu slash ommm. That’s O-M-M-M.