From Gainsborough’s famed portraits to Picasso’s haunting Blue Period figures, tones of azure, cerulean, violet, periwinkle and cobalt have distinguished many a painting. Blue can convey melancholy, hope, innocence, serenity or fear; it fills Impressionist and Post-Impressionist scenes, pulses within abstract expressions and provides the cool backdrop for Dali‘s melting clocks and meditative rose. Some artists prefer to keep blue within its conventional context, while others test such boundaries and like Paul Gauguin assert that "If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue."
Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold
It seems ironic that someone as contrary and self-defined as James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) could produce the gentle, hazy series of works known as Nocturnes. Whistler was born in Massachusetts and sent to West Point Academy as a young man, though he later rejected his New England heritage and the military life to become an expatriate artist.
Whistler began his nocturne series in London in the 1870s. Using extra-absorbent large canvases laid flat on the studio floor, he applied varying washes of color in such liquidy quantities that he actually referred to his paint as “sauce.” In Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge, vaporous blues and grays form an appropriately nocturnal glimpse of the Thames River, which Whistler preferred after most of the daily crowds had gone and when—as Whistler himself declared—“the whole city hangs in the heavens.”
Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night
Next to the Mona Lisa, Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night is perhaps one of the most universally recognized paintings. Completed in June 1889 while Van Gogh was at an asylum in Saint-Rémy, France, the scene shows a nighttime view of a village. The vast realm of the sky is uniquely controlled, its stars forming smooth circles along with another circular aura around the crescent moon.
Van Gogh’s intense passion for color can be seen in almost every one of his canvases, including his use of pale blue, deep sky blue, the purplish-blue of irises in bloom and the swirling wave-like arrangements of blue in The Starry Night. Sadly, by July of the following year, van Gogh had committed suicide. Before that tragic point, however, Vincent had noted his love of stars and his ultimate hope that death would help him to reach their celestial realm.
Martin Johnson Heade’s Giant Magnolias on Blue Velvet
Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) was an American artist who is often linked with New York’s Hudson River School. Born in Pennsylvania, Heade initially studied with Quaker folk artist Edward Hicks, best-known for his 1826 painting The Peaceable Kingdom. Heade produced many distinctive landscapes in his day, but his still life arrangements are particularly fascinating and evocative.
Heade’s Giant Magnolias on a Blue Velvet Cloth was painted in 1890, after Heade had relocated to Florida. Heade’s portrait of the magnolias of his new Southern landscape was surely lovely in its own right, but the use of rich blue velvet beneath the flowers added a whole other dimension. The blue velvet backdrop intensifies the whiteness of the petals and sets them in a kind of twilight interlude. The lush fullness of the magnolias and Heade’s close-up view also bring to mind the later floral works of artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and in 2004 the United States Post Office honored Heade with a stamp issued replicating this same painting.
Franz Marc’s The Little Blue Horses
German Expressionist Franz Marc was born in Munich in 1880. He studied art in Paris and eventually returned to Munich, where he formed the artistic group known as The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) with his friends and fellow artists August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky. Other members included Albert Bloch and Paul Klee, and a primary goal of The Blue Rider was to produce more spiritual artistic work—the color blue signifying that emphasis on personal mysticism and depth.
Marc was fond of animals and often included them in his paintings. Marc’s The Little Blue Horses was done in 1911, around the time of the founding of The Blue Rider, and Marc used his subtly forceful style along with the distinctive color blue to show the noble grace of his subject. Marc’s death in World War I was a great loss, as was the earlier battle casualty of August Macke. Though Marc’s work was labeled as degenerate by the Nazi regime, soon after World War II that stigma was removed, allowing Franz Marc and The Blue Rider to reclaim their rightful chapter in the history of German art.
Sources
- American Salons -- Robert M. Crunden (Oxford University Press, 1993)
- Museum of Modern Art Collection: The Starry Night
- Nocturne: Blue and Gold -- The Tate Collection
