Bluets

Artists have long been captivated by the color blue. Sam Francis called blue the “color of speculation, as it is full of shadow,” while Louise Bourgeois ruminated that 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.” Pop-psychology (and interior design) like to single out blue for its “calming” effect and its ability to activate our parasympathetic nervous system: there is no danger present with the color blue.

This exhibition, curated by James Evans, brings together an array of artists who use blue in their paintings to very different ends. In works like Ludwig Sander’s Sky I (1960) and Theodoros Stamos’s Infinity Lake (1980), blue is so thoroughly massaged into the paintings’ picture plane and structure that it becomes much more than just a compositional element. On the other hand, works such as Irene Monat Stern’s Untitled (c. 1975) employ blue with a lighter touch, as an accent in a larger ballet of colors.

For all the grand art historical precedents that the color blue evokes, ranging from Islamic architecture and medieval stained glass to Picasso’s blue period, the color blue also suggests the small and the intimate, the language of our interiority. As William Gass wrote in his 1975 book On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, “Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. . . Blue is most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.” Relatedly, for the writer Rebecca Solnit, blue is full of yearning, “the color of where you can never go.” The range of works in this exhibition attests to the color’s elusive, inexhaustible nature, its ability to show up in so many guises while exerting the same enchanting effect.