When it comes to knowing what your favorite color is, there’s good reason to suspect that your answer will be none other than blue. Not because of divinatory skills: the majority of Western citizens share this opinion. In a survey carried out among 2,000 people to seller for a long time Color psychology (Editorial GG), by German Eva Heller, 46% of men and 44% of women chose it as their favorite, although only 1% of men and 2% of women said they did not like it. El Verde, by comparison, has about 16% fans among them and about 15% among them. Asked about the feelings that inspired their favorite, the subjects of the dream coincided in associating it with eminently positive emotions: sympathy, harmony, friendship, trust. Even if many participants mentioned cold, intelligence and the masculine, in tradition it has been, against the arbitrariness imposed on the baby’s life, an emblem of the feminine: Iris (lily), Celeste or Zafiro are women’s names.
With 111 tones, blue e-mail like Chagall, from Copenhagen blue to medium, this color dazzles: we see it every day blue jeansIn the street, carriages multiply with this painting, hung on the walls of our houses, providing a calming effect, as Heller reports. Blue, like this pill, is the color of things that don’t change. There is only one place where blue is not appreciated, and that is the plateau. In its multiple incarnations, it becomes divine: vast, deep and artistic.
Countless writers, painters, filmmakers and musicians have sung their odes to the blue muse: Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse and Helen Frankenthaler were captured by him, vibrating in the exaltation of his passion. Blue by Rosa Regàs, it’s moving to see the life disappear in them Blue nights by Joan Didion and in el Tangled in blue Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize winner. In the emblematic Blue of the film trilogy Three colorsby Krzysztof Kieślowski, the filters and objects are bathed in blue to evoke it leitmotif in search of the freedom that the film allows. The melancholy that carries the airs of blue African American comes from its meaning in English: blue alludes to the dark feeling of depression (and also, like here and green, to pornography).
In Spanish, the poet Rubén Darío wrote in History of my books that blue is “the color of teaching, the color of art, a Hellenic and Homeric color, an oceanic and firmamental color, the coeruleum, that in Plinio is the simple color which seems to be the same as the sequins and the zafiro”. Blue…inaugurated dressed in this dye the era of literary modernism in Spanish, a replica of it had the interior arropado by the search for formal beauty and symbolism.
Alongside letters, this movement permeates all the arts. Victor Hugo had already declared that “art is blue” (art is blue), and on this basis and under the influence of Darío’s book was published in 2019 at CaixaForum Blue, the color of modernisma visit behind the stele of this color among the emerging painters and filmmakers of the period between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Featuring works by Santiago Rusiñol, Joaquín Torres García and Gustave Courbet, this sample proves that, along with naturally occurring blue and its then-new artificial tones, such as Prussian blue, it proved to be a favorite color of modernism. European Renaissanceists also revered the fabulous lapis lazuli, and in the 20th century, explorers like neo-Dadaist Yves Klein began their search for the purest mystical blue, materialized in IKB, International Klein Blue.
Installed in an abysmal vision of blue, one of the three primary colors with red and yellow, it currently provokes the same impression that it generated on the modernists and they arrived with the same predisposition as their predecessors. How the curator of this CaixaForum exhibition, Teresa M. Sala, explained that “the perception of colors changes”. Y explains: “It is no longer the same thing today as when electricity did not exist, as when the palette expanded with the help of artificial pigments during industrialization.” And above all, how to introduce Goethe into your Color theory (Editorial GG), it is appropriate to separate the optics of color discovered by Newton from the psychology of its perception, something which, over time, has assimilated all contemporary artists and designers.
Subject to the oscillations of taste and fashion, the perception of color is a suggestion of sense, of sight, but also of sensitivity, which gives rise to the lyrical brushstrokes of Rubén Darío in his description of the “color of history”, even if the historian Michel Pastoureau would indirectly underline it in works like his monumental Blue. History of a color (flipbook): It could not be decided whether it was a Hellenic or Homeric color. As Daniel Entrialgo also recalls in the recent When the sea wasn’t blue (España), its author Iliad describe the sea as the color of wine, and due to the imprecision of the terminology used and the rarity of its artistic plasmaization, scholars of the late 19th century began to sow doubt as to whether the Greeks and Romans were blue blind.
However, we know that the meanings of ancient civilizations functioned exactly like ours, so that it is crucial not to ignore “the distance, sometimes considerable, which exists in all eras, in all societies and in all individuals, between the “real” color (if this adjective means anything), the perceived color and the designated color”, as Pastoureau writes. For the Romans, when they thought that the blue pigment was difficult to obtain and maintain with the natural that was within their reach, the circumstances in which it was linked to the barbarians were summed up in such a way that there was no acceptable soil. “It’s not very aesthetic when it’s bright and disturbing when it’s dark, (because) it’s associated with death and hell,” Pastoureau says.
Classified among the wonders of Marco Polo’s travels, if there is a mythical variant of the blue color that is ultramarine, obtained, as explained by Italian designer Riccardo Falcinelli in Chromorama (Taurus), of “the reduction into octopus of a semi-precious stone, lapislázuli, which arrives in Europe by boats from the countries of Lejano, from “almost everywhere” in 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.
During a risky journey in search of this magical rock, British journalist Victoria Finlay visited the home of the Bāmiyān Buddhas in 2000, shortly before the Taliban destroyed these colossal figures accompanied by frescoes decorated in blue. “El Ultramar shone even – only – in the ruined walls,” Finlay recalled in Color. History of the color palette (Capitán Swing), “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 most famous worksThe announcement Painted by the early Renaissance maestro Fra Angelico around 1430-1432, the recovered luminosity of the lapis lazuli that decorates the bovedas and the mantle that covers the Virgin gave rise to an authentic discovery: the pigment, until then opaque and flat, came back to life in its most intensely luminous and deep tone. “The difference lies in the quality of the overseas and in the technique used by the painter,” explains Almudena Sánchez, responsible for this restoration. Among their excellent qualities, The announcement you can assume. “From the 17th century,” adds Sánchez, “lapislázuli was used much less, replaced by azurite, but this tends to change over time.” Thanks to its extraordinary behavior after 600 years, overseas holds the record for being the most expensive color of all time.
Although blue has not become a favorite since the 17th and 18th centuries, appreciated in the end, as Pastoureau said, as “a beautiful color, the color of the Virgin and kings” and rivaling red, since the recent discovery of a Paleolithic pigment used in Egyptian temples, Chinese porcelain or Gothic glassware, blue presents itself to us as a fascinating color whose hues can be traced throughout history. As Benjamín Labatut recounts in A terrible green (Anagram), it even changed direction: the first modern synthetic pigment, Prussian blue, was originally used in hydrogen cyanide to make the deadly pesticide Zyklon, and was used by Nazi leaders like Hermann Göring to commit suicide before receiving his punishment. Today it waves like the color of peace, embodied in a blue flag, and on clothing of all ages it is the most popular dye, extracted from the indigo plant.
Its symbolism, perhaps above other colors, unfolds like an inescapable enigma, a chromatic circle without beginning or end, because it demonstrates the vast impromptu that has been left in the arts, and which arrives today inscribed in the work of current creators like the unfortunate Matthew Wong. Now that the views shine all the time with the blue that screens reflect on our pupils, it’s probably time to get out into the streets and start observing the sky in color again, with its gray cloud shadows, orange dawns and purple twilights.
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