Blue

EVERYONE LOVES BLUE. Four in ten people would tell you it’s their favorite color. To be fair, though, four in ten people will also say the cashew is their favorite nut. That same percentage of adults still reads actual newspapers, and an equal number believes ghosts are real. So for a moment, let’s set aside the fact that you and I and about 40 percent of everyone we know prefer blue over any other color. Instead let’s wonder: What does that preference reveal about us? What does blue say about us? In the pages that follow, images from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and essays by ten of the museum’s curators and conservators explore that question, providing a rich (and colorful) context for humankind’s fascination with blue across thousands of years of art making and cultural history.

Make a list of everything blue, a stream of blue consciousness. Mine would begin: Picasso’s Blue Period. Joni Mitchell’s album Blue, with its cyan sleeve. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. My favorite blue oxford-cloth shirt. The perfect blue jeans. Elvis and his blue suede shoes. The deep blue of the bull-leaping fresco at Knossos, or better, the brilliant blue backdrop of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate. The blue glass in the windows at Chartres. The Hope Diamond. Tiffany’s little blue box. Sapphires. Smurfs. Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. Cornflowers. Blue jays. Blue books for exams, and blue pens. French chore smocks, called bleu de travail, “work blue.” My mother’s Blue Willow plates, the pattern rubbed off at the edges. And above all, the sky, and then also the sea.

Or to the ancient Egyptians, the sky and the Nile, and by extension the gods who ruled those realms. As blues go, the Egyptians famously invented two: Egyptian faience, a glassy blue ceramic, and so-called Egyptian blue, the first synthetic pigment ever made. But their most precious blue came from the faraway mines of Afghanistan, in the form of the rock lapis lazuli. Ground to powder, lapis becomes ultramarine, at one point the costliest pigment in existence—a luxury rarer even than gold. Renaissance painters reserved it for only the most special applications, like the painted robes of the Virgin, a blue proper for the queen of heaven. A true blue. Which brings us to the medieval fabric that gave rise to that phrase: the blue cloth dyed at Coventry, England, and whose color did not fade.

For a while, everyone wanted that blue Coventry wool. Green may be the color of envy, but blue is the color we covet. We’ve hunted it down, prized it, copied, borrowed, and sometimes been left to create it ourselves out of thin air. One region’s blue often began somewhere else. The origins of China’s beloved blue-and-white porcelain were in West Asia. From China, blue and white made its way to Japan, and throughout Asia, and then on to Europe, where it found a feverish market of admirers, as well as copyists laboring to decode its mysteries. Along the way came the blues of Vincennes, Sèvres, Delft, Wedgwood’s blue jasperware, and the ubiquitous transfer-printed Blue Willow pattern.

As far as I can tell, blue has never meant just one thing. In the seventeenth century, Dutch painters placed blue-and-white Chinese porcelain in their still lifes as symbols of luxury, while in ancient Rome, blue was a color of the working class—the original blue collar. For fancier blues, the Romans used dye from the indigo plant, which today gives my everyday blue jeans their shade. Hokusai used indigo, too, in parts of his print The Great Wave. But when it came to depicting the wave itself, he favored the exciting new Prussian blue, brought to Japan by Dutch traders. In turn, the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh chose the same blue for his pulsating skies. These connections continue. As I write this, Pantone has announced the color for spring 2014: Dazzling Blue, which, as it happens, is also Facebook blue.

Is that what blue is all about? Connections? Think of the blues—that most essential emotion and musical form. The “blue note” in every blues song, its pitch bent a little, flattened, instantly signaling a feeling we’ve all shared. “Am I blue?” Billie Holiday sang. The poet Gayl Jones, listening to Holiday, writes:

The blues calling my name.
She is singing a deep song.
She is singing a deep song.
I am human.

Maybe that’s it: Blue reminds us of what we are. It brings us down to size. Blue stands for something bigger than any one of us. The Nile and the sky, the limitlessness of water and the heavens. I’m thinking now about Neil Armstrong looking back from the moon. From where he stood—nearly a quarter-million miles away—home was “a tiny pea, pretty and blue.” Holding up his gloved hand and closing one eye, he could blot out that blue speck in the sky with his thumb. Doing so, he said, made him feel small.