Blue. exhibition catalogue (Nassau County Museum of Art)

blue.

Photo: Tab Hauser Photography

IN MEMORIAM

FRANK CASTAGNA (1928 - 2020) Frank Castagna’s immensely influential role at the Nassau Museum began with his election to the board in 1996 and continued until this very exhibition, and it is our pleasure to dedicate this book to his memory. So many of the highlights of the 30-year history of the Museum are the direct result of his magnanimity and perfect taste, exhibitions that he sponsored for example and momentous decisions that he made as a longtime member and past president of the board of trustees, that it would be impossible to enumerate them all in one brief tribute.

His smile was as meaningful as his support. The Museum as it is today is unimaginable without his guidance. He supported our work as educators, curators and stewards of the garden. At openings and events, he and his wife Rita showed their deep commitment to the arts and to the community. He addressed the crowd with a quiet dignity, not from a prepared script but from the heart. He was an absolute prince. When Baldassare Castiglione wrote his classic treatise on the ideal gentleman of the Renaissance, The Courtier, he drew a prophetic portrait of Frank Castagna, whose civility offers a paradigm that we all strive to live up to, a torch he has passed on to future generations of Museum leadership.

Ma avendo io già piú volte pensato meco onde nasca questa grazia, lasciando quelli che dalle stelle l’hanno, trovo una regula universalissima, la qual mi par valer circa questo in tutte le cose umane che si facciano o dicano piú che alcuna altra, e ciò è fuggir quanto piú si po, e come un asperissimo e pericoloso scoglio, la affettazione; e, per dir forse una nova parola, usar in ogni cosa una certa sprezzatura, che nasconda l’arte e dimostri ciò che si fa e dice venir fatto senza fatica e quasi senza pensarvi.

However, having already thought a great deal about how this grace is acquired, and leaving aside those who are endowed with it by their stars, I have discovered a universal rule which seems to apply more than any other in all human actions or words: namely, to steer away from affectation at all costs, as if it were a rough and dangerous reef, and (to use perhaps a novel word for it) to practise in all things a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless.

blue.

March 13, 2020 - November 1, 2020

Lenders to the Exhibition Arman Marital Trust

Marc Straus

Corice Arman

The Marc and Livia Straus

Berry Campbell Gallery

Family Collection

Louise Braver

Moeller Fine Art, New York

Cao Jun

Mosaic House

Benedict and Jacob Carton

Barbara Ernst Prey

Beatrice Lei Chang

RoGallery

The Clark Family Collection

Ronin Gallery

Dr. and Mrs. Todd Cohen

Jon Schueler Estate

Daphne Alazraki Fine Art

Sean Scully

DC Moore Gallery

Sean Kelly

Edelman Arts

Spaightwood Galleries

Edwynn Houk Gallery

Sperone Westwater

European Decorative Arts Company

Staley-Wise Gallery

Bart Everly

Susan Vecsey

Alex Ferrone

The Office of the

Franรงoise Gilot

Secretary-General

Han Qin

of the United Nations

Helly Nahmad Gallery

Bettina WitteVeen

The H. Manes Art Foundation

Yoshii Gallery

Judith Mara Cofield, Esq.

Forever Blue

Far and away the globe’s most beloved color, blue

commands a singular sovereignty over the total spectrum with powers all its own. As this exhibition vividly reveals through works from around the globe spanning five centuries, ours has long been a blue planet. Recent surveys reveal that four

They said, “You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.”

-Wallace Stevens

out of five continents rank this color first by a mile, but its power can be traced from the first Neolithic threads spun for

blueprints and cyanotypes. Precious blue items shuttled along

textiles or fishing nets 32,000 years ago to the celestial turquoise

the trade routes between East and West even before the days

on the death mask of King Tutenkhamen, or the soft stone

of Marco Polo. In April 630 CE, the Chinese monk Xunxuang,

dug from more than two hundred mines in what is now New

taking a detour into what is today called Afghanistan on his

Mexico where Navajo, Zuni and other tribes mined the “sky

passage to India, encountered the colossal Buddhas of the

stone” centuries before the Spanish explorers arrived. From

Bamiyan Valley, one of them painted with the “true blue”

the brilliant glazes of Asian ceramics and the Medieval cult of

mineral pigment lapis lazuli mined 400 miles northeast at Sar-e-

therapeutic blue right to our own moment, almost every culture

Sang. This is the beginning of the story of ultramarine, literally

or artist goes through a blue period. Art history alone is replete

“blue from beyond the sea,” which a century later was the most

with potent examples, from the precious lapis lazuli ground

prized pigment in Europe. It was cheaper for Titian because

in mortars for such Renaissance masters as Giotto, Perugino,

Venice was an early stop on the trade route and more costly in

Titian and Vermeer, to the serene, leanly bound ultramarine

Antwerp, where the German master Albrecht Dürer and a local

washes of Poussin, the stunning outburst of cobalt in the

landscape painter of note, Abraham Govaerts, would pay 100

Impressionist palettes of Renoir and Monet, Cézanne’s liquid

of Matisse’s cut-outs, imported across the Mediterranean from

FRONT COVER: Sean Scully Landline Rain, 2018 oil on aluminum 85 x 75 inches Courtesy of the artist

Morocco to the Côte d’Azur.

OPPOSITE: Installation view of Henri Matisse, from top left:

Femme bleue avec Cruche (Blue Nude with Amphora), 1952 color lithograph after paper cut-out and gouache 14 x 10 1/8 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA

planes of Prussian blue, and the moonlit cerulean of Picasso’s heart-rending masterpiece La Vie or the sun-filled ultramarine

That mobility across geography and history, crossing

borders of space and time, is a vital message throughout our exhibition. An atlas of blue extends to all corners of the globe, even the crystalline interiors of polar ice. The amazing confluence of geography and aesthetics comprises a dazzling range of media, from stained glass to gemstones, dyes, glazes, paints, ink and the photographic processes that created 1

Femme bleue assise III (Seated Blue Nude III), 1952 color lithograph after paper cut-out and gouache 14 x 10 1/8 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA Femme bleue qui saute des joie (Woman Leaping), 1952 color lithograph after paper cut-out and gouache 14 x 10 1/8 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA Seated Blue Nude, 1952 color lithograph after paper cut-out and gouache 14 x 10 1/8 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA

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times what they were used to paying for common earth pigments such as the umber made from bistre. The enchanting moonlit scene by Govaerts, one of the gems in our show, trills on the close relationship between the foreground greens and the background blues, following the precepts (“cool colors recede”)

around 1000 CE) to Turkey’s Iznik (in Ottoman times, in the 1600s when it flourished it was called Nicea, just southeast of Istanbul), Delft in the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer and Stoke-on-Trent, where Josiah Wedgwood, after three thousand experimental batches, perfected his jasperware in the 1770s.

of his teacher Jan Breughel the Elder. At the other end of the Silk Road in Beijing the imperial demand for “celestial”

ultramarine (azurite) pigment for landscapes and portraits of

tiles glazed with cobalt, intricate objets d’art, and blue-toned

gentry in indigo blue robes, especially in the Ming dynasty,

rugs of Persia and Turkey or Ikat weavings (dyed in indigo)

drove its price up to eye-watering levels and prompted a decree

passed through Venice and onward along the westbound leg of

to mine lapis locally, even permitting rural families to pay their

the Silk Road, synthetic pigments invented in Europe headed

taxes with the raw rock. For a taste of what true lapis looks like,

east. A cheap French substitute for ultramarine had to wait until

our exhibition includes a ravishing silver-gilt ewer and tray by

the nineteenth century along with aniline, wrecking the Indian

Hermann Bohm, which surrounds panels of regal lapis with

indigo industry, but Prussian blue was discovered by accident

attendant semi-precious stones that enhance its blue eminence.

much earlier, between 1704 and 1706, in the Berlin laboratory of

There is also the three-thousand year history of prized cobalt

alchemist and color merchant Johann Jacob Diesbach. Consider

glazes for ceramics, from China’s Jingdezhen (the imperial capital

the excitement it caused when it arrived in the print studios of

of porcelain – essentially why China is called China – established

Edo (today’s Tokyo) in the nineteenth century. Suddenly that

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Just as the lumps of raw lapis, ceramics and mosaic

ravishingly lovely ombre for which Hiroshige and Hokusai are revered rose from its depths at the edge of the rice paper to fade into its center. By 1830, the passion for Prussian blue was so intense that whole print runs, numbering in the thousands, took this monochromatic indulgence to its full tonal limit.

This traffic between East and West has expanded

not just the sources but also the many ambiguous meanings of blue. While the symbolic and expressive codes of Western religion condition many of us to respond to Mary’s heavenly robe echoed in the pathos of Picasso’s “madonnas” or Braque’s doves, there are also connotations that are Egyptian (the tuat of the underworld, the Nile and the watery chaos of nun), Buddhist (Akshobhya), Hindu (the “blue-skinned god” Krishna) and Islamic (the blue-tiled or mosaic calligraphy of the bismallah).

Then there is the visceral sense in which blue affects the psyche as the exaltation of sea or distant mountains or sky, our planet seen from space, the interstellar midnight blue. The “blue screen of death” is the toxic, technological intrusion on our lives that mimics the primordial fear of cyanosis, a pallor caused by lack of oxygen in the red blood cells that portends cold, hunger and morbidity, in the medical lexicon since Galen but as natural a

European heraldry but also in the language of “Oriental” rugs, many blue paints and dyes are notoriously fugitive, and the close dance of moonlight with the imagination confers on blue its capacity to deceive, which Wallace Stevens ponders in “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” The “blue” note of jazz, W. C. Handy’s flatted third, is an “off ” or “worried” note of indisputable, if impure, sadness that unwove music’s major scale, admitting transfigurations into harmonic and melodic regions unheard of before its advent.

cause for alarm as the smell of poison (cyanide). Blue eyes in many parts of the world are considered scarily inhuman. Cobalt mining even in our day is notoriously deadly for the children of Africa forced into pits to provide the world with phones and computers, echoing its fourteenth-century etymological source kobold, an evil demon that poisoned northern European mines with arsenic fumes. The celestial immateriality of transcendence is ironically depicted by the permanent, colorfast durability of lapis or even (most American of fashion statements going back to the gold mines of California, despite its origins in Nîmes)

OPPOSITE: Abraham Govaerts A Moonlit Landscape, nd oil on panel 6 3/4 x 8 7/8 inches Courtesy of Daphne Alazraki Gallery, New York

denim. The weighty, bulletproof steel helmet worn by United Nations peacekeepers, its color chosen because it is different from any of the shades in the 75 national flags that use blue, travels the world. While “true blue” invokes loyalty, not just in

ABOVE: Ewer and Tray, c. 1875 Hermann Bohm Lapis Lazuli, silver-gilt, champlevé enamel, semi-precious stones Ewer: 7.68 inches high Tray: 8.66 x 12.01 inches Courtesy of European Decorative Arts, Co., Greenvale, New York

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ABOVE: Yoshiharu Large Elephant from a Foreign Country, 1863 30 x 14.25 inches Publisher: Yamaguchiya Tobei Seals: Aratame combined with year seal Signature: Ichibaisai Yoshiharu ga Medium: Color woodblock print triptych Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, NYC LEFT: Hiroshige Fireworks at Ryogoku, 1858 Series: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo 9.75 x 14.25 inches Publisher: Uoya Eikichi Seals: Publisher and year seals Signature: Hiroshige ga Medium: Color woodblock print Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, NYC

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ABOVE: Hokusai Shichirigahama in Sagami Province, c. 1830-1834 Series: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji 14.5 x 9.5 inches Publisher: Eijudo (Nishimuraya Yohachi) Seals: Kiwame (censer seal) Signature: Saki no Hokusai iitsu hitsu Medium: Color woodblock print Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, NYC RIGHT: Hasui Kawase Mountain Temple at Sendai, Summer 1919 Series: Souvenirs of Travel I 10.25 x 15.25 inches Publisher: Watanabe Shozaburo Seals: Watanabe (6mm circular seal) Signature: Hasui, with red circular seal Sui Medium: Color woodblock print Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, NYC

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LEFT: Kuniyoshi Kabuki Actor Nakamura Shikan as Higuchi Jiro, c. 1832 9.75 x 14.25 inches Publisher: Yamaguchiya Tobei Seals: Kiwame (censor seal) Signature: Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi ga Medium: Color woodblock print Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, NYC RIGHT: Kuniyoshi Kabuki Actor Ichikawa Ebizo as Higuchi Jiro, c. 1832 9.75 x 13.25 inches Publisher: Yamaguchiya Tobei Seals: Kiwame (censor seal) Signature: Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi ga Medium: Color woodblock print Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, NYC

OPPOSITE: TOP: Kuniyoshi Favorite Customs of the Present Day, c.1832 30.75 x 15 inches Publisher: Izutsuya Shokichi Seals: Kiwame (censer seal) Signature: Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi ga Medium: Color woodblock print triptych Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, NYC BOTTOM : LEFT: Kuniyoshi Hatsuhana, Wife of Iinuma Katsugoro Doing Penance under the Waterfall, c.1842 Series: Stories of Wise and Virtuous Women 9.75 x 14.25 inches Publisher: Ibaya Sensaburo Seals: Signature: Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi ga Medium: Color woodblock print Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, NYC RIGHT: Eisen Oiran Wearing Full Moon and Tiger Kimono, c. 1838 Series: Pictures of Modern Beautiful Women 9.5 x 14.25 inches Publisher: Kawanaga Seals: Kiwame (censor seal) Signature: Keisai Eisen ga Medium: Color woodblock print Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, NYC

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The Man with the Blue Guitar: Pablo Picasso, Wallace Stevens and David Hockney

The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

-Wallace Stevens

Looming over all Modern art is the monumental, tragic

that this rejection was due to the painful memories. During his

achievement of Picasso’s youthful Blue Period. The story has

third stint in Paris he confessed to stealing bread and a few coins

been retailed too many times by those who would reduce the

from his roommate Max Jacob, and the chill penury of his own

achievement of a 21-year-old tragedian to a mere anecdote.

condition is everywhere reflected in such paintings as The Blind

By any account, it begins on February 17, 1901, when Carles

Man’s Repast. He was in Barcelona the night Casagemas died,

Casagemas, the love-struck boon companion of Picasso’s first

and returned there after the funeral when his family sent him

trips from Barcelona to Paris, shot himself in front of their

some money to travel, making a macabre visit to the morgue

shared muse, Germaine (Laure Gargallo) at the Hippodrome

where that cyanotic pallor seized his imagination. Our portrait

cafe. Picasso’s drawings of the 20-year-old Casagamas on his

of a lady, head downcast in depression or mourning, was made

deathbed morbidly include the bullet hole in his temple. From

in Barcelona in 1903. In addition to the influence of Cézanne,

haunting portraits of Casagemas and the poet Jaime Sabartes,

Lautrec and Van Gogh, the choice of color may also have been

at first created in the Barcelona studio he had shared with

a tribute to Casagemas, who favored a similar cerulean in his

Casegemas where Picasso went to recover from the shock,

pastels and colored pencil drawings, notably a self-portrait made

Picasso rapidly pushed the monochrome into deeply moving

in 1900, stylistically so close to Picasso’s work of that time, that

dramatic territory with The Blind Man’s Repast, The Old Man with the

was the main attraction in an exhibition of the Malagan artist’s

Guitar (which so inspired Wallace Stevens and David Hockney, as

works at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in 2015. The

we are about to see), and the haunting moonlit scenes featuring

culmination of Picasso’s highly personal dive into tragedy is the

the prostitutes interned in the prison-hospital of St. Lazare.

timeless La Vie (1903), which began as a self-portrait (according

They are suffused with the otherworldly harmony of cerulean

to recent x-ray studies) but ended as a portrait of Casagemas

in several shades, sometimes clouded at the edges of the canvas

together with two figures, one who may be Germaine as well

with a forest green, or “cooled” (to borrow Matisse’s term) with

as a maternal presence, by a pair of paintings referring to

black. Late in life, Picasso uneasily dismissed the Blue Period,

Gauguin’s Tahitian allegories. Picasso revered Noa Noa, even

even though he was aware that it had touched a universal chord

adding drawings to his personal copy of the book, now lost. At

with its melancholy, appealing as plangently in Tokyo as in New

this point, the layers of blue’s meaning are arguably beyond the

York, much as Van Gogh’s paintings did. Biographers reason

youthful Picasso’s conscious intentions. Biographer and friend

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John Richardson relates Picasso’s instinctive attraction to the blue of the sea: “The bluer Picasso’s paintings become, the more they are permeated by the sea…For Picasso of the Blue Period, beaches had the advantage of no specific associations; they were outside time and place-a blue limbo.” When Jung applied his alchemical interpretation of colors to Picasso’s paintings, which he saw in Zurich in 1932, he posed this array of meanings: “Picasso starts with the still objective pictures of the Blue Periodthe blue of night, of moonlight and water, the Tuat-blue of the Egyptian underworld. He dies, and his soul rides on horseback into the beyond. With the change of color we enter the underworld.” Picasso is Orpheus, making his “descent into the unconscious.” Jung reads blue in mandalas as the spiritual process of nous (mind) and heaven symbolized by the philosopher’s stone lapis, second only to the alchemical gold (aurum philosophicum) of the divine sun. Together these complementary colors make the homo altus.

Picasso’s Old Man with a Guitar inspired a literary

Pablo Picasso Buste de Femme, original: 1902; printed: 1979-1982 lithograph on Arches paper Edition of 500, 34 APs Courtesy of RoGallery, Long Island City, New York © 2020 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

masterwork by Wallace Stevens that, in turn, prompted David Hockney to create an important group of prints and drawings.

The story begins when James J. Sweeney, the director of MoMA,

this picture of Picasso’s, this “hoard of destructions,” a picture of ourselves, now, an image of our society?”

invited Stevens to lecture on Picasso, Poussin, Corot, Claude, Cézanne and (his personal favorite) Braque in 1937. Stevens used the occasion to deliver an axiom that is the key to much of their work and his own: “Modern reality is a reality of de-creation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers.” The cyclical theme and variations of Stevens’ cycle of 33 lyric meditations on the Picasso

This play of imagination and reality, so perfectly attuned

to make something rich and strange from portraiture, captured the attention of Hockney at an opportune moment. He was a carefree, 39-year-old Brit spending the summer on Fire Island when the MoMA curator Henry Geldzahler gave him a volume of Stevens’ poetry. Hockney made a suite of twenty prints related to “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” filled with autobiographical

painting circle around the message of its opening lines: “Things

overtones that included a self-portrait depicting him seated at

as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar.” It even ventures

a small table hunched over a drawing that may well be this very

from aesthetics (“art for art’s sake”) to the troubled history of

work in our show, and a meticulously drawn portrait of Stevens

what was happening as the world was again en route to war: “Is

in half profile made from a publicity photo. Music joins literature 10

Pablo Picasso Buste de Femme [original: 1902; publication: 1979-1982] lithograph on Arches paper Edition: 500 + 34 APs image size: 20 x 16.5 inches paper size: 29 x 22 inches Courtesy of RoGallery, Long Island City, New York Š 2020 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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and art in one magisterial meditation upon the ways in which the world around us is transfigured by the imagination. Having made his mark on the London art scene by defiantly blending what he called “naturalism” with abstraction in the same paintings, Hockney grasped the dual message in the “buzzing of the blue guitar,” trilling between reality and what lies beyond: A tune beyond us as we are, Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar; Ourselves in the tune as if in space, Yet nothing changed, except the place Of things as they are and only the place As you play them, on the blue guitar, Placed, so, beyond the compass of change, Perceived in a final atmosphere; For a moment final, in the way The thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew.

The tune is space. The blue guitar Becomes the place of things as they are, A composing of senses of the guitar.

TOP: David Hockney The Buzzing of the Blue Guitar from The Blue Guitar series, 1976/1977 etching and softground etching in red, blue, and green (printed from two copper plates) on wove paper plate: 16 3/4 x 13 9/16 inches sheet: 20 11/16 x 18 1/8 inches Courtesy of Bart Everly Photo Courtesy of Heritage Auctions, New York

BOTTOM: David Hockney I Say They Are from The Blue Guitar series, 1976/1977 etching and aquatint in red, blue, yellow, green, and black (printed from two copper plates) on wove paper plate: 13 9/16 x 16 3/4 inches sheet: 18 1/16 x 20 11/16 inches Courtesy of Judith Mara Cofield, Esq. Photo Courtesy of Heritage Auctions, New York

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The Museum of the Sky: Redon and Matisse

As with Hockney, the incandescent blue fantasies of

of allegorical associations with a long European history. When

Odilon Redon are rooted in poetry. The original textual basis of

the Abbot Suger began the monumental cathedral of St. Denis

Cain and Abel is obvious, but Redon draws his mystical blues

in 1137, he had a gift of “sapphire material” that, paired with

from the deeper fathoms of French poetry, particularly Stéphane

gold imported from Byzantium, conveyed “celestial immanence.”

Mallarmé’s “l’azur,” the single most meaningful color for all

Blue in that time was believed to pack the power to protect the

the Symbolists, including Gérard de Nerval, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, in turn the inspiration for Claude Debussy’s “Claire de Lune.” When J K. Huysmans included Redon by name in his decadent novel Against the Grain, this supremely talented but difficult-to-categorize artist from Bordeaux, whose early work had been included in exhibitions of the Impressionists, was catapulted into literary renown. By the end of this career, his disturbing images of eyes as colossal hot-air balloons made him a bridge to Surrealism. What makes Redon’s blue so important? By turning up the volume using the purest pigment (pastel is ground pigment with a binder) he liberates color, as did Matisse, to act as a light source. In his own words, the medium leads the way: “Materials have secrets to reveal; they have their own genius; it is through them that the oracle speaks.” Just in terms of the studio world of nineteenth-century Paris, Redon’s career began in the period of “violetomania” (the Société Anonyme which Monet, Manet, Cézanne and Pissarro founded in 1874 was known for “always

bearer from danger or disease, to release him or her from prison, to cool the toxic humors and clear the eyes, even fight deceit and falsehood. The cathedral glass of St. Denis and Chartres poses a vast mystery, a supply chain puzzle antedating our own business headlines, as the source of the blue (still a secret) may have been cobalt from Saxony or Bohemia or from mines as far away as Persia. But it might also have been a chemical stain made by the combination of manganese and copper or the tints extracted from recycled Roman scent bottles from the second century AD, common in Europe. The most expensive source would be glass mosaic cubes imported from Byzantium along the Silk Road.

Along with these radiant blues, allied with light, the closest to the pure pigment of Redon in our exhibition is Yves Klein’s pulsing IKB (a dark ultramarine) used to transfigure the classic white marble of the Louvre’s Venus de Milo.

The colors were so vibrant he had to wear sunglasses

as he worked. The revolutionary venture into this new medium is usually assigned to his declining years after the operation for

proceeding from a violet and bluish range”) and advanced to the cooler, purer versions that became his signature in later years.

Like the cobalt with which the stained glass of French

cathedrals was made, Redon’s radiant clouds of blue tap a wealth 13

OPPOSITE: Odilon Redon Cain et Abel pastel on Bistre paper 31.5 x 23.6 inches Courtesy of Helly Nahmad Gallery, New York

stomach cancer in 1941 made it difficult for him to stand at

sorts” (to quote Stevens again) cut swiftly with paper or tailor’s

an easel for long periods. Matisse, however, had experimented

scissors, then the assistants would temporarily pin the pieces

with cut-outs a decade earlier when he was doing commissions

to the walls or larger pieces of paper. Later in the process they

for the Ballets Russes and Alfred Barnes (he sternly warned his

would be fixed by mounting and framing them, or tucked into

son not to let Dr. Barnes know he was using the crafty paper

the rectilinear format of a book design. In Matisse’s room

cuts as a design tool). For the large-scale later works, studio

these installations took on an architectural role even to the

assistants painted the heavy Arches paper with even coats of

point where they curled away from the flat wall surface to cast

ultramarine gouache made by Linel. Matisse, “a shearsman of

shadows. The apex of this spatial dimension of Matisse’s work 14

is a walk-in masterpiece that MoMA exhibited during their

rêves, which delicately balanced a nebulous swirl of pure blue

blockbuster show of the cutouts in late 2014, created in the

with the calligraphic line, “This is the color of my dreams.”

summer of 1952 and titled The Swimming Pool.

Tracking the constant presence of blue in Miró’s work leads from the bright sky of his early masterpiece The Farm through

The blue nude was a collaborative process in another

the huge fields of the blue triptych he made in 1961 at the

sense, as the prints in our exhibition attest. The world beyond

conclusion of his career. In his enchanting memoir about

Paris learned about Modern art in living color through

the studio and friends at the rue Blomet in Paris during the

journals and books with full-color plates published by a pair

Twenties, with its cameo appearances by Picasso (whose

of urbane Greeks, Christian Zervos and Stratis Eleftheriades

mother knew Miró’s mother), Juan Gris, André Breton, and the

(known as Tériade) and Albert Skira, who was Swiss. Tériade’s

playwright Antonin Artaud, Miró recounts the influence of

collaboration with Matisse would last 25 years and reach its

Matisse (whom he favored over Picasso) as well as Paul Klee’s

peak in the masterwork of twentieth-century livres d’artistes,

watercolors, which he, Masson, Eluard and Crevel would

Jazz (1947), a triumph of decoupage. In 1929, Tériade

study as soon as they arrived at a bookstore on the boulevard

published his first article on Matisse, who became the main

Raspail. The most plangent line in the memoir is a simple

graphic talent behind the journal Verve, which Tériade founded

confessio amoris, “What we cared about most on the rue

in December 1937 in the spirit of “art for the masses.” On

Blomet was painting.”

the basis of these accurately printed works, their colors mixed to match the expectations of the artists themselves (think of how difficult it must have been to calibrate that secure dark blue bar in Léger’s mural study!), Malraux was able to write about the “museum without walls” which a new generation of reproduction made possible, long before virtual tours.

Matisse was the star, but Tériade’s stable at Verve

included Fernand Léger, Georges Braque and Joan Miró.

They shared the view of the publication as a contemporary version of the illuminated book of hours, uniting text and image in an architecture that was different from a gallery show. For Miró especially, after the precision of his Jazz Age paintings, the 1930s was when he cut loose in a group of what he called poésie peintures (“poem paintings”). These originated in an experimental 1925 work, Photo: Ceci est la couleur de mes 15

TOP: Joan Miró L’air Verve first edition, 1937 14 x 10 inches Courtesy of Yoshii Gallery, New York RIGHT: Georges Braque Oiseau Bleu, 1952 color lithograph, published in a special issue of Verve produced iunder the artist’s supervision 13 7/8 x 10 1/4 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA FAR RIGHT: Marc Chagall Double Self Portrait II, 1974 color lithograph 12 3/4 x 10 3/4 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA

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Paul Klee Beulen Birne (Bulgy Pear), 1934 gouache on paper 8 ¼ x 8 ½ inches Courtesy of Moeller Fine Art - New York © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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The Blue Rider: Klee

A decade after Picasso’s Blue Period and a few years

blue would fill a central position in Kandinsky’s mighty mountain

after Matisse and the Fauves lit up a small seaside town called

paintings, the most familiar of which for New Yorkers is at the

Pont-Aven, these two avant-garde heroes played cameo roles

Guggenheim Museum, as well as Marc’s horses and deer and,

in one of the pivotal episodes in the story of Modernism: the

as we can see in the precious painting in our exhibition, Klee’s

Blue Rider movement in Munich. Because it was brief and far

revisionary still lifes and landscapes. The connections between

from Paris, London or New York, this internationally diverse

the avant-garde groups of Munich and Paris, via Kandinsky and

congress of talent has become unjustifiably obscure. It is not

Delaunay, were numerous, and included close ties with Matisse

widely known, for instance, that Picasso almost chose Munich

as well as Redon, who wrote an essay for the Almanach. Visits

over Paris when he became aware of the sophisticated abstract

to Tunis by Klee and Kandinsky, like Matisse’s trip to Morocco,

rebellion against Romanticism spearheaded by the group’s leaders

expanded the repertoire of blues on their palettes. While the Blue

Wassily Kandinsky, who shuttled between Paris and Munich

Rider was short-lived, reaching its apex in 1911 just as Klee came

with his talented girlfriend Gabriele Münter, and Franz Marc,

on board, it resonated through the Scandinavian Cobra group, the

the only native of Munich in the group. The Blue Rider refers

Cubists, and the Bauhaus, which a decade later brought Klee and

to Kandinsky’s Cossack horseman and Marc’s signature blue

Kandinsky together again for the next phase of the moonshot to

horse. The Almanach they published in 1911 and two knockout

land art on the planet of abstraction.

traveling exhibitions included works by a roster of art stars from Van Gogh and Picasso to the Russians Kandinsky and

So much of the metaphysics that the Blue Rider

Alexei Jawlensky, the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg,

group unabashedly promoted is wrapped up in Klee’s small but

Robert Delaunay and (as an author of a catalogue text) Odilon

substantive still life of a single pear, invested with an illogical and

Redon. Arriving from Bern in pursuit of Munich’s renowned

artificial green (certainly not the pear we would pick from the bin

teachers of classical technique, Paul Klee reviewed the first

at the farmer’s market) and surrounded in fields of graduated

Blue Rider exhibition as a critic and showed some of his early,

blues, including cut strips of painted paper applied at the top and

predominantly linear work in the second. The blue of the Blue

bottom edges that are right out of the Matisse playbook. Klee

Rider is a vivid, “spiritual” color that dominates the group’s

and Kandinsky eloquently taught in their writings the god-like

manifestos, associated not just with the sky and hills of Murnau,

role of the artist who creates a pear in his own “de-formed” way,

the little market town just outside Schwabing which was their

leading away from the commonplace and prosaic correctness of

version of Pont-Aven, but with a symbolic code. Kandinsky and

realism to abstraction. One of the great ironies of the Blue Rider

Münter lived in a cozy farmhouse in Murnau, its furniture and

group is the fact that the most vibrant assembly of paintings,

winding staircase decorated by him in the style of folk paintings

including Gabriele Münter’s personal trove of Kandinsky works,

on glass, along with children’s drawings. A dark, “masculine”

is housed in the mansion of Franz von Lenbach, a dull master of 18

The Tune in Space: Abstract Expressionist Blues proper draughtsmanship whose teaching attracted Klee and others

to Munich in the first place. Klee’s teaching and writing offered an

several breakthroughs in painting covered by this exhibition. Via

extraordinary guide, step-by-step, from the literal to the ethereal.

the transmission of Munich’s own Hans Hofmann as teacher

Beginning with empirical observation, taking the pear on the table

and the advanced books Tériade and Skira were publishing,

as a simple starting point, and progressing with all the patience of a

the ideas of the Blue Rider found fertile ground in the New

grade-school teacher (the occupation of Ludwig Wittgenstein and

York-based Abstract Expressionists, notably Al Held, James

Josef Albers, incidentally), Klee walks us through a process that

Brooks, Norman Bluhm, Norman Carton, Helen Frankenthaler,

becomes no less than a lesson in the nature of consciousness itself,

Robert Motherwell (whose blue was sourced for collages from

“growing” (a favorite term) from the premise that “in its present

the label on his Gitanes), the “blue poles” of Jackson Pollock’s

shape it is not the only possible world.” Via a cautious sequence of

most colorful drip painting, the blue clouds of Rothko and the

“deformations” that rhyme with Picasso’s “de-creation” (at precisely

rare, dark blue fields of Barnett Newman, demarcated with pale

the same moment in art history) Klee uses outline and the arbitrary

blue zips. Although never a formal member of the Blue Rider,

or unexpected assignment of colors to extend his “freedom”

Hofmann was the conduit for their color theories, which he

from the presence of the still life into the future. This cosmic train

passed on to his students in Manhattan and Provincetown, a

of thought was influenced by the Einsteinian physics of the day

direct thread from Klee’s modestly proportioned still life to the

(both were from Bern, and Klee and Kandinsky tracked with great

vast expanse of bright oceanic blue in Helen Frankenthaler’s

ardor the latest discoveries in atomic research). Like the “thought

Herald. Although she was Hofmann’s pupil only briefly in

experiments” of Einstein, Klee reveals what he calls the “latent”

Provincetown, there is something absolutely Blue Rider-esque

realities beyond direct observation: “Formerly we used to represent

about the way the broad swath of ultramarine (acrylic, for its

things visible on earth, things we either liked to look at or would have

bounce) advances to conquer the space not just of the picture

liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things,

plane but of half the gallery, as blue also “pushes” from

thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated

Hofmann canvases and from the bright patch in Held’s small

case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other,

but potent untitled work in our show. As for Miró, Matisse and

latent realities.” He unites the verbal impetus of theory with the visual

Picasso, blue was a touchstone throughout Frankenthaler’s career.

momentum of a painting underway that pursues its own direction,

Her studios and plein air excursions led her over and over again

leaving the pear on the table far behind along with the earthbound

to sunlit salt water: Peconic Bay and the ocean by Springs in

strictures of Munich’s renowned training, much as Matisse, Miró and

1951, Cape Breton in 1952, shipboard on her honeymoon to

Picasso were avoiding the gates of the École des Beaux Arts.

Spain and the Côte d’Azur with Motherwell in 1958, Morocco

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Klee’s unprepossessing little pear bears the seeds of

in 1960, the glorious studio overlooking Provincetown Bay in

and about the whole world and the whole universe, and about all the

1964 and after, the long-term studio she maintained starting in

great throbbing tragedy of movement and life ... and by god it was about

1974 at Shippan Point overlooking Long Island Sound from

everything I’ve been thinking about, and I just have to raise myself one

the Connecticut shore, having known the Sound from our side

way or another to the point where I can truly feel it and express it, and

when she taught in Great Neck in 1959. The milestones of her

where I get far, far beyond the point of techniques and doesn’t this look just

long career all took blue as their tonic key, from Mountains and

like some impressionist, and whatever anyone might be whispering in my

Sea (1953, surely I cannot be the first to notice that the mountain

ear -- you or critics or buyers or dealers or friends or artists or enemies or

at its center is a Kandinsky-worthy blue cone) to The Bay (1963),

what.......I’m dying to paint. I know I’m gaining vision.

Ocean Drive West #1 (1974), Interior Landscape (1964), Blue Reach (1978), to choose a handful of titles that testify to her special

Among others in this exhibition for whom blue served

affinity for the color.

as a balm, Schueler was a survivor of trauma. His wartime journals describe with an eerie calm the blue of the sky during

Another influential teacher who was a living link to

a battle in which the flying fortress bomber in which he was

Matisse and a champion of Modernism (along with Dr. Barnes)

navigator was caught in a wild dogfight over France. After

in staid Philadelphia, Arthur B. Carles, taught Norman Carton

recovering from his injuries, he repaired to Scotland each

at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to place blue at the

year where the serenity of blue was as integral to his mental

center of his palette. In 1954, just home from a few years in

recuperation as it was to his art. Together with the recovery of

Paris, Carton painted Manhattan Gothic with its coruscating chorus

Picasso from the shock of his friend’s death and Matisse from

of deep blues rhapsodically celebrating the city that never sleeps.

high-risk cancer surgery, others rode blue out of pain, including

He was en route to an epic series of large-scale, blue-inflected

Braque and Léger who endured life-threatening injuries in the

works made in the Sixties based on Moby Dick. In a similarly expressive vein, John Schueler’s billowing cloudscape is one of over a hundred paintings keyed to blue, which he linked to jazz, the musical key of B minor (so important to Chopin, Liszt and Brahms as well as Miles Davis), and the protean weather of Scotland where he created the sprawling painting in the show and wrote this airman’s paean to “the wild blue yonder”:

PREVIOUS, left to right: Helen Frankenthaler Herald, 1970 oil on canvas 108 x 81 inches Courtesy of Dr. and Mrs. Todd Cohen Jeffrey Gibson Deep Blue Day, 2014 found vinyl punching bag, recycled wool blanket, artist-repurposed painting, artificial sinew, steel studs Courtesy of the Marc and Livia Straus Family Collection and Ari and Molly Straus, New York

Every day is a grey day here, and I’ve noticed more and more the blues and the purples. But from Morar - out to the sea-the cloudy sky and the water and the islands (Eigg and Rhum loom huge in the distance, menacing, sharply defined in outline, but hazy and indistinct in content) everything was a deep, deep blue - the most penetrating, somber, magnificent, symphonic blue I have ever seen. It was a very simple subject - yet immense 21

Sean Scully Landline Rain, 2018 oil on aluminum 85 x 75 inches Courtesy of the artist OPPOSITE: Norman Carton Manhattan Gothic, 1954 oil on canvas 54 x 35 inches Courtesy of Benedict and Jacob Carton

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PREVIOUS: Jon Schueler o/c 1023 Magda’s Blues, II, 1979 oil on canvas 79 x 120 inches Courtesy of the Jon Schueler Estate LEFT: Françoise Gilot Enfance IV, 1963 oil on canvas 6 1/2 x 9 inches Courtesy of Daphne Alazraki Fine Art, New York OPPOSITE: Wayne Thiebaud Glass and Sweets, n.d. watercolor 9 ¾ x 8 ¾ inches Courtesy of Louise Braver

trenches during World War I. Norman Carton was only nine

AIDS and Sean Scully lost the son he fathered at age 19 when

when he escaped pogrom massacres and became a refugee.

the young man was himself only 19. As Scully has remarked,

Arman served as a medical orderly in Vietnam during France’s

comparing the “mystic power” of the blue sky caught in his

early involvement. Han Qin still has vivid nightmares recalling

sculptural “Cage of Air” with his “Wall of Light” paintings,

nearly drowning as a child in the water city of Hangzhou and

the healing depth of blue is personal: “When I’m making my

Christopher Winter learned from his mother that he was a “blue

paintings I’m always trying to raise the color but the color’s

baby” who barely survived infancy. Therapeutic bouts with

always falling because that’s in me, that darkness is in me and I

punching bags prompted Jeffrey Gibson to create garments for

can’t do anything about it, I can’t fix what happened.” Françoise

them using handcraft techniques that can be “cathartic” (his

Gilot was on a yacht in the Aegean in 1961, recovering from her

word) just as he addressed the issues of “traumatized land”

abusive time with Picasso when she began a series of close to

(the backwoods of Mississippi) and victims of sexual trauma in

fifty works, dominated by blue, on the theme of Theseus and

his films. Bettina WitteVeen dedicated herself to an orphanage

the Minotaur, taking a direct approach to catharsis since that

for children left by the victims of mass killings in Cambodia,

was one of his main mythic materials. The tightly constructed

while Clive Smith’s dedication to the traumatic effects of

labyrinth of Enfance IV, with its side-by-side areas of ultramarine

climate change has led him to this astonishing insight: “I want

and warmer, more violet blues, recalls the scalar progression of

to understand a subject through the empathetic medium of

blues in Klee’s still life as well as the construction by color in the

painting.” Mark Innerst lost his partner after a long struggle with

works of Wayne Thiebaud.

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Bay City Blues: Thiebaud and Diebenkorn

Nobody doesn’t like Thiebaud’s still lifes, which are

from a small plane, into an abstract method for “fighting the

most irresistible when luscious slices of cake or hot cups of

landscape feeling.” Strange as it may seem to those who love

coffee are on the menu. More like Klee than art historians have

his Ocean Park series with its unforgettable blues, he once said:

presumed, Thiebaud pushes his own color theory toward a more

“For years I didn’t have the color blue on my palette because it

free abstraction than a regular Pop artist would indulge (he never

reminded me too much of the spatial qualities in conventional

bought into that categorization). Blue more than any other color

landscapes.” Just as Klee or Matisse would construct a painting

is the key to understanding Thiebaud’s method of achieving what he calls “vibrancy,” most often in combination with a pulsing orange, a juxtaposition which emits the halo effect for which he is celebrated. Illustrating a recent essay by Margareta Lovell on the saturated blue “mountain” series from 1965 to 2019, a photo of Thiebaud’s studio reveals no less than seven tubes of blue paints from six different firms right in the center of the work table (the now defunct Lucien Lefevre Foinet, Gamblin, Winsor & Newton, Old Holland, Williamsburg and M.

based on the vibrancy of the color itself, rather than as a literal reference to sea or sky, Diebenkorn liberated blue. When the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art brilliantly paired him with Matisse in an exhibition in 2017 that was symphonic in its blues, the comparison began with the well-known anecdote of Diebenkorn as a student encountering the Matisse paintings at the home of Sarah Stein—almost exactly the same tale that relates how Motherwell also decided he would become an artist.

A review by the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and biographer

Graham). The three magisterial watercolors in our exhibition, which plunge from the lively blue shadows so characteristic of his work into depths of black (the still surface of the coffee in the cups) are not dependent on the simultaneous contrast between complementary colors but on the potency of blue itself as a vehicle for transforming a simple still-life into a lesson in looking. A squiggling brushstroke along the stem of a wine glass, like the curlicue by which Mark Innerst conjures a flickering figure in the Met lobby or the tracery of Clive Smith’s bare branches, reminds us that we are enjoying a painting

Thiebaud’s friend and fellow Californian Richard

Diebenkorn translated an aerial epiphany, the view of topography 26

Mark Stevens nailed it when it came to the singularity of the blue that floods most of his painting in our show: “Diebenkorn blue is not simply a color…his example should encourage those who still wish to be painters. He added something. A certain blue, for example. A blue never quite seen before. A blue as distinctive as a poet’s voice.” The blue of sky and sea remains inescapable, as so many aqueous works in our exhibition attest. Barbara Prey’s classic wash upon wash of Prussian blue upon which classic Maine dories float in apparent conversation (Time Travelers is the suggestive title) seems a world away from Roy Lichtenstein’s wavy Rowlux (the iridescent film more familiar to us as the shiny wrapping around drums for rock bands), but both reflect the pervasive influence of the sea to which Frankenthaler responded so strongly. For the Kyoto-based ceramic artist Sueharu Fukami, celadon serves as the pacific hue of Seascape, an object that has a quiet, calming presence perched on its wooden base. Then there is the Turnerian tempest. As gestural as Cao Jun’s molten, marbled whorls of color are, I happen to know that behind Symphony is a globe-trotter’s passion for mighty waters, from the surf off New Zealand where he first emigrated to icebergs viewed at both poles, the sublime torrent of Niagara Falls which prompted the work in the first place and Baldwin Bay, where he fishes each summer (for blues, naturally). The title invites another musical comparison, and for this cosmic work with its swirling nebulae of gold dust we would want the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, especially its mighty brass section, rattling the plaster of Carnegie Hall with Gustav Holst’s The Planets. The “blue rider” of China, where his unique abstract expressionism is a sensation in art schools and museums (including one devoted entirely to his own work in Xian), Cao Jun was just honored by the elite Canadian paint manufacturer RockWell, which named its purest blue “Cao Jun Lapis Lazuli,” joining such artists as Maxfield Parrish and Yves Klein in lending his name to a pigment.

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Barbara Ernst Prey Time Travelers, n.d. watercolor and dry brush on paper framed: 39 x 52 inches Courtesy of the artist

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Yves Klein Venus Bleue, (1962/1982) dry pigment in synthetic resin on plaster 27 1/8 x 12 1/2 x 9 7/8 inches Courtesy of the H. Manes Art Foundation

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Beyond Blue: Yves Klein and Arman

Two myths about Yves Klein can be dispelled at

been the au pair of Arman in Nice) with which he created the

once: He is more than just the “blue man” of Modernism and

blue “anthropometries,” so similar not just to the swimmers

his celebrated International Klein Blue (IKB) is not a direct

of Matisse but also to the shadow-like migrants of Han Qin

reference to the sea or sky of the Côte d’Azur. This potent blue

grasping at a new land, were an effort to progress beyond the

was claimed from the most intense core of fire. Those of us who

traditional studio practice of making objects for a gallery. Klein

bent glass tubing over a Bunsen burner in chemistry class will

who had spent more than a year in Japan becoming a black belt

recall that the hottest region of the flame is that little cone of

in judo, would also liken these figures to the ashen silhouettes

blue near the source. Klein returns to the Medieval association

of Hiroshima’s fallen civilians. The blue-coated sponges or

of alchemists of blue with the crucible’s peak heat at over

casts of canonic works such as Michelangelo’s Dying Slave (a

1,000 degrees. The darkened ultramarine, technically Rhodopas

highlight of our True Colors exhibition) and the Venus de Milo

M60A thinned with ethanol and ethyl acetate to preserve

led away from the easel.

luminescence, was concocted by the scientifically advanced artist with Edouard Adam, a Parisian color merchant, and chemists

at Rhône-Poulenc. In 1957 Klein flamboyantly turned the blue

boundaries of medium and genre. This exhibition gathers a

monochrome into a yearlong, international cause célèbre (not

particularly driven group of painters: Klee’s edging toward

just in France but in Germany, Italy and the United States). This

freedom, Matisse’s decoupages as installation, the torqued

epoca blu was the launching point of a fantastical three-part leap into the “void” (his pet term) as daring as the theatrical swan dive he took from the roof of a townhouse on October 19, 1960 apparently into the street below. (Air-brushed from the whimsical photo of the feat, which left him with a sprained ankle, was his devoted crew of believers holding a net below to catch the “man in space.”) Blue was stage one of Klein’s sacred trinity, followed by gold (he trained in 1949 to use gold leaf at the London framer Robert Savage) and pink (rose madder, to be precise).

Klein is the epitome of the artist who pushes the

cropping strategies of Hokusai that altered Post-impressionist composition, Frankenthaler’s staining, the painterly printing of photographers such as WitteVeen, Casebere, Turbeville and Ferrone, Antonio Santin’s sophisticated technology for braiding thick strands of oil, the gold-leaf disk at the center of Michael Brown’s midnight blue web, Gibson’s “repurposing” of all the paintings in his studio that he sliced from their stretcher bars one day and ran three times through a laundromat washer at (nota bene) high heat, Innerst’s glazing, Vecsey’s accumulated radiance, the diluted, “unpainted” oils of Innes and Scully, or Sendor’s

Klein’s transit from blue to gold, like the gradus ad parnassum Klee

polished surfaces. We are surrounded by works that stretch the

spelled out invoking freedom from the materiality of painting,

limits of painting.

was initiated by fire: He turned a blowtorch on a monochrome blue painting and orchestrated fireworks displays in the gallery

Klein took this to an extreme, at a price. He incinerated

courtyards. Other experiments pushed the limits of painting even

works of art as well as the checks he received to pay for what

further. The “living brushes” (including his wife Rotaut, who had

he considered “fragments of the void” into which they, and he, 30

were destined to vanish too soon (he died at 32). Less than a

to arrange, for example, Navy and Air Force blues, or Turkish

year before, he arrived in New York in 1961 for a show of blue

and Delft, along grades of hue, value and chroma. They shift

monochromes at Leo Castelli’s gallery. The mockery with which

incrementally, just as modal jazz redirects tonal arrays, as the

they were greeted rivaled the philistine repudiation of another

percentages of white or black, green or red are added and

French artist decades before, Marcel Duchamp, despite the

subtracted. Kind of Blue culminates in a spontaneous masterstroke

clear prefiguration they offered of monochrome works on the

of chromatic dissonance, “Blue in Green,” which Evans in his

horizon by Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Brice Marden and

liner notes to the album compared to free-flowing Japanese

Ellsworth Kelly, not to mention performance art and the Roden

calligraphy. Later in jazz history, Coltrane’s Interstellar Space and

Crater of James Turrell. Stung by the critical skepticism, Klein

Stellar Regions relate modal jazz to astrophysics, sailing free of the

holed up in the Chelsea Hotel to bang out a 13-page, double-

gravity of traditional rhythm laid down by the drums and bass.

spaced manifesto on a borrowed typewriter which defiantly yet

These are musical versions of Klee’s pear and Klein’s sponge,

plaintively asked, “What can I do? Stop now?”

responses to the cosmic expansion that Einstein’s thought experiments unfolded. The geometry behind quantum physics

As Klee, Picasso and Klein intuited, the de-familiarizing

lies behind Christopher Bucklow’s haunting traces of the sun’s

effect of blue defies the gravity of strict realism. All three would

passage through pinholes in a huge box “camera” of his devising,

have appreciated a musical analogy for the way blue mobilizes

which burn the image into a cyanotype. Langston Hughes caught

creative freedom because they were accomplished musicians.

this transfiguration in “The Weary Blues,” which features the

Kandinsky was a cellist who could have played professionally

lament of a solitary musician: “And far into the night he crooned

with the Moscow Symphony, Klee a violinist and Klein

that tune./The stars went out and so did the moon.” On the

conducted an orchestra playing his “monotone” symphony when

way into the gallery where the musical Arman and Klein are

the anthropometries were performed. As we installed the show,

joined, the Hockney prints based on Stevens’ “Man with the Blue

Steve Mann (most voluble of my volunteers) strode into my

Guitar” channel the same transcendence via a solo “tune beyond

office with a copy of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the 1959 studio

us.” Whether in art, music or poetry, blue uses its distancing

session “made in heaven” which pioneered modal jazz. The first

effect to transport.

cut, “So What,” opens on a three-note bass figure landing on G-sharp, played by Paul Chambers, answered by two deceptively simple but loaded piano chords, played by Bill Evans. Then the bass line unfolds along a major scale to a nine-note version of the opener and the reply is taken up in unison by Davis on the trumpet and on saxophone by John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. Beyond the fortuitous fit with Arman’s “dissected” double bass and saxophone, which back up Klein’s Venus in one elegant gallery, the modal transformation of melodic material using scales (replacing traditional chord progressions) is an apt musical translation of Klee’s step-wise alteration of form through color. For artists and designers, the blue scale is a way 31

OPPOSITE: Arman Untitled, 2004 sliced cello with acrylic paint on canvas - unique 60 x 42 x 4 inches Courtesy of the Arman Marital Trust Corice Arman, Trustee © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

The Blue Planet: Mark Innerst, Antonio Santin, Christopher Winter

Suddenly, with the paintings of Mark Innerst, this link

to the way blue “de-familiarizes” is brought home with views of the Metropolitan Museum’s lobby or the escalators leading from the ticket level of Penn Station to Seventh Avenue, almost boring they are so well-known to Long Islanders. When we hung these exquisitely focused paintings in March, we still had no idea that these real places would soon be empty, the distancing betokened by blue in prescient accord with history. As Innerst wrote in response to a question about what blue means to him: “It’s the color of distance, of things far away. Blue suggests the subterranean, interiors, coolness. It originated so long ago, taking pictures from my black and white TV using color film-they came back from the photo shop a saturated blue, which added to the whole glassy, lens-like look. Lately I’ve been looking and borrowing from old masters, those passages and vignettes of landscape in the background, the blues so distinctive.” Curator

and scholar Richard Milazzo introduced me decades ago to Innerst’s economical and intimate urban paintings and their atmospheric revolution against landscape as genre. As Milazzo has written, “Landscapes always represented an excuse for Mark to break all the rules of the genre, and do fundamentally whatever he wanted to, always somehow distantly reflecting the times we lived in, and doing so without being ideologically overbearing.” That understated assertion of freedom, pulling us toward the idea rather than pushing us (the difference between poetry and propaganda),

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is also a hallmark of the cityscapes and still lifes in which Klee broke generic bounds.

Antonio Santin’s spectacular paintings wow viewers

with crowd-pleasing displays of trompe l’oeil wherever they are shown. But these technical triumphs that play with our sense of

OPPOSITE PAGE: TOP Mark Innerst Platform, 2018 oil on canvas in artist’s handmade frame 10 x 8 inches Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York BOTTOM Mark Innerst Leaving Penn Station, 2018 oil on canvas in artist’s handmade frame 9 x 11 inches Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York

spatial dimensions are more than an illusionist’s trick. They hold messages and mysteries. They follow in the tradition of weaving Eastern and Western motifs at the Alhambra (in Granada, due south of Santín’s Madrid studio), combining cultures seamlessly.

ABOVE: Alex Ferrone On the Shore Date: Image capture: 2012; Printed: 2020 Photograph, dye sublimation on white satin aluminum Float framed, white wood 35x48 inches 36x49x2 inches (framed) Courtesy of Alex Ferrone

The “tree of life” is emblematic of this gathering of so many beliefs (Islamic, Judaic, Christian, Hindu, Assyrian) in one archetype. The crucial symbolism of blue in an oriental rug is tie 34

not only to truth and honesty but also to the idea of a peaceful

they do in Clive Smith’s convex image of a tree in winter, just

afterlife. The wool is dyed in extracts made from the leaves

to steady our perception of the space, like a gyroscope that

of woad (the original, less colorfast source), grown in western

orients us. The recessive nature of blue applies to time as well as

Anatolia) and indigo (a related plant, etymologically “from

space. Deborah Turbeville fantasized on a bygone era of courtly

India” but grown in many regions including Indonesia, Mali and

luxury when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis arranged for her to

Guatemala since the Spanish conquest in 1524).

do a shoot in the long-abandoned chambers of Versailles in 1979. The works are imbued with a dreamlike powder blue caste that rhymes with the cinematic filter in which Andrew Sendor’s characters haunt their surrealist dramas. The models are friends of the Brooklyn-based artist, posed according to a script of his own devising, and the stills are meticulously rendered in oil on Plexiglass, an icy white surface that gleams through the coats of blue. Tucked into their corner installation of blue walls and carpet as prescribed by his stagecraft, they whisk you away into their own puzzling dreamscape of horses, clouds and characters.

That trip, freed from the laws of gravity as well as

genre, dramatically lifts the two figures in an expansive painting

by Christopher Winter. An enormously talented storyteller,

the English artist taps the great figural tradition that gave

What lies beneath the folds of Santín’s painting is also

Surrealism its wings in his Alpine fantasy. He also draws upon the

intriguing. Lovers of literature may relate these paintings to an

experiments in consciousness that Aldous Huxley recorded in his

enigmatic novella by Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet,”

book, The Doors of Perception (1954). Oddly akin to the Swiss artist

which compares a character’s lifelong secret to an obscure detail in a Turkish rug: “The figure in the carpet was traceable or describable only for lovers supremely united.”

This bending and alteration of space leads us to the

architectural fantasies of James Casebere, painterly photographs of architectural models made in a Tribeca studio that sink into an aqueous tide of modulated blues, or Alex Ferrone’s disorienting aerial pictures, taken at the angle of a banked helicopter 500 hundred feet above the supposedly familiar waters off Glen Cove. We grasp the bare boughs of the tree, which bend as 35

LEFT: Clive Smith Heart of Glass, 2018 wood on panel 34-inch diameter Courtesy of Marc Straus, New York OPPOSITE: Andrew Sendor Saturday’s Hallucinations on December 2., 2018 oil on matte white Plexiglass in white powder-coated aluminum frame 46 ¾ x 39 ¾ x 2 inches Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York

Klee’s much smaller still life of a pear, Winter’s panorama shares

Blue has something transcendental and soothing and occupies a huge part

qualities with the intimate prints of Japan. Like the supernatural

of cannot be mixed from anything else but are like fathers to whole families

powers of Kuniyoshi’s Kabuki characters or poor, sodden

of blues). Each parent blue can then be guided to new depths depending on

Hatsuhana, the adolescent figures soar over the lake, while the

whether you add them together or mix small amounts of green, black, white

mountains behind have the peaceable harmony on the tonic

or purple to them. The nuances are infinite. All my work is an exploration

blue of Hiroshige’s landscape, Shichirigahama in Sagami Province.

of our known reality. In my painting the central characters are floating in

Winter’s studio teems with separate pots of several acrylic blues,

space above a lake in Switzerland. Whether it is our perception or their

the core of his palette, as for Thiebaud and Schueler, that offers

perception that has been altered it is not clear. The force of gravity has been

the tones on his modal keyboard. The artist sounds like John

lost and they float through a blue sublime landscape. The laws that normally

Coltrane on weightlessness toward the end of this meditation:

govern us and bind us to the earth are relaxed and replaced by a feeling of liberation.

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OPPOSITE: James Casebere Blue House on Water #2, 2018 Edition 3/5 with 2 APs framed archival pigment print mounted to Dibond paper 60 ½ x 46 ¾ inches Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York, © the artist THIS PAGE: TOP: Deborah Turbeville Unseen Versailles: Aurelia Weingarten, 1980 archival pigment print on metal image: 9 x 12.75 inches print: 12 x 16 inches Courtesy of Staley-Wise Gallery, New York BOTTOM: Deborah Turbeville Unseen Versailles: Aurelia Weingarten, 1980 C-Print image: 9 x 13 in. print: 11 x14 in.

Courtesy of Staley-Wise Gallery, New York

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Han Qin: An Artist of the Floating World

The weightless white silhouettes of Han Qin’s scrolls

Visiting Hangzhou last year, she enlarged the

originate with her deeply personal narrative and expand to

scope of the project to include the stories of twenty

address the global issue of immigration. They descend in a

migrant workers inside China who leave their hometowns

hybrid art-historical line from the arched backs and outstretched

for distant opportunities. Their narratives are essential to

arms of the swimmers in Matisse’s cutouts (albeit reversed,

a full understanding of the project. Millions of Chinese are

with white figures on a blue ground) and the floating fairy

immigrants within the nation’s borders, displaced from the

characters (xian nu) of the thousand-year-old Dunhuang cave

familiar culture of their ancestral homelands. Positioned at

paintings in Gansu, China. The starting point is her journey

the same moment along two 36-foot-long scrolls, these artist-

from the “water city” of Hangzhou, where she attended a

wanderers hold tight to precious objects they took with them

prestigious art academy, to Long Island. During most of her first year in America, with an infant son, she felt quite lost until one morning she watched a bird nesting under the eaves of a neighbor’s house. Recalling her fellow passengers on the flight over from China, who scattered upon arrival at JFK to seek new homes, she saw their dispersion as part of an evolutionary pattern. The suite of cyanotype scrolls titled Ethereal Evolution was made with the collaboration of friends who emigrated.

They assumed dance-inspired poses on huge sheets of rice paper (for “Chinese flavor”) washed with a solution to enhance the mysterious transitions from cyan to blue-purple as the rays of the sun project their shadows into it. The artist, who

on their journeys, such as a piece of jewelry or other talisman, articles of faith no less touching than the ornaments on Jeffrey Gibson’s garments. The colorful characters whose silhouettes remain anonymous candidly mix uncertainty with aspiration in quick, understated diary sketches that evade cliché because they are so personal. One, nicknamed “Big Dog,” is a native of Quzhou who arrived temporarily in Hangzhou to do graffiti after stops Liuzhou, Jinhua and Myanmar: “Settling down in Hangzhou, with a feeling of deep-water phobia along a riverbed.

Stopping at a place makes me nervous, always wanting to eat the dust outside. This is like a shoal of migrating fish chasing a warm current.” The artist’s own entry: “Travel for a dream.

danced professionally, has also choreographed a ballet based on these works to be presented during the exhibition, just as Klein included a ballet with his “anthropometries”—both artists imprint bodies in motion on a one-to-one scale. The range of movement in Han Qin’s process is as simple as a figure in fetal position rolling slowly across the length of a sheet to the gyrations of an arabesque.

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PREVIOUS: Christpher Winter Huxley’s Guide to Switzerland, 2011 acrylic on canvas 35.5 x 27.5 inches Courtesy of Edelman Arts, New York OPPOSITE: Han Qin Lovers-1, 2018 cyanotype on paper 10 x 6 ½ inches Courtesy of the artist

A split second of retrospection and homesickness. Will I be forever a stranger?”

art) captures the two-way traffic of birth and death: That second-floor arch in a London house, looking up and down the well of the staircase, and commanding the main thoroughfare by which the

The artist directed us as we installed the scrolls, back-

to-back, in the center of the spiral staircase of the century-old Frick mansion, a spectacular ode to the movement of both time and space, expanding on the temporal aspect of a scroll that is slowly unfurled. When they were shown in Hangzhou, they flowed from the ceiling to the floor, like ceremonial banners side-by-side (in an historic Ming dynasty courtyard that had been moved from Anhui province). The artist comments on its relationship with architecture:

inhabitants are passing; by which cook lurks down before daylight to scour her pots and pans in the kitchen; by which young master stealthily ascends, having left his boots in the hall, and let himself in after dawn from a jolly night at the Club; down which miss comes rustling in fresh ribbons and spreading muslins, brilliant and beautiful, and prepared for conquest and the ball; or master Tommy slides, preferring the bannisters for a mode of conveyance, and disdaining danger and the stair; down which the mother is fondly carried smiling in her strong husband’s arms, as he steps steadily step by step, and followed by the monthly nurse, on the day when the medical man

People on the move and buildings on the move are connected, just as the

has pronounced that the charming patient may go down stairs; up which John

contemporary and the historical are. The process of cyanotype gives the

lurks to bed, yawning with a sputtering tallow candle, and to gather up before

work a calm, deep, mysterious and unique strong cyanogen blue. Due to

sunrise the boots which are awaiting him in the passages;—that stair, up or

the different angles and unpredictability of the sunlight, and the blurring

down which babies are carried, old people are helped, guests are marshalled to

effect of the pre-painted solution, the characters and their objects alternate

the ball, the parson walks to the christening, the doctor to the sick room, and

between reality and illusion, leaving varied traces on the paper surface,

the undertaker’s men to the upper floor—what a memento of Life, Death,

suggesting a complex and multi-level world. The time-consuming exposure

and Vanity it is…Your son will new furnish the house, or perhaps let it,

and participation of many people make the work realize the value of the

and go into a more modern quarter; your name will be among the “Members

coexistence of technology and craft, an inter-reality that unites the social

Deceased,” in the lists of your clubs next year. However much you may be

phenomenon and its artistic realization.

mourned, your widow will like to have her weeds neatly made—the cook will send or come up to ask about dinner—the survivors will soon bear to look

The staircase of an ancestral mansion, as William

Makepeace Thackeray eloquently observed in his classic Vanity

at your picture over the mantel-piece, which will presently be deposed from the place of honour, to make way for the portrait of the son who reigns.

Fair, is a multi-generational metaphor of ascents and descents.

Our spectacular grand staircase, which we unconsciously travel step-by-step all day and is a pause in the art as visitors move from the first to the second floors, has become a momentous centerpiece for a celebration of blue. Han Qin’s white phantoms reached upward or downward in gestures that recall not just Matisse and Klein but Rodin’s famous Gates, just as Thackeray’s time-lapse opener of Chapter 61 (aptly concluding in a work of 43

OPPOSITE: Han Qin Ethereal Evolving 4, 2018 cyanotype on paper 82 x 47 inches Courtesy of the artist

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RIGHT: Han Qin Ethereal Evolving 5, 2018 cyanotype on paper 82 x 47 inches Courtesy of the artist FAR RIGHT: Han Qin Ethereal Evolving 2, 2018 cyanotype on paper 82 x 47 inches Courtesy of the artist

46

servers in the depths of a Google storage facility and in the present case, Lake Inle in Myanmar and a pagoda in Yangon at

Blue in Spirit: Bettina WitteVeen and Makoto Ofune

dawn and at sunset. The project, confronting the issue of posttraumatic stress through the healing potential of art, has left indelible impressions wherever it has brought its profoundly lyrical message about history: Brooklyn Navy Yard’s abandoned hospital, a subterranean former munitions factory in Berlin’s

Prenzlauer district, an abandoned Soviet army base in East Germany and inside the cobalt-blue glass sanctuary of the

How far can blue go? Transcending borders of space

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. Her travels permit

and time, it is the never-ending story of color in culture. Bettina

WitteVeen to catch blue on the fly, gathering glimpses of its

WitteVeen is a Mannheim-born artist educated at Wellesley

sacred quality. The blue of this Buddha who presides over our

College who is a devout Buddhist. Her epic humanitarian project

gallery was never really there, though. The print is actually the

Heart of Darkness has led her to hunt for haunting blues in such

“color reversal” of the original gold image, as is the serene blue

“extraterritorial” sites as a meadow of blue flowers on the site

lake at dawn. She contrasts the symbolic solar gold of the rational,

of a former Russian gulag, a Native American reservation, the

“Day Mind” with the blue “Night Mind,” lunar and female:

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In emphasizing dualism by the use of the colors this series intends

wood using natural animal gelatin glue (nikawa). Every gradation

to guide the viewer to the realization that the perceived dualistic nature of

of fading blue that Hokusai unspooled in his ombre is somehow

our world is illusory. The Buddhist belief that the structure of the universe

present in an effect that is so de-materialized that it appears to

is inherently unstable and unpredictable coincides with quantum physics and

expand before your eyes. After the rock-hard blues of lapis and

finds its expression in the highly individualistic combinable nature of these

sapphire, the fragile blues of beads and glass and porcelain, the

photographs. Were we to understand that all phenomena are ultimately empty

powdery blues of pastel and Klein’s Venus, the soft blues of

and non-existent (Pragaparamita) much suffering could be avoided and we

water and ink, this is the very blue of air and light alone.

would be liberated from the curse of Samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth.

In abstraction, blue drifts free of temporality or the boundaries

drawn by human consciousness. Susan Vecsey’s puff of cobalt hovers over the plane of the canvas as though suspended, while the tide of dark blue surges from the edges of the sprawling canvas of Landon Metz. When Makoto Ofune begins a new work, he strictly follows traditional nihon-ga methods. He grinds the mineral pigments (iwa enogu, in this case azurite) that are applied, particle by particle, to hemp fiber mounted on solid

As Stevens wrote, The thinking of god is smoky dew.

The tune is space. The blue guitar Becomes the place of things as they are, A composing of senses of the guitar.

-Charles A. Riley II, PhD 48

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PREVIOUS: Bettina WitteVeen Buddha Mind (Triptych), 2019 C-print with gallery Plexiglass face-mount and wood base 22 x 22 inches (each panel) Courtesy of the artist ABOVE: Makoto Ofune Eternal #6, 2009 powdered and mineral pigments on hemp paper mounted on board 35 1/2 x 104 3/8 inches Courtesy of Yoshii Gallery, New York

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Exhibition Checklist Arman Untitled, 2003 sliced saxophone with acrylic paint on canvas – unique 34 x 44 x 5 inches Courtesy of the Arman Marital Trust Corice Arman, Trustee

James Casebere Blue House on Water #2, 2018 Edition 3/5 with 2 APs framed archival pigment print mounted to Dibond paper 60 ½ x 46 ¾ inches Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York, © the artist

Arman Untitled, 2004 Cast 1/8 + 4 APs polychromed bronze cast of sliced bass fiddle parts assembled together 71.3 x 31.5 x 10.6 inches Courtesy of the Arman Marital Trust Corice Arman, Trustee

Marc Chagall Double Self Portrait II, 1974 color lithograph 12 ¾ x 10 ¾ inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA

Arman Untitled, 2004 sliced cello with acrylic paint on canvas–unique 60 x 42 x 4 inches Courtesy of the Arman Marital Trust Corice Arman, Trustee Norman Bluhm Untitled, 1958 watercolor on paper 40 x 27 inches Courtesy of The Clark Family Collection Georges Braque Oiseau Bleu, 1952 color lithograph, published in a special issue of Verve produced under the artist’s supervision 13 7/8 x 10 1/4 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA Christopher Bucklow Towards the Field of the Cloth of Gold II, 3.11pm, 27th October, 2012 unique Cibachrome print 19 1⁄4 x 15 inches Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York Cao Jun Symphony, 2019 Mixed media on canvas 67 x 128 inches Courtesy of the artist Norman Carton Manhattan Gothic, 1954 oil on canvas 54 x 35 inches Courtesy of Benedict and Jacob Carton James Casebere Monticello #3, 2001 digital chromogenic print mounted to Plexiglass 24 x 30 inches Courtesy of the H. Manes Art Foundation

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Marc Chagall La Baie des Anges (The Bay of Angels), 1962 Edition: 5,000 lithograph on thin Wove Paper, signed and dated in ink lower right image size: 34 x 23 inches Courtest of RoGallery, Long Island City, NY Richard Diebenkorn Blue, 1984 color woodcut edition: 182/200 Printed by Tadashi Toda at Shiundo Print Shop, Kyoto Carved by Reizo Monjyo, Kyoto 40 x 25 inches on 42 ¼ x 27 inches sheet Courtesy of Dr. and Mrs. Todd Cohen Cohen Eisen Oiran Wearing Full Moon and Tiger Kimono, c. 1838 Series: Pictures of Modern Beautiful Women color woodblock print 9.5 x 14.25 inches Publisher: Kawanaga Seals: Kiwame (censor seal) Signature: Keisai Eisen ga Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, New York City Alex Ferrone On the Shore, [image capture: 2012; printed: 2020] photograph, dye sublimation on white satin aluminum 35 x 48 inches Courtesy of Alex Ferrone Alex Ferrone All Blues, [image capture: 2012; printed: 2020] photograph, dye sublimation on white satin aluminum 32 x 48 inches Courtesy of Alex Ferrone Alex Ferrone Division Flow II, [image capture: 2013; printed: 2020] photograph, dye sublimation on white satin aluminum 42 x 42 inches Courtesy of Alex Ferrone

Helen Frankenthaler Herald, 1970 oil on canvas 108 x 81 inches Courtesy of Dr. and Mrs. Todd Cohen

Han Qin Ethereal Evolving 5, 2018 cyanotype on paper 82 x 47 inches Courtesy of the Artist

Fukami Sueharu Seascape I, n.d. celadon glazed porcelain with wood pedestal with signed wood box 3.5 x 4.8 x 5.3 inches Courtesy of Dai Ichi Arts, Ltd.

Han Qin Ethereal Evolving 7, 2018 cyanotype on paper 82 x 47 inches Courtesy of the Artist

Fukami Sueharu Seascape II, n.d.

3.6 x 4.6 x 48 inches celadon glazed porcelain with wood pedestal and signed wood box Courtesy of Dai Ichi Arts, Ltd. Jeffrey Gibson Deep Blue Day, 2014 found vinyl punching bag, recycled wool blanket, artist-repurposed painting, artificial sinew, steel studs Courtesy of the Marc and Livia Straus Family Collection and Ari and Molly Straus, New York

Han Qin The Direction of Migration (Diptych), 2019 cyanotype on paper 3307 x 94.5 inches Courtesy of the Artist Han Qin Lovers-1, 2018 cyanotype on paper 10 x 6 1/2 inches Courtesy of the artist

Françoise Gilot Celebration, 2008 oil on canvas 28 x 22 inches Courtesy of Daphne Alazraki Gallery, New York

Hasui Kawase Mountain Temple at Sendai, Summer 1919 Series: Souvenirs of Travel I color woodblock print 10.25 x 15.25 inches Publisher: Watanabe Shozaburo Seals: Watanabe (6mm circular seal) Signature: Hasui, with red circular seal Sui Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, New York City

Abraham Govaerts A Moonlit Landscape, n.d. oil on panel 6 3⁄4 x 8 7/8 inches Courtesy of Daphne Alazraki Gallery, New York

Al Held Untitled, 1959 acrylic on paper 23 ½ x 17 ¾ inches Courtesy of The Clark Family Collection, New York

Han Qin Ethereal Evolving 1, 2018 cyanotype on paper 82 x 47 inches Courtesy of the Artist

Hiroshige Fireworks at Ryogoku, 1858 Series: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo color woodblock print 9.75 x 14.25 inches Publisher: Uoya Eikichi Seals: Publisher and year seals Signature: Hiroshige ga Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, New York City

Han Qin Ethereal Evolving 2, 2018 cyanotype on paper 82 x 47 inches Courtesy of the Artist Han Qin Ethereal Evolving 3, 2018 cyanotype on paper 82 x 47 inches Courtesy of the Artist Han Qin Ethereal Evolving 4, 2018 cyanotype on paper 82 x 47 inches Courtesy of the Artist

David Hockney The Buzzing of the Blue Guitar Series: The Blue Guitar, 1976/1977 color lithograph plate: 16 3/4 x 13 9/16 inches ; sheet: 20 11/16 x 18 1/8 inches Courtesy of Bart Everly David Hockney I Say They Are Series: The Blue Guitar, 1976/1977 color lithograph plate: 16 3/4 x 13 9/16 inches; sheet: 20 11/16 x 18 1/8 inches Courtesy ofJudith Mara Cofield, Esq.

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Hokusai Shichirigahama in Sagami Province, c. 1830-1834 Series: Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji color woodblock print 14.5 x 9.5 inches Publisher: Eijudo (Nishimuraya Yohachi) Seals: Kiwame (censer seal) Signature: Saki no Hokusai iitsu hitsu Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, New York City Mark Innerst Met Museum Interior, 2018 oil on canvas in artist’s handmade frame 37 x 37 inches Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York Mark Innerst Leaving Penn Station, 2018 oil on panel in artist’s handmade frame 9 x 11 inches Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York Mark Innerst Platform, 2018 oil on panel in artist’s handmade frame 10 x 8 inches Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York Callum Innes Exposed Painting Blue Violet, 2018 oil on linen 70 7/8 x 68 7/8 inches Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York, © the artist Kato Tsubusa Porcelain Sculpture “Kyogoku-Moon” No.10, n.d. porcelain 5 x 15 inches Courtesy of Dai Ichi Arts, Ltd. Kato Tsubusa Porcelain Sculpture “Next-Moon” No.11, n.d. porcelain 4.3 x 14 inches Courtest of Dai Ichi Arts, Ltd. Paul Klee Beulen Birne (Bulgy Pear), 1934 gouache on paper 8 ¼ x 8 ½ inches Courtesy of Moeller Fine Art – New York Yves Klein Venus Bleue, conceived in 1962; executed in 1982 dry blue pigment in synthetic resin on plaster 27 1/8 x 12 1⁄2 x 9 7/8 inches Courtesy of the H. Manes Art Foundation Kuniyoshi Hatsuhana, Wife of Iinuma Katsugoro Doing Penance under the Waterfall, c.1842 Series: Stories of Wise and Virtuous Women color woodblock print 9.75 x 14.25 inches Publisher: Ibaya Sensaburo Seals: Signature: Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi ga Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, New York City

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Kuniyoshi Favorite Customs of the Present Day, c.1832 color woodblock print triptych 30.75 x 15 inches Publisher: Izutsuya Shokichi Seals: Kiwame (censer seal) Signature: Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi ga Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, New York City Kuniyoshi Kabuki Actor Nakamura Shikan as Higuchi Jiro, c. 1832 color woodblock print 9.75 x 14.25 inches Publisher: Yamaguchiya Tobei Seals: Kiwame (censor seal) Signature: Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi ga Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, New York City Kuniyoshi Kabuki Actor Ichikawa Ebizo as Higuchi Jiro, c. 1832 color woodblock print 9.5 x 13.75 inches Publisher: Yamaguchiya Tobei Seals: Kiwame (censor’s seal) Signature: Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi ga Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, New York City Fernand Léger Peinture Murale, 1924 color pochoir after original gouache 10 7/8 x 8 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA Roy Lichtenstein Moonscape, 1965 Rowlux screenprint on plastic board 19 15/16 x 23 5/16 inches Courtesy of the H. Manes Art Foundation Roy Lichtenstein Study for Taittinger Champagne Bottles, c. 1986 Painted and printed paper on board Image: 10 x 25 inches Board: 16 ¼ x 31 inches Courtesy of the H. Manes Art Foundation Henri Matisse Femme bleue assise III (Seated Blue Nude III), 1952 color lithograph after paper cut-out and gouache Published in the deluxe art review Verve and dedicated to Matisse’s last works. Produced under the artist’s supervision and published after his death.

14 x 10 1/8 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA Henri Matisse Seated Blue Nude, 1952 color lithograph after paper cut-out and gouache Published in the deluxe art review Verve and dedicated to Matisse’s last works. Produced under the artist’s supervision and published after his death.

14 x 10 1/8 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA

Henri Matisse Femme bleue avec cruche (Blue Nude with Amphora), 1952 color lithograph after paper cut-out and gouache Published in the deluxe art review Verve and dedicated to Matisse’s last works. Produced under the artist’s supervision and published after his death.

14 x 10 1/8 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA Henri Matisse Femme bleue qui saute des joie (Woman Leaping), 1952 color lithograph after paper cut-out and gouache Published in the deluxe art review Verve and dedicated to Matisse’s last works. Produced under the artist’s supervision and published after his death.

14 x 10 1/8 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA Henri Matisse The Dance, 1938 color lithograph. Published in Verve.

Produced and published under the artist’s supervision.

18 x 12 7/8 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA Landon Metz Untitled, 2018 dye and canvas 76 x 95 inches Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York © the artist

Barbara Ernst Prey Time Travelers, n.d. watercolor and dry brush on paper framed: 39 x 52 inches Courtesy of the artist.

Odilon Redon Caïn et Abel, nd pastel on Bistre paper 31.5 x 23.6 inches Courtesy of Helly Nahmad Gallery, New York Antonio Santin Volver, 2013 oil on canvas 78.7 x 114.2 inches Courtesy of the Marc and Livia Straus Family Collection and Marc Straus, New York Antonio Santin El Arbol de la Vidilla, 2020 oil on canvas 84.6 x 59 inches Courtesy of Marc Straus, New York Antonio Santin Toast to Ashes, 2020 oil on canvas 84.6 x 59 inches Courtesy of Marc Straus, New York

Joan Miró Archipel Sauvage, 1963 color etching and aquatint on paper Edition: 35, plus unkown H.C. 23 1/8 x 35 3/4 inches Courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Upton, MA

Jon Schueler o/c 1023 Magda’s Blues, II, 1979 oil on canvas 79 x 120 inches Courtesy of the Jon Schueler Estate

Miyanaga Tozan III On the Way (Round), n.d.

18.8 x 6.7 x 17.2 inches cobalt glazed Porcelain Courtesy of Dai Ichi Arts, Ltd.

Sean Scully Landline Rain, 2018 oil on aluminum 85 x 75 inches Courtesy of the artist

Makoto Ofune Eternal #6, 2009 powdered and mineral pigments on hemp paper mounted on board 35 1/2 x 104 3/8 inches Courtesy of Yoshii Gallery, New York

Andrew Sendor Saturday’s Clouds, 2018 oil on matte white Plexiglass with stained mahogany shelf 13 x 17 inches Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York

Pablo Picasso Buste de Femme [original: 1902; publication: 1979-1982] lithograph on Arches paper Edition: 500 + 34 APs image size: 20 x 16.5 inches paper size: 29 x 22 inches Courtesy of RoGallery, Long Island City, New York

Andrew Sendor Saturday’s Hallucinations on December 2., 2018 oil on matte white Plexiglass in white powder-coated aluminum frame 46 ¾ x 39 ¾ x 2 inches Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York

Pablo Picasso Femme Assise [original: 1919; publication: 1979-1982] lithograph on Arches paper Edition: 500 + 34 APs image size: 21 x 17 inches paper size: 29 x 22 inches Courtesy of RoGallery, Long Island City, New York

Andrew Sendor Walitha with a Found Arm at Death Butter Lake on Wednesday, November 16th, 2017 oil on matte white Plexiglass in white powder-coated aluminum frame 32 ¼ x 24 ¼ x 1 ½ inches Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York Clive Smith Heart of Glass, 2018 oil on wood panel 34 inch diameter Courtesy of Marc Straus, New York

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Wayne Thiebaud Cakes, n.d. watercolor 14 x 17 inches Courtesy of Louise Braver Wayne Thiebaud Glass and Sweets, n.d. watercolor 9 ¾ x 8 ¾ inches Courtesy of Louise Braver Wayne Thiebaud Coffee Cups, n.d. watercolor 8 ½ x 11 inches Courtesy of Louise Braver Deborah Turbeville Unseen Versailles: Aurelia Weingarten, 1980 C-Print image size: 9 x 13 inches; sheet size: 11 x14 inches Courtesy of Staley-Wise Gallery, New York Deborah Turbeville Unseen Versailles: Aurelia Weingarten, 1980 archival pigment print on metal image size: 9 x 12.75 inches; sheet size: 12 x 16 inches Courtesy of Staley-Wise Gallery, New York Susan Vecsey Cobalt, 2013 oil on paper 26 x 35 inches Courtesy of the artist, Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, and Quogue Gallery Christopher Winter Huxley’s Guide to Switzerland, 2011 acrylic on canvas 35.5 x 27.5 inches Courtesy of Edelman Arts, New York Bettina WitteVeen Buddha Mind (Triptych), 2019 C-print with gallery Plexiglass face-mount and wood brace 22 x 22 inches Courtesy of the artist Yonehara Shinji Glass Vase “hikarinoki41”,n.d.

13 x 5.9 inches glass Courtesy of Dai Ichi Arts, Ltd. Yoshiharu Large Elephant from a Foreign Country, 1863 color woodblock print triptych 30 x 14.25 inches Publisher: Yamaguchiya Tobei Seals: Aratame combined with year seal Signature: Ichibaisai Yoshiharu ga Courtesy of Ronin Gallery, New York City

Tree of Life zellige traditional mosaic zellige mounted on two panels approximately 48 x 24 inches Courtesy of Mosaic House, New York Tree of Life zellige traditional mosaic zellige mounted on two panels approximately 48 x 24 inches Courtesy of Mosaic House, New York Ewer and Tray, c. 1875 Hermann Bohm Lapis Lazuli, silver-gilt, champlevé enamel, semi-precious stones Ewer: 7.68 inches high Tray: 8.66 x 12.01 inches Courtesy of European Decorative Arts, Co., Greenvale, New York Pair of Vases/Candlestick Holders Russian or French Circa 1800 Gilt-Bronze, Lapis Lazuli Courtesy of European Decorative Arts Company, Greenvale, New York Cup and Saucer KPM Porcelain | Berlin, Germany Circa 1810-15 Decorated to simulate Lapis Lazuli and Micromosaic Courtesy of European Decorative Arts Company, Greenvale, New York Pair of Three-Light Candelabra Probable Austro-Hungarian Circa 1880 Gilt-Metal, Lapis Lazuli, Semi-Precious Stones Courtesy of European Decorative Arts Company, Greenvale, New York Pair of Cassolettes Continental Circa 1780-1800 Gilt-Bronze, Earthenware Courtesy of European Decorative Arts Company, Greenvale, New York Vase Elkington & Company Circa 1876, One of Pair from Centennial Exposition of 1876, Philadelphia Cloisonné Enamel Courtesy of European Decorative Arts Company, Greenvale, New York Porcelain Cabinet Plate, c. 1860, continental decorated with portraits of classical figures from antiquity “en camaieu” Courtesy of European Decorative Arts Company, Greenvale, New York UN Helmet Courtesy of the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, United Nations UN Flag Courtesy of the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, United Nations Verve No. 35/36, 1958 complete volume 14 2/5 x 10 4/5 inches Courtesy of Yoshii Gallery, New York Verve first edition, 1937 Courtesy of Yoshii Gallery, New York

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TOP LEFT Fukami Sueharu Seascape I, n.d. celadon glazed porcelain with wood pedestal and signed wood box 3.5 x 4.8 x 5.3 inches Courtesy of Dai Ichi Arts, Ltd.

TOP RIGHT: Fukami Sueharu Seascape II, n.d. celadon glazed porcelain with wood pedestal and signed wood box 3.6 x 4.6 x 48 inches Courtesy of Dai Ichi Arts, Ltd.

MIDDLE: LEFT: Kato Tsubusa Porcelain Sculpture “Kyogoku-Moon” No.10, n.d. porcelain 5 x 15 inches Courtesy of Dai Ichi Arts, Ltd.

BOTTOM RIGHT: Kato Tsubusa Porcelain Sculpture “Next-Moon” No.11, n.d. porcelain 4.3 x 14 inches Courtesy of Dai Ichi Arts, Ltd.

BOTTOM LEFT: Miyanaga Tozan III On the Way (Round), n.d.

18.8 x 6.7 x 17.2 inches cobalt glazed Porcelain Courtesy of Dai Ichi Arts, Ltd.

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Blue: An Anthology But the hue of the paper, and that of the sky, are just as

It is a color that moves easily from reality to dream, from

fixed as temperatures are; and the sky is actually a brighter

the present to the past, from the color of the daytime into

thing than white paper, by a certain number of degrees

the blue amorphous tones of deepest night and distance.

of light, scientifically determinable. In the same way,

Snow on mountains, rendered by distance as blue, seems

every other color, or force of color, is a fixed thing, not

connected in harmony with the undersides of clouds.

dependent on sensation, but numerically representable with

Classical painting used no blue. According to Oswald

as much exactitude as a degree of heat by a thermometer.

Spengler, this was because blue—and green—were to

And of these hues, that of open sky is one not producible

the Greeks vaporous, “essentially atmospheric,” and “not

by human art. The sky is not blue color merely,—it is blue

substantial,” a perspective color, ethereal as the color of

fire, and cannot be painted. Next, observe, this blue fire has

the heavens, the sea, the shadow of the Southern moon,

in it white fire; that is, it has white clouds, as much brighter

the unactual. Is it for its moderating tone that blue in

than itself as it is brighter than the white paper. So, then,

aviation is therefore advisory (with yellow caution and red

above this azure light, we have another equally exalted step

warning)?

of white light.

- Alexander Theroux, The Primary Colors (1994)

-John Ruskin, “Turnerian Light,” Modern Painters, IV (1856)

The secret of blue is well kept. Blue comes from far away.

After walking across the garden of the Arena in the glare

On its way, it hardens and changes into a mountain. The

of the sun, I entered the Giotto chapel, the entire ceiling

cicada works at it. The birds assist. In reality, one doesn’t

of which and the background of the frescoes are so blue

know. One speaks of Prussian blue. In Naples, the virgin

that it seems as thought the radiant daylight has crossed the

stays in the cracks of walls when the sky recedes. But it’s

threshold with the human visitor in order to give its pure

all a mystery. The mystery of sapphire, mystery of Sainte

sky a momentary breather in the coolness and the shade, a

Vierge, mystery of the siphon, mystery of the sailor’s

sky merely of a slightly deeper blue now that it is rid of the

collar, mystery of the blue rays that blind and your blue eye

glitter of the sunlight, as in those brief moments of respite

which goes through my heart.

when, though no cloud is to be seen, the sun has turned its

– Jean Cocteau

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gaze elsewhere and the azure, softer still, grows deeper.

- Marcel Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past, VI: The Fugitive

LEFT: Norman Bluhm Untitled, 1958 watercolor on paper 40 x 27 inches Courtesy of The Clark Family Collection MIDDLE: Norman Carton Manhattan Gothic, 1954 oil on canvas 54 x 35 inches Courtesy of Benedict and Jacob Carton

RIGHT: Richard Diebenkorn Blue, 1984 color woodcut edition: 182/200 Printed by Tadashi Toda at Shiundo Print Shop, Kyoto Carved by Reizo Monjyo, Kyoto 40 x 25 inches on 42 ¼ x 27 inches sheet Courtesy of Dr. and Mrs. Todd Cohen

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“BLUE pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and

cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like

stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by

that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call

longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected

for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the

by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they

death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the

call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian

flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a

cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue

swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds

they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and

and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness

the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may

of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently

wear; afflictions of the spirit—dumps, mopes, Mondays—

the color of everything that’s empty: blue bottles, bank

all that’s dismal—low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians,

accounts, and compliments, for instance, or, when the sky’s

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turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same),

Installation of artwork by Antonio Santin (left to right):

and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts

Antonio Santin Toast to Ashes, 2020 oil on canvas 84.6 x 59 inches Courtesy of Marc Straus, New York

and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese . . . the pedantic, indecent and censorious . . . watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it’s stood for fidelity.�

- William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976)

Antonio Santin El Arbol de la Vidilla, 2020 oil on canvas 84.6 x 59 inches Courtesy of Marc Straus, New York Antonio Santin Volver, 2013 oil on canvas 78.7 x 114.2 inches Courtesy of the Marc and Livia Straus Family Collection and Marc Straus, New York

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“What You Need for Painitng”

Once more following the blue grief of the evening Down the hill, to the springtime fishpond—

from a letter by Renoir THE PALETTE: Flake white

As if the shadows of those dead for a long time were hovering above, The shadows of church dignitaries, of noble ladies—

Chrome yellow

Their flowers bloom so soon, the earnest violets

Naples yellow

In the earth at evening, and the clear water washes

Yellow ochre

From the blue spring. The oaks turn green

Raw umber Venetian red French vermilion Madder lake Rose madder Cobalt blue

In such a ghostly way over the forgotten footsteps of the dead The golden clouds over the fishpond.

-Georg Trakl, “In Hellbrunn”

Ultramarine blue Emerald green Ivory Black Raw sienna

The cold remote islands

Viridian green

And the blue estuaries

White lead

Where what breathes, breathes

DON’T FORGET:

The restless wind of the inlets,

Palette knife

And what drinks, drinks

Scraping knife

The incoming tide;

Essence of turpentine

Where shell and weed

BRUSHES?

Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,

Pointed marten-hair brushes

And the clear nights of stars

Flat hog-hair brushes

Swing their lights westward

Indifference to everything except your canvas.

To set behind the land;

The ability to work like a locomotive.

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks

An iron will.

Renews itself forever;

-Raymond Carver (1987)

Where, again on unclouded nights, The water reflects The firmament’s partial setting;—O remember In your narrowing dark hours

OPPOSITE: Han Qin The Direction of Migration (Diptych), 2019 cyanotype on paper 3307 x 94.5 inches Courtesy of the Artist

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That more things move Than blood in the heart.

-Louise Bogan, “Night,” from The Blue Estuaries (1968)

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The winemaker worries over his casks, as the dark juice Inside them broods on its own sleep, its ferment of dreaming

A horse came tearing down the mountain and went mad. From that day on she eats blue food.

Which will burn out to have been a slow waking after all, All that time. This would be true of the red wine or the white; But a look inside these barrels of the azure would show

Summer dyes blue the women's eyes and sleeves, and then whirls merrily in the town square.

Nothing. They would be as if filled with what the sky looks like.

-John Hollander, "Blue Wine," (1979)

The customers on the terrace smoke so many cigarettes that the tinny sky scribbles rings in the ladies' hair.

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night

Sad memories should be thrown out like a handkerchief. If only I could forget the love and regret and the patent leather shoes!

By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway. . . .

He did a lazy sway. . . .

To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.

I was saved from having to jump from the second floor.

The sea rises to the heavens.

-Chika Sagawa, “The Blue Horse,” (1936)

With his ebony hands on each ivory key He made that poor piano moan with melody.

O Blues!

Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.

Sweet Blues!

A tune beyond us as we are, Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar; Ourselves in the tune as if in space, Yet nothing changed, except the place Of things as they are and only the place

Coming from a black man’s soul.

As you play them, on the blue guitar,

O Blues!

Placed, so, beyond the compass of change, Perceived in a final atmosphere;

-Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues” (1925)

For a moment final, in the way The thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew.

OPPOSITE: Arman Untitled, 2004 Cast 1/8 + 4 APs polychromed bronze cast of sliced bass fiddle parts assembled together 71.3 x 31.5 x 10.6 inches Courtesy of the Arman Marital Trust Corice Arman, Trustee © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

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The tune is space. The blue guitar Becomes the place of things as they are, A composing of senses of the guitar.

-Wallace Stevens, from “The Blue Guitar”

64

I. From a sky sand-brushed and blurring, rain.

Plants on the sill heave signs of loneliness.

The lamp glows, a pendulous jewel hung on the bosom of an ageing countess.

I sketch an essay on Rilke as if on the tissues of consciousness itself, the halos of the almost seen rewarding a wondrous, hard-won clarity.

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II. High rocks spiked with pines and the slim white lines of birches. Under the cliffs, from nowhere a feather drifts into your hand (the gull gaping in disbelief from the margins), a rare offering I fail to comprehend until a stretch of sea is seen through the wisps of the bird’s lost quill, breathlessly severed.

III. Careening through streets in a taxicab, between two German women and their perfumes, I try to argue the point about Ravel.

I fear they do not understand his peculiar form of childishness: teacups cracked and shrieking, hats left on trains and taken faster than we can run after them, even if we run for years, into dust.

IV. Hyacinths have filled the apartment with spring, a lulling scent seeping into the wood of old furniture, the old radio, oil paintings gazing into the room with that finite look.

Out the window gulls dive lustfully toward the water, blue with reflections of sky, in love with everything, though we are all alone.

V. Thunder. Is what it is to be alive balancing on the sinews of circumstance.

The sirens lull us to sleep in pelting song.

Awakening, we feel our way through the dark.

We see light again under the door, stumble out among appearances. Their luminous movements are a world on fire, sparked by our own seeing.

Susan Vecsey Cobalt, 2013 oil on paper 26 x 35 inches Courtesy of the artist, Berry Campbell Gallery, NY and Quogue Gallery

Callum Innes Exposed Painting Blue Violet, 2018 oil on linen 70 7/8 x 68 7/8 inches Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York, © the artist

-Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, “Phenomenology in Blue” © 2020 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

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Jeffrey Gibson Deep Blue Day, 2014 found vinyl punching bag, recycled wool blanket, artist-repurposed painting, artificial sinew, steel studs Courtesy of the Marc and Livia Straus Family Collection and Ari and Molly Straus, New York

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Cao Jun Symphony, 2019 Mixed media on canvas 67 x 128 inches Courtesy of the artist

Landon Metz Untitled, 2018 dye and canvas 76 x 95 inches Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York Š the artist

The everlasting Azure’s tranquil irony Depresses, like the flowers indolently fair, The powerless poet who damns his superiority Across a sterile wilderness of aching Despair.

In flight, with eyes shut fast, I feel it scrutinize With all the vehemence of some destructive remorse, My empty soul. Where can I flee? What haggard night Fling over, tatters, fling on his distressing scorn?

Oh fogs, arise! Pour your momentous ashes down In long-drawn rags of dust across the skies unreeling To darkly drench the livid swarm of autumn days, And fabricate of them a great and silent ceiling!

And you, emerge from Lethean pools and gather in While rising through them, freight of mud and pallid reeds, Sweet Boredom, to block up with a never weary hand The great blue holes the birds maliciously have made …

Still more! Unceasing let the dismal chimney-flues Exude their smoke, and let the soot’s nomadic prison Extinguish in the horror of its blackened queues The sun now fading yellow away on the horizon!

–The Sky is dead. –To you I run, Oh matter! Bestow Forgetfulness of Sin and of the cruel Ideal Upon this martyr who comes to share the stable straw On which the happy human herd lies down to sleep.

For there I long, because at last my mind, drained As is a rouge-pot lying on a closet-shelf, No longer has the art of decking tearful plaints, To yawn lugubrious toward a humble death …

But vainly! The Azure triumphs and I hear it sing In bells. Dear Soul, it turns into a voice the more To fright us by its winged victory, and springs Blue Angelus, out of the living metal core.

It travels ancient through the fog, and penetrates Like an unerring blade your native agony; Where flee in my revolt so useless and depraved?

For I am haunted! The Sky! The Sky! The Sky! The Sky!

- Stéphane Mallarmé, “L’Azur” (1864), translated by Hubert Creekmore

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The water’s cool scent is tempting. I take off my clothes and slide deep into the pool. I open my eyes. The blue sky has spread in the depths of the water. I feel as though I am floating among the galaxies. The water’s breath blows away the thousand-year-old dust from my soul. My spirit quivers with pleasure. It is as if invisible hands are giving me ablution in the spring of eternal life. I lie floating on the surface. The sun has climbed halfway down the wall and in the fading light the cypress trees have grown taller. Again, I turn my eyes toward the house. How simple and unassuming, how noble and immaculate. It reminds me of someone close but forgotten, someone at the tip of ancient memories. At the edge of a sweet dream.

I climb out of the pool. I shiver. Dusk in the desert is cool and refreshing. I get dressed. I pick up my shoes and set off barefoot.

I count twelve stairs. Someone had been praying on the veranda and has left behind a prayer stone. I step onto the veranda. It is an empty space with plain, unadorned walls. The windows are framed with modest cut-mirror designs. On either side of the veranda there are two half-open doors that lead into a room that is adjacent to a hidden alcove. Dim, labyrinthine hallways and spiral staircases draw me to themselves.

I am breathless by the time I reach the top floor. From here, I can see the four corners of the world. The sky is only a step away and the desert stretches as far as the horizon. I sit. For a long time.

What point in time is this? Where am I? A sweet slumber hovers behind my eyelids, but it doesn’t reach my brain. The stars have one by one appeared. My gaze floats in space and my thoughts, like runaway ripples on water, have no constant or defined shape.

I cannot feel my arms and legs. My body has lost its physical bounds and boundaries. I feel like I am an extension of the house, of the garden, of the desert, and that my eyes are suspended from the stars. I float in space. Weightless. Empty. How removed I feel from everyone and everything, from the geometric relationship of objects and the logical symmetry of things, from the tyranny of time and the exactitude of numbers, from the massive slate of law and the heavy tome of ethics. How far away I am from the validity of matter and the authenticity of history, from the invariable legitimacy of ideas and the conflict between the haves and have-nots, from the rituals of purification and the ceremonies of shrouding and burial.

-Goli Taraghi, “The Grand Lady of My Soul” (2013)

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He swam more and more, trying to understand the blue…The problem was the sky. Swimming in one direction, he was headed towards a great rounded-green mountain, thick with the bright yellow-green of dense chestnut trees, making a slightly innocent, simple arc against the sky. Whereas the other way, he swam towards crags, towards a bowl of bald crags, with a few pines and lines of dark shale. And against the green hump the blue sky was one blue, and against the bald stone another, even when for a brief few hours it was uniformly blue overhead, that rich blue, that cobalt, deep-washed blue of the South, which fought all the blues of the pool, all the green-tinged, duck-egg-tinged blues of the shifting water. But the sky had also its greenish days, and its powdery-hazed days, and its theatrical louring days, and none of these blues and whites and golds and ultramarines and faded washes harmonised in any way with the pool blues, though they all went through their changes and splendours in the same world, in which he and his shadow swam, in which he and his shadow stood in the sun and struggled to record them.

He muttered to himself. Why bother. Why does this matter so much. What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again. I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera-camp in Colombia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint or air on a bit of board? I could just stop.

He could not.

He tried oil paint and acrylic, watercolour and gouache, large designs and small plain planes and complicated juxtaposed planes. He tried trapping light on thick impasto and tried also glazing his surfaces flat and glossy, like seventeenth-century Dutch or Spanish paintings of silk. One of these almost pleased him, done at night, with the lights under the water and the dark round the stone, on an oval bit of board. But then he thought it was sentimental. He tried veils of watery blues on white in watercolour, he tried Matisse-like patches of blue and petunia – pool blue, sky blue, petunia – he tried Bonnard’s mixtures of pastel and gouache.

His brain hurt, and his eyes stared, and he felt whipped by winds and dried by suns.

He was happy, in one of the ways human beings have found in which to be happy.

-A.S. Byatt, “A Lamia in the Cévennes” (1998)

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For Further Reading Adler, Tracy, Jane Panetta, et al. Jeffrey Gibson: This is the Day (New York: Prestel, 2018).

Anderson, Christina A. Cyanotype: The Blueprint in Contemporary Practice (Contemporary Practices in Alternatice Process Photography)(Waltham: Focal Press, 2019) Di Crescenzo, Casimiro. Matisse and Tériade (New York: Yoshii Gallery, 1997).

Yang, Meili. The Circulation of Elite Longquan Celadon Ceramics from China to Japan: An Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Study (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2018).

Zweite, Armin. The Blue Rider (New York: Prestel, 1989).

Ottman, Klaus. Yves Klein: Works, Writings, Interviews (Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2010).

Gass, William. On Being Blue (Boston: Godine, 1976).

Pastoureau, Michel. Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Gilot, Françoise. Françoise Gilot: Monograph, 1940-2000 (Lausanne: Acatos Publishing, 2001).

Restany, Pierre. Yves Klein: Fire at the Heart of the Void (New York: Journal of Contemporary Art Editions, 1992).

Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014).

St. Clair, Kassia. The Secret Lives of Color (New York: Penguin, 2016).

Hollander, John. Blue Wine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1979).

Stevens, Wallace. The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 1937).

Klee, Paul. On Modern Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1945).

Lukavic, John P. Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer (New York: Prestel, 2018).

Nelson, Maggie. Bluets (Seattle: Wave Books, 2009).

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Theroux, Alexander. The Primary Colors (New York: Henry Holt, 1994).

Wayne Thiebaud: Mountains, 1965-2019 (New York: Acquavella Gallery/ Rizzoli, 2019).

PREVIOUS (left to right): Andrew Sendor Walitha with a Found Arm at Death Butter Lake on Wednesday, November 16th, 2017 oil on matte white Plexiglass in white powder-coated aluminum frame 32 ¼ x 24 ¼ x 1 ½ inches Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York Andrew Sendor Saturday’s Hallucinations on December 2., 2018 oil on matte white Plexiglass in white powder-coated aluminum frame 46 ¾ x 39 ¾ x 2 inches Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York Andrew Sendor Saturday’s Clouds, 2018 oil on matte white Plexiglass with stained mahogany shelf 13 x 17 inches Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York

OPPOSITE: Andrew Sendor Saturday’s Clouds, 2018 oil on matte white Plexiglass with stained mahogany shelf 13 x 17 inches Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York ABOVE: Andrew Sendor Walitha with a Found Arm at Death Butter Lake on Wednesday, November 16th, 2017 oil on matte white Plexiglass in white powder-coated aluminum frame 32 ¼ x 24 ¼ x 1 ½ inches Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York

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Acknowledgments

Nobody understands the vatic powers of art better than the

The global reach of the project was gratifying, highlighted by

artists themselves, many of whom were on board with this project from

the magnificent gesture of the Secretary-General of the United Nations

the start and collaborated with us to create work just for the exhibition.

extending his personal greetings along with a flag and a peacekeeper’s

Antonio Santin arrived from Spain with Dr. Marc Straus to spend a day

helmet, delivered by Zaw Win (a longtime friend of the Museum,

with us taking the measure of the walls for which he created spectacular

whose son Alexander is a volunteer). The loans from Kazuhito Yoshi

paintings, still releasing the welcome fragrance of oil as I write this. The

include editions of Verve that he and his father, Chozo, put on view in

stunning 36-foot-long scroll that cascades down the center of our spiral

collaboration with Maria-Gaetana Matisse and Alice Tériade, as well as

staircase was installed by Han Qin (with the help of Melody “Spoon”

Makoto Ofune’s sublime painting, Eternal #6.

Su, who is on our volunteer roster). Longtime friends Mark Innerst, Christopher Winter and Bettina WitteVeen offered intellectual guidance as well as art. The international art star Sean Scully came to our museum, and within a week had offered us the loan of a major recent work (at the time, his exhibition with Turner was on the walls of the National Gallery in London). I visited Cao Jun’s studio as his masterwork, Symphony, gathered its forces like some cosmic event. Many other artists helped us in so many ways, including Susan Vecsey, Barbara Prey, Alex Ferrone (with my dear friend Richard Abatelli), Andrew Sendor, Clive Smith and Michael Brown. The gracious Madame Corice Arman, friend of Yves Klein, along with Magda Schueler, wife of Jon, and Jake Carton, son of Norman, were living links to powerful antecedents. With the kind support of Cecile Panzieri at Sean Kelly Gallery, Achim Moeller, the marvelous David Libertson and Madison Folks Ronin Gallery, Daphne Alazraki Elyse Luray of Heritage Auctions (again!), Chester and Christy Murray, Bruce and Michele Clark, Asher Edelman, Beatrice Lei Chang, Scott Defrin at European Decorative Arts around the corner from us

The exhibition committee declared blue to be a theme

worthy of the main mansion, and we drew on the support of Dr. Harvey Manes, who sponsored this publication, and Dr. Todd Cohen (once again, lenders), Arthur S. Levine, William Achenbaum Angela Susan Anton, and to Cynthia and Tom Rosicki for a timely dose of the Moody Blues. The elegantly professional installation is the work of Fernanda Bennett, her hardworking associate Jennifer Haller (including this very book, with guidance on the design from Liz Prinz), and building engineer Rey Castillo, who obliged me when I wanted a chandelier fixture to hold a sculpture by Jeffrey Gibson. The education department under Laura Lynch’s leadership offered its usual insightful influence on the curatorial decisions, including Reem Hussein, Katie Aragon, Rebecca Hirschwerk, Noemi Fletcher, and Jean Henning (who edited this text). John Ryan, along with Monica Reischmann, Tara Keblish, Diane Roedel, Deb Breen and our new colleague Julia Sucher, as well as interns Natalia P. Good, Alex Maccaro, and Aram Ebrahimian, were all part of the team effort.

and Shining Sung (who introduced me to Madame Arman and Beatrice Lei Chang), I had connoisseurship and kindness on my side. I will never forget entering the sanctuary of Spaightwood Galleries and meeting Professor Andrew Weiner and his wife Sonja, which took the intellectual conversation about Picasso, Matisse, Miró, Braque and Léger to new heights.

-Charles A. Riley II, PhD

Museum Staff

Board of Trustees

Administration

Angela Susan Anton

Dr. Charles A. Riley II, PhD, Director

President

Diane Roedel, Accountant, Finance & Administration John Ryan, Manager of Museum Services Jules Harris, Weekend Coordinator Roz Eisenberg, Weekend Coordinator

Frank Castagna*†Executive Vice President

Exhibitions

Arthur S. Levine*

Fernanda Bennett, Deputy Director & Chief Registrar

Vice President

Jennifer Haller, Exhibitions Associate Reynaldo Castillo, Building Engineer

William Achenbaum Treasurer

Education Laura Lynch, Director of Education Jean Henning, Senior Museum Educator Noemi Fletcher, Education & Public Program Educator

Wm. Russell G. Byers, Jr. Todd J. Cohen, M.D.

Katherine Aragon, School & Family Program Educator

Mrs. Stephen J. Cuchel

Rebecca Hirschwerk, Manager of School Programs

Coco Han

Reem Hussein, Manager of The Manes Family Art & Education Center

Mrs. Gerard L. Eastman, Jr. Maryam Franzella, Esq.

Development Monica Reischmann, Director of Development Tara Keblish, Manager of Membership, Corporate Affairs & Events Julia Sucher, Development Associate Debrah Breen, Grant Writer

Steven A. Klar Harvey Manes, M.D. Cynthia Senko Rosicki, Esq. Laura Savini Jonathan R. Serko

Facilities and Grounds

Margaret L. Stacey

John Yoniak, Head Groundskeeper Tony Penate, Groundskeeper

Constance Schwartz Director Emerita

Catalogue Design: Jennifer Haller with thanks to Liz Prinz * Past President †Deceased, 2020

ENDPAPERS: assorted blue paints Photo courtesy of Christopher Winter ABOVE: Mark Innerst Met Museum Interior, 2018 oil on canvas in artist’s handmade frame 37 x 37 inches Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York