The exhibition at the Textile Museum, Washington, Blue, begins with jeans — a pair of 19th-century Levi’s found in 1997 in a California barnyard. They show their age. The man who wore them, wore them hard.
They didn’t come with belt loops. He held his pants up with suspenders. There is a hole in a back pocket, probably worn through by the metal tools he carried, and the pocket is riveted, a feature given up (because rivets scratch the furniture) when Levi’s went genteel. This pair is not genteel. Everything about them — especially the colour — says tough, dirty work.
That is still one of blue’s messages. Long before blue denim was youthified and nuanced to a fare-thee-well, blue was the colour of toil, worn by the lower orders.
“Blue was formerly the distinctive colour for the dress of servants, tradesmen, etc.,” says the Oxford English Dictionary; “also of paupers.” In France, blue-collar workers still wear blue cotton coats.
But there is more to blue than that. It is the spaciest of colours. Airy as the sky, extensive as the sea, it sets the mind afloat.
The Blue show is not a blockbuster. Its mood is rather sweet, miniature, old-fashioned. The fragments of old fabrics from India and Egypt, the Japanese kimono, the Mao jacket from China and the works of fabric art displayed in the exhibit don’t begin to exhaust blueness. Its real theme is indigo. But the show’s reflections on blueness are enough to invite your thoughts to riff.
Of fluid definitions
The colour has no edges. Blue’s meaning, like the sea’s, is fluid. Blue reaches around opposites. In Britain, for example, it isn’t just the colour for storekeepers and servants. It is also for the toffs.
The blue-blooded aristocrats who play at antique games at Eton and at Harrow, at Oxford and Cambridge, do so in their blues.
If blue clothing were not cheap, paupers wouldn’t wear it. The colour, one imagines, ought to carry with it notions of impoverishment, but in the Renaissance, blue ranked with gold and silver as the costliest of all.
The blue robes of the Virgin in Jan van Eyck’s The Annunciation at the National Gallery of Art, or the blue cape on her shoulders in Sandro Botticelli’s The Virgin Adoring the Child at the same museum, are not only there to make the viewer think of heaven.
They also evoke cash — the blue pigments the painters used could cost vast amounts. Cheap blues often faded, but the costliest ultramarines did not. Ultramarine means beyond the sea, which is where the colour came from.
Derived from lapis lazuli brought all the way from Badakhshan (in what is now Afghanistan), the best grades of the colour were exceptionally expensive. Andrea del Sarto’s 1515 contract for Madonna of the Harpies was typically specific: The blue paint for the Virgin’s robe must be worth at least five gold florins per ounce.
Blue is down and dirty, too. But blue is also high. Blue stands for fidelity. No wonder brides equip themselves to counter something borrowed, and owned but temporarily, with something else that is blue.
When people scream blue murder they do so very noisily, though the strict laws of the Puritans are also coloured blue.
Blues can be the top — the best wins the blue ribbon, blue chips make you rich — but they can also be the pits. Have you ever had the blues?
Lots of artists loved the colour. Franz Marc, the German painter who helped to found the group known as the Blue Rider, looked upon the colour as “spiritual and serious” (adding that if you mixed it with a touch of red, “then you augment the blue to an unbearable mourning”).
“Blue Period” Picassos stress the colour’s gloominess. The three figures who appear barefoot on the beach in his 1903 The Tragedy at the National Gallery don’t explain their sorrow, but the viewer has no doubt that all three have the blues.
No 20th-century painter dug more deeply into blue than the French artist Yves Klein (1928-1962). “Long live the immaterial!” was one of his pronouncements.
Part painter, part performer, part minimalist, part mystic, Klein (who, by the way, was also a judo black belt, and a seeker of Zen emptiness) sought to lead our spirits out of this material world and deep into the spiritual freedom of the void. For this astounding mission, his chief weapon was blue.
Indigo-centric
“Blue” investigates that colour through indigofera tinctoria, the blue dye known as indigo, a substance with a history. Simultaneously developed 4,000 years ago (in Egypt, Peru, India and possibly China), indigo is still being used by contemporary artists as well as Levi Strauss. Curator Lee Talbot's 27-object show is in three parts:
— Textile fragments (Egyptian, Persian, Yemeni and pre-conquest Peruvian) and grand clothes (a dragon robe from China, a Navajo chief's blanket, a summer kimono from Japan) show how the colour was once used.
— Contemporary work by five fabric artists (Hiroyuki Shindo, Shihoko Fukumoto, Rowland Ricketts, Maria Eugenia Davila and Eduardo Portillo, all of them aware of the traditions of Asian dyeing) reveal how it is used now — in hangings and installations and a small see-through tea ceremony room by Fukumoto, which he calls “Morning Mist”.
— In “Blue Alchemy: Stories of Indigo”, a film by Mary Lance and the show's third part, indigo is grown, harvested, seeped, whisked, fermented and then precipitated into midnight-blue cakes. In India the whisking is done by quartets of men who step into the vat, hang on to the edge, and, in patient unison, splash with their feet.
The show (the second in a series, following “Red”) is on at the Textile Museum, 2320 S Street NW, Washington, until September 18. For information, call 202-667-0421.
