Pink and green horses may be tolerated in an incunabulous experimenter like Paolo Uccello, but I remember wincing at the sight of Impressionist portraits with faces and bosoms and hands blotched with vivid vegetable green reflected from the surrounding foliage, orange and scarlet from the sunshades held by the subjects. If the clearly expressed intention of Uccello, or Besnard, or Rolle, or Zorn had been to study the effect of reflections on horses’ hides or women’s skins, we should have adjusted ourselves accordingly. That was not the case. The portraits referred to will scarcely find now the admirers they had when their mere newness excited and, for an instant, fascinated the spectator. (Aesthetics and History)
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Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet thick dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.
Kandinsky claims that a circle of yellow will seem to ooze from its center and even warmly approach us, while a similar circle of blue ‘moves into itself, like a snail retreating into its shell, and draws away from the spectator. The eye feels stung by the first circle while it is absorbed into the second’ (Concerning the Spiritual in Art).
Yellow cannot readily ingest gray. It clamors for white. But blue will swallow black like a bell swallows silence ‘to echo a grief that is hardly human.’ Because blue contracts, retreats, it is the color of transcendence, leading us away in pursuit of the infinite. From infra-red to ultra-violet, the long waves sink and the short waves rise. ‘Just as orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow, so violet is red withdrawn from humanity by blue.’
When the trumpet brays, Kandinsky hears vermilion. The violin plays green on its placid middle string. Blues darken through the cello, double bass, and organ, for him, and the bassoon’s moans are violet like certain kinds of gloom. He believes that orange can be rung from a steeple sometimes, while the joyous rapid jingle of the sleigh-bell reminds him of raspberry’s light cool red. If color is one of the contents of the world as I have been encouraging someone — anyone — to claim, then nothing stands in the way of blue’s being smelled or felt, eaten as well as heard. These comparisons are only slightly relative, only somewhat subjective. No one is going to call the sounds of the triangle brown or accuse the tympanist of playing pink.
Some spices are true scarlets, I suppose, as pepper seems to be, and surely the richness of fine food often borders on brown. Earth tones appropriately rule the stove, and the carefully conceived kitchen will let porcelain and stainless steel stand for cleanliness, blue tile for planning and otherwise taking thought, while wood, clay, and copper, the mustards, reds, and deeper greens, signify the work itself, although one should notice that the grander a cuisine is the less robust its hues will be.
Still, we permit the appearance of our meats, sauces, fruits, and vegetables to dominate our tongues until it is difficult to divide a twist of lemon or a squeeze of lime from the colors of their rinds or separate yellow from its yolk or chocolate from the quenchless brown which seems to be the root, shoot, stalk, and bloom of it. Yet I hardly think the eggplant’s taste is as purple as its skin. In fact, there are few flavors at the violet end, odors either, for the acrid smell of blue smoke is deceiving, as is the tooth of the plum, though there may be just a hint of blue in the higher sauces. Perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. No watermelon tastes red. Apropos: while waiting for a bus once, I saw open down the arm of a midfat, midlife, freckled woman, suitcase tugging at her hand like a small boy needing to pee, a deep blue crack as wide as any in a Roquefort. Split like paper tearing. She said nothing. Stood. Blue bubbled up in the opening like tar. One thing is certain: a cool flute blue tastes like deep well water drunk from a cup.
That space in paper sacks which are too small to be re-used is blue. Sucking stones, too. Even if the sacks themselves are often tan and sandy, the stones are ovals of gray-blue granite. Molloy’s sentences of calculation, so calm, so formed, so desperate, are blue to the pale core they contain, and at the bottom of the paper bags, as if waterlogged, there is always a little slip with the price of purchase. The pockets of the greatcoat and the pockets of the trousers, the tireless fist which is at itch to trade one for another, are blue like the empty sacks they resemble. There is a swim of blue in the toothbrush glass. The loneliness of clothes draped over the backs of chairs is blue; undies, empty lobbies, rumpled spreads are blue, especially when chenille and if orange; not body warmth or body smell or the acidulous salts of the vagina — no — blue belongs to the past — to the minutes after masturbation, to thought, to detachment and removal, fading, to the inside side of sex and the self that in the midst of pitch and toss has slipped away like a lucky penny fallen from a dresser.
IV
IMAGINE for a moment that I have gained possession of the famous talisman of Gyges, a ring (as Plato tells) which confers invisibility upon its wearer when the bezel’s turned. Of course I can kiss, kill, and steal easily. Without paying, I can get in all the games. I can play tricks in a world of rubes. But what else?
My neighbors. I can spy: there’s that buxom wench with the inviting eyes, and her husband, a stout, red-faced, and unappealing lout who wears, I’ve noticed, both a pair of suspenders and a belt. While they’re hugging groceries from car to kitchen, I slip inside their house. I wish the ring eliminated sounds. They’ll hear my breathing, and how my stiff clothes scrape. There she is, innocent and unaware, preparing salad at the sink.
Come. Walk through Blue Willow. There are pavilions, birds, green boughs like blue grapefruit, leaves like hanging lanterns, foliage like mascara’d eyes in midwink. I’m told it tells a story. And it may be the most popular pattern ever manufactured. Why? Stacks of them, fresh from Woolworth’s, fill my neighbor’s china closet. See the doves? When we twist the ring, we’re in. There are peacock feathers, sunflowers blue in the face, ferny streamers, fuzzy puffs, each fastened above the blue wiggle of a streaked trunk, the ground beneath like a foamy wave. There are nowhere any normal shapes. It is in fact a land afloat on milk-white water. There are blue boats out, and best of all there is a bridge where three sages cross, island to island, carrying, as one makes it out, a shepherd’s crook, a board or box, a string upon a handle. They know what it is: being blue; but who can feel how this world was once, counterfeiting has so changed it. Beyond the zagging fence a walk like a white shadow leads to wrinkled steps which have abruptly been unfolded from the portico of the great pagoda. We can see the inner windows, fanned and nowhere repetitious, then funny hatted houses in the distance, while the encircling calm of blue doodled borders — squares, scrolls, circles, diamonds, dots, checks, curls — drawn as if on the empty edge of the earth, keeps us lazily underneath the willow, by its water, the way the saucer which carries the pattern rests its cup.