Blue Genes

At the museum, we have an internal database that catalogs every (or almost every, save an odd teaspoon or stamp) object in the collection. The database is searchable by date, title, material, when the museum acquired it, exhibition history and other parameters. Oftentimes, however, when searching by "keyword" some interesting and seemingly unrelated finds can come up. I don't know how this next object came up when I was searching for objects to feature in an upcoming Arts of Islam talk but nevertheless it caught my attention.


Levantine (possibly Syria)
Portrait Head (Glass) 1st century B.C.-1st century A.D.

To be honest, the first thing it reminded me of was an episode of the show Pete and Pete (early 1990s children's show on the cable channel, Nickelodeon) whereby a blue marshmallow portrait of President Eisenhower gets stuck up Pete's nose. It was an odd TV series. That aside, I tried to pinpoint what exactly about the little azure portrait that drew me to it. It isn't exactly unusual to come across portraits in molded glass in ancient Rome and there were equivalent objects and workshops in the Levant during the first century. So what was it about this portrait? If it were a snake it would have bitten me right between the eyes. It's blue! The face, a youth perhaps when Augustus-style hair and a clean shaven face were trendy in the early Roman empire, is saturated in ultramarine blue. It almost appears as if it were carved from the stone, lapis lazuli (which would have been very pricey to acquire at the time). But this particular shade of blue had a particular resonance. I'd seen it before. But where? Could it be that this was International Klein Blue?!


Yves Klein, installation view of Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers. ©2010 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © Artists Rights Society, New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo by Lee Stalsworth.

Yves Klein was one of the first modernist painters to experiment with monochromatic paintings in the 1950s. He is most known for his monochromatic blue paintings where he developed a specific blue that he patented, "International Klein Blue." Painting in monochrome was a way for Klein to not only experiment with paint but to move beyond limitations of the rectangular canvas. A recent retrospective of Klein's monochromatic works at the Hirschorn in Washington, D.C. (pictured above) had sponges, sticks, and globes all tinted, painted and dyed International Klein Blue. For Klein, blue had spiritual, mystical properties that other colors could not offer. In 1959 in a lecture at the Sorbonne, Klein stated,

"Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not… …All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract."

Klein's association of the color blue with the sea and sky is not without its historical precedents. In the late 19th century the Symbolists, a group of artists who valued expressing abstract ideas through indirect means (thus through symbols, metaphors...), valued the color blue because of its celestial association. Blue for the Symbolists symbolized spirituality (one of the unwieldy concepts the Symbolists believed could not be captured by mere representational description or Realism) because it could reference the sky, thus celestial realm.

Klein's monochrome experiments with IKB got quite conceptual and even performance-based when he painted nude young women with the color then rolled them about a canvas. His patenting of the color was less about protecting a formula and more about the application of an idea. How monochrome, or IKB, can transform not only the idea and what we expect from a 2-D painting, but everyday objects as well. Perhaps Klein couldn't have patented the blue of our Levantine youth after the fact but that sapphire hue to the face, hair, neck permeates every highlight and shadow across the molded surface. It transforms it from being a mere bottle topper (as it likely would have been) to something quite celestial.