The Italian artist Roberto Ferruzzi produced one remarkable painting in his lifetime, Madonnina (1897), an image of a mildly disheveled street dweller and a sleeping infant. The original paint-ing was eventually lost, but the image attained a second life through duplication as religious paraphernalia. Ferruzzi never intended the work to be devotional, but the majestic blue of his model’s robes pushed the painting toward a decidedly devout interpretation.

The most striking chromatic detail of Ferruzzi’s original has mutated greatly in subsequent reproductions. Mary’s robe (an art historical staple that, in some respects, is her most recognizable feature) was a muted, airy blue in Ferruzzi’s original. But replica-tors have added smoldering washes, deep pools of blue cloth that bring the image closer to a Renaissance depiction. Tiny, laminated prayer cards —stored in the purses and nightstand drawers of little Catholic grandmas everywhere— bear the Ferruzzi image (or its countless copycats). Through blue, Ferruzzi inadvertently achieved the divine.

Blue is obviously vested with grand symbolic power. Through light absorbed and scattered, the visual geneses of sky and sea, blue forms a significant part of our visual experience of the physical world. Its prominence in realms both natural and artificial signals its importance to the human eye. In a 2003 survey by Joe Hallock, the majority of both men and women identified blue as their favor-ite color.

Artists, too, have an affinity for it, having infested art history with the many moods of blue. Though it is a primary color, blue was not always readily available, especially in the palettes of early oil painters. Ultramarine, the preferred pigment, was extraordinarily expensive, made from ground lapis lazuli. As such blue was re-served for special occasions, like the Madonna’s robes. (Nota bene the connection emerging here, one between blue, femininity and the sacred.) According to Victoria Finlay, Michaelangelo’s The En-tombment went unfinished because he couldn’t afford ultramarine.

Fast forward several centuries and you have cheaper blue pig-ments, leading to more spectacular and expansive uses of the color throughout the entirety of modernism. Lyrical and color field

FUGITIVE BLUES

The Royal Blue Peanut. At one time, the most expensive Beanie Baby, valued at thousands of dollars -- an absurd but nevertheless valid continuation of blue’s historical expensiveness.

Detail from van der Weyden’s Crucifixion Diptych (c. 1460).

Ferruzzi’s (presumed) original and a replica prayer card. The number of reproductions makes it difficult to determine any one version’s origins.

Given the limited gamut of colors then used in printing comic books, 1980s X-Men stories frequently used an explosive blue for villains, anti-heroes and characters caught in a liminal space (among them shape-shifters, outcasts and ancient gods). Notice the malicious connotations of blue in the costumes pictured.

Rei Ayanami from the anime Neon Gen-esis Evangelion (1995). The distinctive

blue hair communicates the character’s utter lack of emotional depth.

The epitome of an unfeeling blue: the BCBS logo.

Left: The Deutsche Bank logo: a strong blue design with hard-edge aspirations. Were this a painting, it would probably sell.Right: The Windows Blue Screen of Death, a celebrity among glitches and system crashes.

The unbearable blueness of business.

abstractionists were fond of blue. It was emotional, light or heavy depending on the mood of the brush. It was self-supporting, a color with no inherent need for the graces of line or shape. Opti-cally, blue recedes, and this motion gives large patches of blue a dreamy shimmer. In Rothko’s high modernist project, blues were portals to transcendent planes.

In the visual lexicon of businesses and institutions, however, blue sells the idea of security and stability. Its popularity and di-gestibility lend it a special place in these anodyne palettes, ap-pearing frequently in organizations, sports teams, universities and governmental agencies. These “official” uses build on blue’s his-torical association with royalty and prestige.

Blue’s frequent use in computing interfaces (Microsoft Win-dows comes to mind, as do various leading social networks) fur-thers its inoffensiveness. In darker shades, blue does not draw at-tention, making it ideal for corporate contexts where bland colors are needed. The navy blue of business attire exemplifies a de-cidedly neutered approach to coloration: color without emotion, chroma without punch. Wear a blue jacket to a job interview, and you will likely make a good impression (according to one study in the journal Sex Roles).

Too much blue, however, can imply depression and unease. It invokes two sides of the same thing: the celestial and mysterious, the despairing and lonely. Shared by both perceptions of blue is a certain formlessness. As mystery is shapeless, so is sadness.

Or, the emotional register of blue can be nonexistent. If we understand depression in a clinical sense —i.e. as a blunting of emotion, rather than an outpouring of anguish— we can under-stand blue as a similarly emotionless color. Blue’s rival red is af-fectively pugilistic, as are other warm tones. Even purple (blue’s sibling) maintains an air of sentimentality or sensuality. Blue can be more emotionally unavailable than any of these colors.

In biomedicine, this is arguably blue’s aesthetic purpose: to reduce emotion, to still the brain. (The ER extends this meta-phor of blueness-as-stillness: a “code blue” is for cardiac arrest.) Blue’s psychological prowess and aesthetic effectiveness are best summarized in the form of pills. Anthropological studies into the color of pharmaceuticals have shown that patients link blue pills with tranquility and sleep. Accordingly, many kinds of blue pillsexert an anxiolytic, antidepressant or anorectic effect. (In the case

The banal blues of social networking: Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and LinkedIn.This is blue-as-corporate-ally, untroubling hues perhaps meant to lull the viewer into

complacent scrolling.

Nina Simone’s blues relayed an almost uncommunicable sadness and frustration.

Mixed amphetamine salts (Adderall), 10 mg. Prescribed for the management of ADHD, these pills embody blue-as-calm-ative and blue-as-anorectic.

of Adderall and Viagra —two stimulating drugs, commonly blue— the symbolism of blue is reinstated by their soothing or softening of an or-ganic obstacle or excess.)

Pop music, meanwhile, is one of the largest repositories of emotive blues, an antithesis to pharma blues that gently strip the color of feeling. Blues both lyrical and sonic permeate the music of woman musicians like Laura Nyro, who sung deeply idiosyncratic and mystical versions of “the blues” that reestablish the connection between the ethereal and the feminine. While Mary’s blue robes represent spiritual willingness, the blues of women singers offer freedom from the demands of men to “be happy.” From Joni Mitchell through Lana Del Rey, women musi-cians have sung and reaffirmed the power of blue: as color, as feeling, as concept, as a voice of emotional dissent and transformation. Likewise, the blues have offered multiple generations of black Americans a fluent language for expressing the pains of living under racist institutions and ideologies. Recently, artist Ana Teresa Fernández painted the border fence in Nogales, Mexico, blue. She said it “represents the physical wound of two countries not being able to heal.” This is blue-as-resis-tance, blue-as-catharsis, blue-as-potential.

As evidenced by the work in Blauww, there are many blues, each one with a distinct temperament. Looking at the work here, I see blue as an omen, a scarcity, a rendezvous, an impending storm, a remembered abode, military garb, Promethean flame, poetic decay.

Patrick Malin’s Atlantic Crest is closest to the legacies of immanence discussed here, while Beth Claverie’s Blue Bedroom exhibits magnifi-cent gloom and ambiguous blues that continue the color’s emotional histories. David Barnes and Marc Kehoe have submitted similarly por-tentous scenery, recalling blue’s substantive talents in setting a mood. Fish Wells’ dinosaur head --a tribute to blues guitarist Son House-- rees-tablishes the blues as a project of vitality and humanity against agoniz-ing circumstances. Elin Noble and Joshua Nierodzinski seem to probe the cognitive spheres of blue, while Susan Strauss and Nancy Shand fillet the landscape to expose blue’s animating energy. Natasa Prljevic’s Floating Structures is located on some strange road between graphical abstraction and the chaos of animation, with a delightful partnership of blue and its nemesis red. Kristin Street’s prickly piece weds untouch-able needles to a heavenly sapphire. It could be interpreted in an almost ecstatic context: the pain of the needles mitigated by a curative blue. Street didn’t intend it that way, but once released blues have their own agenda. Like Ferruzzi, we can’t predict where blue will take us.

“My baby lives in shades of blue.../I can’t do nothing about his strange weather.” The lamentations of a blue girl. Del Rey has saved the ultimate slot on her last two albums for Simone covers: an uroboric act which links LDR to Nina’s unbeat-ably powerful and political sadness (albeit within the context of a privi-leged white femininity).

-- Alexander Castro, December 2015