Blue

The book challenge rolls on. My favorite blogger is now clobbering my meager "a book a month, for the love of goodness, surely I can read at least a book a month" goal, which makes posting about my walloping "book #4" seem pretty pathetic, but here goes.

Book #4 was Blue: The History of a Color. A good ole fashion art book. I haven't read a good ole fashioned art book in ages and it was refreshing, if for no other reason then that. Its author, Monsieur Michel Pastoureau, has nothing if not an axe to grind with the rest of academia for neglecting the study of color. Luckily, he appears to be on a one man quest to plug the holes of that dam, left wide open by historians, art historians, chemists, religious scholars, and basically everyone except Monsieur Pastoureau. Fortunately, he is nothing if not modest about his aspirations in this endeavor:

...The aim of this book is to examine all kinds of objects in order to consider the different facets of the history of color and to show how far beyond the artistic sphere this history reaches. The history of painting is one thing; that of color is another, much larger question. Most studies devoted to the history of color err in considering only the pictorial, artistic, or scientific realms. But the lessons to be learned from color and its real interest lie elsewhere.

So the aim of the book was the entire social, political, religious, and artistic history of blue in... well, the world. A modest goal for one's second book. We start with cave paintings and work our way up to blue jeans and the modern obsession with blue. This seems really ambitious for a 180 page book with about 80 pages of pictures, but who am I to judge. Lest you worry that his scope of "just blue" is actually too narrow to truly wrestle with the topic at hand, Mounsieur P. is well aware of this potential issue and addresses it forthright in the introduction:

A single color, however, can never be viewed on its own. Its function can be grasped and its meanings understood only when it is compared or contrasted to one or many other colors. To study blue, then, requires the consideration of other colors as well ... Green and black, blue's close counterparts at many points in history; white and yellow, with which it was frequently paired; and above all red, blue's opposite, partner, and rival...

Oh good. Now we plan to cover all the primary colors in the color wheel and their import and evolution in the western world by looking at their social, religious, historic, and art historic contexts in 100 pages of writing and 80 pages of well selected folios. Aiming fairly high, eh?

Lest I sound even more crotchety then last time I wrote about a book, let me be clear - the book is actually good. It's shallow (uh, duh.) but the book itself is lovely, the illustrations failry well chosen, and there are lots of interesting little tidbits in the book. It's a slog to get through because the topics change so drastically from one subhead to another and especially from one chapter to another, but I'm fascinated by the history of color, in general, and it was a great read to add to that addiction (though if you read only one book on color, I still recommend Color as the starting primer.)

But on to the fun stuff! As Cheap Seats would say - "Just the facts, on Do You Care?":

• Turns out that the early history of blue is fairly easy to catalogue - there wasn't really one. It made no appearances in Paleolithic paintings or artifacts, and it really isn't until the Romans that we see blue making any kind of appearance. Nevermind the fact that its appearance is largely as a background and is generally ignored by dyers, artists, and other artisans.
• Because blue was not really used widely, it didn't accrue any real or lasting symbolic meaning. Because it didn't accrue symbolic meaning, it was never really used to convey or evoke emotional or aesthetic responses.
• Another reason for the relative lack of prominence of blue in ancient and even Roman culture was the lack of better dyeing techniques. Dyeing techniques of the time left much to be desired and really only versions of red could be counted on to hold their color consistently through the sun, washings, and wearing. Because of that, blue never became really popular as a clothing color until the Middle Ages
• Woad (an herb of the mustard family that gives off a blue hue) was used in dying by the Celts and Germans, making the color even more of an anathema to the Romans and Greeks (who went from thinking nothing in particular of the color to associating it with Barbarians once they saw it in all its Braveheart glory)
• Add to that that blue, when it did have connotations for the Romans, was associated with death and the underworld, and that blue eyes were considered either a physical deformity or a sign of bad character (a.k.a., blue eyes must mean you have sight into the underworld), and you really don't have the makings of a fashion trend.
• So, I feel like I see blue in my life all the time, what the heck happened? The Church, that's what! The Church comes along and decides that it wants to have a practice schism, so that when Luther comes along everyone's already been through a dry run, and decides to break itself into factions featuring pro and anti colorists. (chromophiles and chromophobes, respectively).
• If you are pro color, you believe, roughly, that color is light and as such is part of the divine sphere and should be celebrated wildly in all its forms. Your windwos should have stained glass of all colors, your chruch should be ornate, and your robes should be nothing short of a technicolor dream coat. If you are anti color, you believe that light is matter and as such is base, and no more than a physical wrapping which is a distraction to concentrating on the service to the divine. your church would feature none of the above accoutrements and would be rather barren to help you concentrate on your variety of sins and transgressions. The best references for all this back history are in French, so forgive if I haven't fact checked this to the utmost.
• So in the Middle Ages, the chromophiles won and Blue began to establish itself as the color of all that is good, holy, and related to the Virgin. Blue started its humble trajectory as a way to associate the Virgin Mary with mourning, but gradually, the more the Virgin was painted in blue, the more blue became the color of the religiously minded, then the color of Kings who wanted to be associated with the newly minted holy virtues of the color, then the only acceptable color for religiously and sober minded puritans to wear, then the color of mourning, again, only this time as featured in literature and plays, then the color of the French revolution, and finally the mainstay of the fashion industry as dying techniques became gradually more consistent and reliable.
• The book has droned on about dying techniques and whatnot for about 60 pages at this point, until it finally gets to the following really interesting history of blue jeans:
• In 1853 Levi Strauss, a Jewish merchant from New York arrived in San Francisco intent on selling canvas for tents and wagons. When he arrived, a pioneer explained to him that where he was in California, what was needed most was strong and functional pants, not tent canvas (I'm wondering just how, exactly, that conversation went... But I digress). Strauss, being rather ingenious, then made pants out of his canvas. They were immediately popular and were not yet blue - they were off white, brown, tan, etc, - but not blue. Between 1860 and 1865, Strauss had the idea of replacing canvas with denim, a twilled fabric dyed with indigo that was slightly less rough and more flexible than canvas, and blue jeans were born.
• The term "blue jeans" first appeared in the 1920s, even though all his pants had been blue from 1870 onward. Denim was too dense to absorb the indigo dye completely, so there was never a guarantee that the color would last - which turned out to be the major selling factor. "...The color seemed to be alive, changing over time... Several decades later, when progress in chemical colorants allowed any fabric to be dyed deeply and uniformly with indigo, jeans producers were obligated to whiten and discolor their pants artificially in order to recapture the washed out shades of the original product."
• In 1890 the patent protecting jeans made by Levi Strauss ran out and all of a sudden a dozen or so competing brands debuted. (This is my favorite part...) "in 1936, to avoid any confusion with the competing brands, a small red label bearing the brand name was stitched onto the right back pocket to mark authentic Levi Strauss jeans. This was the first time that a brand name was overtly displayed on the outside of a garment."

All in all, an interesting book with a pretty wide scope. Heck, where else could you read about this history of the Cathedral of St Denis in the same book as the history of blue jeans?