Blue is the colour found between violet and green on the visible spectrum of light as perceived by human eyes. It comes in many different hues, tints, and shades and varies dramatically in intensity and brightness, but is found at its purest at the middle of its range on the spectrum with a wavelength of 470 nanometres.
Along with red and yellow, it is regarded as one of the three primary colours and much loved by painters. If it's extremely difficult for us to imagine the natural world in the absence of blue, it's virtually impossible to construct a history of modern art that doesn't refer repeatedly to this profoundly beautiful colour in its various guises; ultramarine, cobalt, cerulean, turquoise ... even the names make happy and contain a kind of poetry or word-magic.
Recognizing this, Rilke famously speaks in his letters about the possibility of writing a monograph on the colour blue, beginning with the pastels of Rosalba Carriera and ending with the very unique blues of Cézanne. As the intensity of his blue-delirium increases before the canvases of the latter, Rilke speaks ecstatically of all kinds of blue, including: a waxy blue, a wet dark blue, a self-contained blue, a densely quilted blue, a thunderstorm blue, a bourgeois cotton blue, a juicy blue and an almost invisible blue that he terms barely-blue.
As one commentator notes, this blue-incantation goes beyond a mere listing of technical terms and although he makes conventional references to sea-blue and sky-blue, Rilke carefully avoids clichéd descriptions. For he's attempting to see colours differently and to stammer the first terms of a new language in which blueness is expressed directly and concretely; as it is by the truly great artists - be they poets or painters - who understand how the reality of colour arises from the work itself.
See: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, trans. Joel Agee, (North Point Press, 2002).
As one commentator notes, this blue-incantation goes beyond a mere listing of technical terms and although he makes conventional references to sea-blue and sky-blue, Rilke carefully avoids clichéd descriptions. For he's attempting to see colours differently and to stammer the first terms of a new language in which blueness is expressed directly and concretely; as it is by the truly great artists - be they poets or painters - who understand how the reality of colour arises from the work itself.
See: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, trans. Joel Agee, (North Point Press, 2002).
