In Search of Blue

Tragedy, elation and madness in the search for the world’s most sought-after pigment, ultramarine blue.

A boy—nineteen, arrogant, French—watches the sky. “The blue sky,” he declares, “is my first artwork.” He turns to his friend and offers him the earth and its riches. He turns to his other friend and gives him the air. Himself? He takes the sky.

At nineteen, he won’t turn to painting yet. He will study judo and wrap himself in mysticism. He will fixate on emptiness and infinity and all the things that can’t be touched. At twenty-six, he will turn to art for good, starting with paint, the métier of his parents. At thirty-two, he will jump from a building and break his nose to capture the perfect photograph. But at twenty-nine, he will declare that the Earth is blue, and he will believe it so fervently that he will renounce all colours but blue, and begin to paint canvases in only one hue, and then he will paint not just the two dimensions of canvas but statues and tabletops and world globes and dinner plates and even the naked flesh of women because Yves Klein, at the all-consuming age of twenty-nine, is obsessed with blue.

But this is not the story of a compulsive French boy. This is the story of the elusive pigment that drove Yves Klein and others like him to obsession, destroyed fortunes, and birthed geniuses. This is the story of the colour that existed before anything, and yet, for most of human history, hardly existed at all. This is the story of the colour blue.

If I was to guess your favourite colour, I would guess it to be blue. Statistically speaking, that would be the wisest guess. But even if blue is your favourite colour, and even if you've painted your walls with it or bought bedsheets in it or designed a wardrobe out of it, when was the last time you really looked for the colour blue?

The thing you probably don’t know about blue is that it does not exist in nature the same way as the other colours do. Of course, the sky is mostly blue, and big bodies of water can certainly appear to be blue, but consider this: a leaf is green because of a pigment called chlorophyll. A carrot is orange and a daffodil is yellow because of pigments called carotenoids. But the sky is blue only because it is no colour at all, and the ocean is blue for the same reason. You can’t grind up the sky and turn it to powder; you can’t bottle the ocean and call it blue.

Let’s take a quick detour to understand how colour works. Light from the sun consists of seven colours. Each colour is its own light wave running at its own frequency. Objects on the earth absorb some light and reflect some light depending on their atomic structure. The colour of an object is not the colour of the light it absorbs, but the light it reflects back. Grass is green because the atomic structure of chlorophyll absorbs six colours and reflects back only green.

Unlike the slow and sturdy wavelengths of reds and yellows, blue light has a high frequency, which means it scatters easily. In the air around us, gases and particles interfere with blue light waves and send them out everywhere, making the atmosphere above us look blue. The same thing happens in the ocean—the water molecules scatter the blue portion of the light coming from the sun.

Blue light isn’t actually the highest colour frequency—purple is. If our sun emitted all light wavelengths in equal proportion, we’d be gazing up at purple skies.

But it doesn’t: the sun emits mostly blue light, and so our skies are more blue than purple.

So blue light is all around us, but blue pigment—truly insoluble blue substance—is astoundingly rare in the natural world. There is no naturally blue pigment among plants. Blue flowers are the result of modified anthocyanin pigments, which are actually red. Blueberries are coloured by the same pigment, as are eggplants and blue corn and purple carrots. Blue flowers and plants modify the natural structure of anthocyanin by changing their pH or mixing it with other molecules and pigments, creating a blue hue.

Most blue animals achieve their colour through iridescence—the same phenomenon that makes you see different colours in bath bubbles and roadside oil spills and the shiny side of DVDs. Unlike pigmentation, iridescence is colour created through the way light interacts with and is reflected by the atomic structure of an object. So Blue Jay feathers are actually brown; their beaded microscopic structure scatters light so that only blue light is reflected. The bright blue wings of the Blue Morpho butterfly have ridged scales for a similar effect. Occasionally, animals get blue colouring from non-blue pigments, like blue plants do, but blue colouring in animals is almost always structural, not pigmented. The only true blue pigment known to exist in the animal world exists in a tiny 10-millimetre diagonal strip of colour across the broad black wings of the Obrina Olivewing butterfly.

Even blue eyes are pigment-less. Brown eyes are coloured by melanin, but blue eyes are empty of pigment: they scatter the light, just like the sky, reflecting blue light (and therefore blue colour) back out.

The incredible rarity of blue pigment meant that the paints the ancients made from plants and animals and minerals produced mostly reds and yellows and pinks. In fact, the classical world believed in four primary colours: yellow, red, white and black. The Roman author and philosopher Pliny the Elder claimed that Classical Greek painters used only these four colours. It’s probably an exaggeration, but not an entirely unfounded one.

Touchable blues were so absent from ancient daily life that most surviving texts from ancient cultures—ancient Greek poetry, old Chinese stories, the Icelandic sagas, the Koran and the ancient Hebrew bible—didn’t even have a word for it. In The Iliad, Homer mentions not the blue sea but the “wine-drunk sea." The only allusion we have to the colour blue is in the word melas, which is more accurately translated as dark. It appears that blue, to the Greeks, was just a shadow; a function of darkness.

But blue wasn’t completely missing. The first evidence of blue in use as a dye (but not a pigment, which proved much more difficult to create) is a collection of seeds called woad seeds and blue-dyed tree fibre excavated from a Neolithic cave in the southeast of France dated to sometime between 5000 and 10,000 BC.

Woad is an unusual substance. It is a green-leafed plant that flowers yellow, and if you dry the leaves, grind them up and let them ferment, they make blue.

The Ancient Egyptians used woad to dye their clothes and other
fabrics, alongside other blueish dies, like indigo (from the pink-flowering plant Indigofera tinctoria). Other parts of the world were also using the deep purple-blue indigo dye; evidence of indigo-dyed fabric in Peru’s Chicama Valley dates all the way back to 4000 BC. But fast-forward to someplace like 2500 BC and the Egyptians had

developed a taste for a blue they couldn't have—or rather, could only have at a serious cost. The colour runs through the semi-precious gemstone lapis lazuli. Today, you know it as ultramarine.

There are only five places in the world where digging will lead to lapis lazuli: Chile, Siberia, Myanmar, the United States, and a giant valley called Sar-e-Sang in the Badakhshan province of Afghanistan.

The Egyptians were bewitched by lapis lazuli. They painted it on faces and carved it up into beads; they draped it over kings and queens, swallowed it to heal themselves, chipped away statues from it and ground it up into powder to paint with the pigment. But getting this rare blue stone into Egypt from Afghanistan was difficult, and expensive, and very slow. So the Egyptians, obsessed as they were with the perfect blue, created the world's first synthetic pigment: Egyptian blue.

This is no insignificant moment in human history: it is the beginning— though still a very early beginning—of the kind of pigment production that is now worth $30 billion globally. Most of the colour in your daily life is the result of artificial pigment.

The process for making Egyptian blue was complicated and near-genius. The Egyptians would heat limestone, sand, copper and sodium in precise proportions and to a very particular temperature, then lower the temperature and leave it heating for up to four days. The blue that emerged from the heat was a blue so bright and beguiling that it was painted in tombs and on statues and over the coffins of mummies. The Egyptians had their blue. It was called ḫsbḏ-ỉrjt: artificial lapis lazuli.

Egyptian blue crossed centuries and cultures, making its way to Ancient Greece and Rome, into Parthenon statues and Pompeii wall paintings. But when

Rome fell, the recipe for Egyptian blue was lost for four and a half thousand years, until a pot of the pigment was discovered in 1814 during the excavation of Pompeii.

For centuries, blue stayed in the sky and in the water and flew briefly on the wings of butterflies, occasionally fermented into dyes or powdered into pigments but never quite turning out the way the sky does on a spring morning, never quite mirroring the middle of the ocean. Blue was always there, and—for a long time— always out of reach.

But sometime in the 13th or 14th century, lapis lazuli arrived in Europe. The stone probably made its way to the continent through Venice, the major trading port between Europe and the other side of the world. Ultramarine pigment was a breakthrough for Renaissance artists and their patrons. The name translates as beyond the sea, and while this sounds like a romantic tribute to the depth of its hue, it was a name given to many goods that came to the continent by boat from places the Europeans could only dream of: it came from but beyond the sea. But the cost of the little blue stone just about crippled the painters who sought it: pound for pound, it was more expensive than gold. The process of extracting pigment from the rock itself involved some fifty steps, and it yielded less than ten per cent of its total weight in pigment. Even in an era of artistic resurgence, buying ultramarine was no small purchase.

It is important here to note just how different ultramarine is from other kinds of blue. Some blues feel cool, some feel smooth. Some remind you of purple, others verge on green. But ultramarine is like nothing else. When you look at ultramarine, you cannot look away. And once you see it—once you truly see ultramarine for what it is—you can never unsee it. Nothing will compare and no blue will be the same to

you again. The 15th century Italian painter Cennino Cennini called it “a colour more noble, more beautiful, and perfect than any other colour."

There is a painting that hangs in the National Gallery in London today. It is a dark, dramatic snapshot of Jesus being carried to his tomb. It dates to 1501, but for some time—a long time, actually—art historians did not know who had painted it, or why some parts (the biggest being a blank a corner shaped like a kneeling figure) had been left unfinished. How frustrating, they must have thought. A glorious painting and a blank right corner. Who was to go there? Why was it left like that?

The answer came in 1864, though it was rejected and contested for years. The artist was no small-time painter; the artist was Michelangelo. And the blank kneeling shape in the corner? Most likely designated for the holiest of strokes: the robes of the Virgin Mary. Unfinished, it is believed, because the ultramarine pigment had not arrived from the patron, and at the age of twenty-five, Michelangelo could not have paid for the pigment himself.

Legend has it that while waiting for his ultramarine in Rome, Michelangelo left to find the human-sized block of marble that would ultimately become the white stone flesh of his David. He returned the money paid to him by the church and left Rome with the painting unfinished. Better, perhaps, an unfinished masterpiece than an unworthy blue.

About a century later, a Dutch painter by the name of Johannes Vermeer was painting to modest acclaim. After his death, he would know worldwide fame, but through his short, turbulent life, he saw little of this. In his studio, he was slow, methodical. With his pigments, he was untameable. It could have been a happy ending: a well-to-do family, a successful-enough painter, if only Johannes Vermeer hadn't fallen in love with the most expensive pigment in the universe.

Maybe Vermeer saw blue everywhere, or maybe he just painted that
way. Ultramarine runs through almost all of his thirty-four confirmed paintings, showing up not just in blue objects but in dark shadows and in white walls, in human flesh, in fabric of all hues, in green leaves, in black tiles, in the purple of lights and tablecloths and the murky brown of wooden beams. But perhaps the most famous example of Vermeer’s use of ultramarine is the deep blue headscarf draped over the bright pale face of the Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Vermeer was so taken by ultramarine that he wouldn’t settle for lesser blue pigments like azurite. Refusing to paint without it, he drove his family’s fortune into the ground. At forty-three, Vermeer died broke and unfulfilled and—for the most part—an unrecognised genius, leaving his wife and eleven children deep in debt.

But Vermeer’s obsession with ultramarine might have paid off in the end. In the early twentieth century a frustrated Dutch painter slighted by critics and disillusioned by the art world turned his vengeful hand to forgery. His name was Han van Meegeren, and he painted a number of fake Vermeer paintings that began to appear on the art market. One of them sold to Nazi military leader Hermann Göring (he swapped it for 137 of his existing paintings), and it became one of Göring’s most prized possessions. When the Allies discovered the painting in a salt mine (along with the rest of Göring’s looted art collection) at the end of the war, the possibility of a new Vermeer discovery thrilled them. But the painting was traced back to van Meegeren, who confessed to the forgery. Could they believe him? There was one way to find out: did the blue pigment match the chemical structure of Vermeer’s revered

lapis lazuli? Of course it would—van Meegeren knew his Vermeers. But, alas: the pigment was part ultramarine, part cobalt. But cobalt pigment wasn’t discovered until 1802—more than a century after Vermeer’s death. Van Meegeren
had purchased ultramarine, but the seller had mixed it with cobalt to cut costs. The trickster was brought down by a trickster: Van Meegeren was sent to prison, but he died before he made it there.

But ultramarine wasn’t the only blue pigment around. There was azurite, distilled from the blue stone of the same name, but it was weak and impure and lacked the raw power of lapis lazuli. There was smalt, but it lacked depth, and indigo, but it was too much like purple. Cerulean blue came in 1789, followed by Cobalt blue in 1802. These new blue pigments were great, if you didn't mind your blues a little murky, a little impure. Great, if you weren't relentlessly obsessed with cutting out the sky and pasting it on canvas. And many painters weren’t. But some only saw one blue.

You can see Renaissance attitudes to blue pigment on canvases all over the world. Look closely at da Vinci’s The Last Supper (currently sitting in the Santa Maria Delle Grazie convent in Milan) and you’ll see something curious. Jesus is cloaked in ultramarine, but Judas is painted in azurite. Cheaper, duller, a little dirty. A false blue for a false disciple.

For Renaissance painters, ultramarine was not just another pigment: it
was the pigment. Some say thieves would scrape it right off a canvas; others claim that people who owned ultramarine paintings brandished them as proudly as they did their precious gemstones.

Even the accidental discovery of a clear, bright pigment called Prussian blue a century or so later wouldn’t stop painters yearning for the world’s finest blue pigment.

Picture this: it was 1703, or 1706, or just sometime in the early 1700s depending on who you read, and a Swiss colour-maker was sitting down to work in the airy Berlin laboratory he shared with a mad German scientist. Germany had just become Prussia, a rigid militant and authoritarian state, but people were still opening laboratory doors and clocking in to work. The story diverges again here: either the colour-maker was skimping on materials and bought a cheaper form
of potash (a mixture of alkaline potassium salts) as an experiment, or he grabbed the wrong bottle by accident, or he ran out of his usual and borrowed a handful of salts from the mad scientist down the hall.

Our colour-maker was Johann Jacob Diesbach, and he was making a red pigment that is sometimes called Florentine lake, sometimes referred to Carmine lake and other times simply labelled Red lake, a burnt pink-red pigment made for scarlet robes and crimson sunsets. But tipping in the cheap or borrowed or mistaken alkali ruined the recipe. The pigment wasn’t red at all—it was blue.

Turns out there was a simple explanation for Diesbach’s accidental hue:
the substitute salts had been distilled from animal oil, which still carried a tiny trace of blood. The iron in the blood blended with the rest of the mixture and made blue instead of red.

It was a happy accident for Diesbach. The pigment was cheap and durable and easy to mix, and it made its way onto palettes and canvases and gallery walls around the world, including Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa and van Gogh’s

The Starry Night. The Prussian army died their uniforms with the stuff, and gave it its name. It became a staple in photography, inks and clothing, and century and a half later, it would was the basis for blueprint technology.

But some hungry painters yearned for a blue as pure and unadulterated as ultramarine as a cloudless sky. No synthetic pigment could compete with the breath- taking brilliance of lapis lazuli, and digging up more out of the ground wasn’t an option.

By now it was 1814, and a young apprentice painter with a passion for colour had noticed bright masses of blue growing in soda kilns at the glass factory in Saint Gobain, France, and sent them to a chemist for analysis. His hunch was right: the masses were practically identical in chemical composition to lapis-lazuli-made ultramarine.

He sent his findings to France's Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, suggesting that a synthesised ultramarine pigment mightn’t be such a pipe dream after all. In 1824, the society put out a call. A prize of 6,000 francs (50,000 USD today) would go to the first person to develop a synthetic pigment the colour of ground-up lapis lazuli. The catch: it can’t cost more than 300 francs a kilogram to make.

Rewind now two decades to a ten-year-old boy—another French boy. His mother had died, his father was a busy and well-renowned engineer, and his doting aunts had sent him to boarding school with perfectly coiffed hair and a bright blue coat. At school, his beautiful hair was shaved and his blue coat stuck out in the line. The children laughed at him and called him the blue bird. His name was Jean- Baptiste Guimet.

The blue bird grew up, studied science at the École Polytechnique, risked his life defending Paris against the Allies, married a painter. He was kind and studious and everybody liked him: they called him the happy chemist. He was working his way up the ranks in the Administration des Poudres et Salpêtres, the French gunpowder monopoly, when his wife suggested he enter the running for the
first artificial ultramarine pigment.

You should do it, she is said to have urged him. Maybe at breakfast, over bread and cheese and the fervour of fresh coffee. Maybe at dinner, over soup and bread and the courage of evening wine. You could, she might have said. You could win this, you know.

By February of 1828, Guimet had created an artificial blue like nobody had ever seen. He submitted his pigment to the society for analysis. A month later, the society met for a general meeting and the contest had a winner: Jean-Baptiste Guimet had created the first artificial ultramarine pigment.

Guimet opened an ultramarine workshop in Paris and sold his new pigment for 400 francs a pound—a dramatic drop from the 4,000 people were paying for ultramarine. But it wasn’t over yet. A month after Guimet’s win, a second and equally brilliant ultramarine pigment was submitted to the society by a German chemist named Christian Gmelin. Gmelin insisted that the prize should be his, because he claimed to have developed the pigment a year ago.

But the happy chemist knew how to fight. He claimed that he’d already discovered his ultramarine in 1826, but had kept it a secret for two long years. In fact, he’d given it to painters to experiment with as early as 1827: Ingres used it to

paint the robes of one of the key figures in The Apotheosis of Homer, which hangs now, bright and resplendent, in the Louvre.

The fight ran for years, but eventually Guimet had proof enough to convince the society that he had been the first all along. He kept his prize, kept his glory, and the pigment was labelled French ultramarine.

By sometime 1830 Guimet had taken his pigment to industrial scale, opening a factory in Fleurieu-sur-Salone. Eventually, Guimet’s son Émile took over the family business, and the laboratory blue that surprised the world became a family business, and then a family fortune, and then a family legacy.

In some ways this was the beginning of the end for blue. Overnight, ultramarine blue was instantly available to painters of any means—but there was something about the elusive, impossible nature of blue that was lost once it
went mainstream.

Blue is everywhere now. It is the light in our screens and the colour of our jeans; it is Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Zoom. We have conquered the skies; we have chartered our oceans, sorted them, named them, clipped trackers on whales and studied algae under microscopes.

Today, buying a sweater in blue is an unremarkable act, there is a blue pencil in every set, and even birthday cakes come in blue. It is the most popular and the most trusted colour in the world, and it is no longer unreachable.

But blue still drags some of us to the deep end.

Remember the French boy who signed his name to the sky? The story of the colour blue would not be complete without the story of Yves Klein, because the colour blue turned Yves Klein upside down, changed his life, and rewrote the story of art as we know it.

Klein's obsession with the sky began as an obsession with space—with what he called the void. But when, at twenty-six, he returned to the family trade as a painter, he began to experiment with the very definitions of art, and came to resent the lines and figures that made up traditional paintings. He became determined
to “liberate colour from the prison that is the line,” and slowly—then all at once—his world turned blue.

It is important to place Yves Klein in his time. Born in 1928, he was a product of inter-war tensions and European turmoil. He spent his teenage years in a country ravaged by Nazi conquest, and emerged as a young adult under the Cold War anxieties of atomic destruction, dreaming of space and peace and freedom and hope. Yves Klein’s generation were slowly rebuilding his country’s pre-war confidence, gradually coming to believe that the world could be beautiful again after all. A world that had been so long in darkness was finally regaining colour.

At some point in Yves Klein’s dreamy post-war entry into adulthood, he realised that space—immaterial space, that space of the sky that he had loved as a boy and the space in his heart that longed to be filled—had been waiting for him all along inside a single colour. It had been waiting inside the colour blue.

Once Yves Klein discovered blue he had no need for other colours. He renounced the rest of the rainbow and pledged his allegiance to the one colour that “is beyond dimensions."

Scientists agree on this. Painters use blue to show that objects are far away: the further away an object, the bluer it looks, because the air in the atmosphere

scatters blue light. The more distance between your eyes and an object, the bluer it will appear. It’s why trees on mountains are blue from afar, and why the sky is blue (it is only space and distance), and why in satellite photos the deepest oceans are the deepest blues. Blue in its purest form—a single slice of light—is only space.

At some point, Yves Klein had settled on the bluest shade of blue he could find. He teamed up with a Parisian colour-maker named Edouard Adam and developed a matte resin that would bind to the ultramarine pigment and create a blue that was wholly untouchable: it wouldn’t glimmer and wouldn’t glisten, and so retained all its dry, untouchable depth, casting no glow and revealing no impurity.

Yves painted sculptures and canvases and objects and human bodies in his signature ultramarine. He coloured globes and plates and sponges and tabletops and his mad blue pigment became a masterpiece of its own.

He called it International Klein Blue, and registered his paint formula with the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle. He never patented it, and maybe he didn’t need to. Today, artists and art fans use IKB or IK Blue when referring to the colour, and it’s printed in reverence on pillows and keychains and tote bags and bedspreads around the world.

Yves Klein’s life was brief and dramatic and, after a certain point, entirely blue. The sky was his first inspiration, his eternal studio, his ultimate masterpiece. He died at thirty-four of an unexpected heart attack, right at the height of his art world fame. But just before his death, he turned to his friend. “I’m about to go,” he said. “I’m about to go into the biggest studio in the world, and I will only do immaterial works."