YCBA Gets Tangled Up In Blue

Maybe it’s a light seen through a window at twilight, far away. Maybe it’s the light at the end of a tunnel. Or maybe it’s something more distinct rendered blurry. Something’s coming, but we don’t know what it is.

Anish Kapoor’s Shadow IV: Dark Blue is accompanied by a quote from the artist in The Guardian from November 7, 2008: ​“That’s what I am interested in: the void, the moment when it isn’t a hole, it is a space full of what isn’t there.”

But placed in the context of ​“Chromatic Crosscurrents: Blue and the British Empire” — running now at the Yale Center for British Art on Chapel Street until Aug. 11 — there is a lot to Kapoor’s piece. It’s the final chapter in a story about a color that also happens to be a story about the legacy of the crimes and misdemeanors of the British Empire. In the context of the museum, it’s the latest example of a show that, refreshingly, isn’t afraid to bite the hand that feeds it, just a little.

The exhibit starts out by pointing out that, in pre-imperial Britain, the pigment blue was a little hard to come by. ​“The only natural source of blue dye derived from a plant called woad, which proved useful for dyeing textiles but could not be used as paint,” the accompanying text explains. ​“A much
more vivid form of blue was eventually obtained from indigo plants grown in India. Most blue pigments used in European painting were sourced from afar, such as the bright ultramarine pigment that came from the mineral lapis lazuli buried deep in the mountains of northern Afghanistan. The desire for lapis lazuli and indigo, among other sources of blue pigment, was part of a larger story of trade and colonialism over the course of British history.”

By tracing the history of the pigment in Europe, one can trace the history of the rise of the East India Company, perhaps the main vehicle for the creation of the British Empire. ​“The company was the primary importer of goods traveling from India to England and carried indigo, calico printed textiles, and Chinese porcelain, among other commodities,” the accompanying text states. The association of the color blue with the subjects of Britain’s far-flung empire seeped into art from the imperial era.

Edward Lear — yes, the famous cartoonist and nonsense poet — made his living as a travel artist, expertly depicting places far from London for people who could not travel there. Not all of his paintings were landscapes. Some depicted people, but when they did, the text points out, the features were indistinct enough to take away the subjects’ individuality. As often, Lear left the people out altogether. ​“Lear highlighted the dramatic grandeur of the Indian landscape rather than portraying its bustling urban centers,” the text observes. ​“His emphasis on untouched nature, in part accomplished through wide empty swaths of blue skies and rivers, aligned with a visual strategy employed by other imperial powers. The paintings reinforce the notion that so-called underutilized land would be better managed by nonindigenous people, and therefore foreign settlers should have a natural right to claim control.” For the British themselves, the text suggests, it was easier to contemplate ruling the world if they didn’t have to consider just how many people they were subjugating.

Meanwhile, British elites developed a taste for acquiring blue objects from their imperial subjects as a status symbol. ​“Their ownership of these expensive and exotic items signaled a cultural, if not political, appropriation of China,” the text states. In turn, demand from wealthy British households sparked a change in the way ceramics were produced in China: ​“China started an export ceramic made exclusively to cater to Western taste, churning out traditional blue-and-white motifs of flora and fauna on European forms such as mugs and candlesticks.” The layers of meaning, and perhaps irony, piled on as still-lifes possibly using similarly imported pigments were painted of these very objects, suggesting just how deeply the colonial enterprise saturated day-to-day life in Britain itself.

By the early 18th century, however, the strong connection between the pigment and the mechanisms of empire began to give way under innovation, as ​“synthetic pigments such as Prussian blue and cobalt were created and produced in Europe,” the text explains. ​“Not only were these dyes more affordable but they also tended to remain stable over time, in contrast to natural pigments.” Over time the color blue went from being something that needed to be imported from Indian or the Caribbean to something that could be made in a factory. The cost of the pigment plummeted. In time, anyone could get it as part of a paint set.

The exhibit doesn’t make much of this, but one’s mind drifts to what the effect of this innovation was on Britain’s colonial subjects, who would remain so for another couple centuries. What sway they held as the producers of a precious commodity was eventually broken. Yet they remained subjects of colonial rule.

So it’s right and good that the exhibit ends with Kapoor’s work, with a nod to fellow postcolonial artist Yinka Shonibare’s more pointed, political work in the next gallery over. Kapoor and Shonibare are both examples of postcolonial painters creating works and being recognized in Western cultural institutions, in ways that likely would have been denied them in imperial times. But there’s also a sense that we shouldn’t be lulled into a sense of complacency. We are still dealing with the legacy of the British Empire, from the borders it drew across the Middle East that are still a source of conflict to the vast worldwide inequalities in wealth that it created, which are still all too much in place today. What reckoning is yet to come? What will the art that reflects that look like? And will it make it into Western museums?

“Chromatic Crossroads: Blue and the British Empire” runs at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St., through August 11. Admission is free. Visit the museum’s website for hours and more information.