Sacre Bleu
Two: The Women, They Come and Go
Three: The Wrestling Dogs of Montmartre, Paris
Five: Gentlemen with Paint Under Their Nails
Six: Portrait of a Rat Catcher
Seven: Form, Line, Light, Shadow
Eight: Aphrodite Waving Like a Lunatic
Nine: Nocturne In Black and Gold
Thirteen: The Woman in The Storeroom
Fourteen: We Are Painters, and Therefore Somewhat Useless
Sixteen: It’s Pronounced Bas’Tahrd
Seventeen: In The Latin Quarter
Nineteen: The Dark Carp of Giverny
Twenty: Breakfast at The Black Cat
Twenty-two: The End of The Master
Twenty-three: Closed Due to Death
Twenty-four: The Architecture of Amusement
Twenty-five: The Painted People
Twenty-six: The The, The The, and the Color Theorist
Twenty-seven: The Case of The Smoldering Shoes
Twenty-nine: Two Grunts Rising
Epilogue in Blue: Then There Was
Bleu
,
Cher
Afterword: So, Now You’ve Ruined Art
I always feel like a traveler, going somewhere, toward some
destination. If I sense that this destination doesn’t in fact
exist, that seems to me quite reasonable and very likely true.
—V
INCENT VAN
G
OGH,
J
ULY
22, 1888
Well, I have risked my life for my work, and it has cost me
half my reason—
—V
INCENT VAN
G
OGH,
J
ULY
23, 1890
T
his is a story about the color blue. It may dodge and weave, hide and deceive, take you down paths of love and history and inspiration, but it’s always about blue.
How do you know, when you think
blue
—when you say
blue
—that you are talking about the same blue as anyone else?
You cannot get a grip on blue.
Blue is the sky, the sea, a god’s eye, a devil’s tail, a birth, a strangulation, a virgin’s cloak, a monkey’s ass. It’s a butterfly, a bird, a spicy joke, the saddest song, the brightest day.
Blue is sly, slick, it slides into the room sideways, a slippery trickster.
This is a story about the color blue, and like blue, there’s nothing true about it. Blue is beauty, not truth. “True blue” is a ruse, a rhyme; it’s there, then it’s not. Blue is a deeply sneaky color.
Even deep blue is shallow.
Blue is glory and power, a wave, a particle, a vibration, a resonance, a spirit, a passion, a memory, a vanity, a metaphor, a dream.
Blue is a simile.
Blue, she is like a woman.
Auvers, France, July 1890
O
N THE DAY HE WAS TO BE MURDERED
, V
INCENT VAN
G
OGH ENCOUNTERED
a Gypsy on the cobbles outside the inn where he’d just eaten lunch.
“Big hat,” said the Gypsy.
Vincent paused and slung the easel from his shoulder. He tipped his yellow straw hat back. It was, indeed, big.
“Yes, madame,” he said. “It serves to keep the sun out of my eyes while I work.”
The Gypsy, who was old and broken, but younger and less broken than she played—because no one gives a
centime
to a fresh, unbroken beggar—rolled an umber eye to the sky over the Oise River Valley, where storm clouds boiled above the tile roofs of Pontoise, then spat at the painter’s feet.
“There’s no sun, Dutchman. It’s going to rain.”
“Well, it will keep the rain out of my eyes just as well.” Vincent studied the Gypsy’s scarf, yellow with a border of green vines embroidered upon it. Her shawl and skirts, each a different color, spilled in a tattered rainbow to be muted under a layer of dust at her feet. He should paint her, perhaps. Like Millet’s peasants, but with a brighter palette. Have the figure stand out against the field.