Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour

by Carol Mavor

The sea, the sky, the veins of your hands, the earth when photographed from space—blue sometimes seems to overwhelm all the other shades of our world in its all-encompassing presence.

The blues of Blue Mythologies include those present in the world’s religions, eggs, science, slavery, gender, sex, art, the literary past, and contemporary film. Carol Mavor’s engaging and elegiac readings in this beautifully illustrated book take the reader from the blue of a newborn baby’s eyes to Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and from the films of Derek Jarman and Krzysztof Kiéslowski to the islands of Venice and Aran.

In each example Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture. In an echo of Roland Barthes’s essays in Mythologies , blue is unleashed as our most familiar and most paradoxical color. At once historical, sociological, literary, and visual, Blue Mythologies gives us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales, and connotations of those somethings blue.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Essays, Art History, Theory, Photography, Mythology

224 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 2013

About the author

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour; Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott; Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden; and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs.

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

My recent dissatisfaction with Maggie Nelson's Bluets made me want to return to Mavor's work on the same hue, which syncs much more with my own sensibilities. I love the constellations of her subjects & references which encompasses Giotto, Chantal Akerman, Joseph Cornell, Proust, Varda, various cyanotype artists, John Singer Sargent, Fortuny, Helen Chadwick, & countless more, spinning them into little jewel-like essays "with an eye to the novelesque that she terms "mythologies."

I did wish that there was something a little stronger than an acknowledgment of paradox & multiplicity to tie all these texts together; it's finally so diaphanous that after turning the final page it all just kind of seems to... drift away, as if swallowed up into an endless blue sky. Which is appropriate in its own way, of course. And certainly the main pleasure here is in the journey, of all the countless little unexpected pathways to explore along the way.

"Blue Mythologies uncloaks blue as a particularly paradoxical color. The conflicting temperaments of blue unravel easily. For instance, blue is the purity of the Virgin Mary, yet blue names a move as obscene... the yarn of this book takes up many hues of the colour, yet its pattern remains faithful to one 'over and done with' thread: blue is paradoxical; it is self-contradictory, yet true."

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Blue blossoms and blooms into blues within blues.” Carol Mavor’s formally ingenious look at the endlessly enigmatic hue, Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour is richly researched, sonorous in scope and style, and a vast mine for a magpie mind to pick and choose from. With Colette and other “connoisseurs of blue” we are led through several blue subjects: Yves Klein, Gainsborough, blue pencils, blue movies, blue blood and blue eyes, the sky and the sea and the Virgin Mary’s lapis lazuli cloak, blue flowers, blue earth, indigo milk mushrooms, Kieślowski, Proust, Francis Alÿs, and of course above all is Roland Barthes, whose Mythologies underpins much of Mavor’s form and thinking. Mavor, in her essays long and short, crafts “blue bowers that perform the mythology of blue as paradoxical”, not as contradictory but as an artistic solution. “In the distance, she beckons me with her blue silence.” “Nothing is missing. There is nothing to be found. He is as limitless, as abject, as the colour blue.” All these blue things, blue people, blue ideas, ebb and flow like blue water while Mavor circles, orbits, blueness, in its familiarities and its strangenesses — the places we are used to seeing it and the places we can’t help but miss it. Most rewarding for me was Mavor asking “what could be richer than a ‘narrative’ of blue that is juxtaposed by red?”, a question which in its rhetorical way confirms something I had myself suspected and hoped to be true (and which I owe in no small part to Maggie Nelson). I so loved immersing myself in Mavor’s lean prose and enlivening blue reveries.

[Eavan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I feel like I should preface this with the fact I was actually able to meet the author and view some original Anna Atkins cyanotypes at the Getty at a talk with her book. I was late and only caught the last of her presentation, but beyond the 10 or so of us in there Mavor’s passion for the art described in her book was palpable.

After prying it from my aunt’s unread hands, I was finally able to read it. What I got was at times beautiful, at times frustrating “essay poem” on art involving the color blue. Fever dream it was—I can tell you with certainty I was glad when it was over.

Mavor strings each chapter together with a small unifying theme, connecting threads that are (as I even said earlier) sometimes apparent and gorgeous, to downright superficial and contrived. Heavy on the À la recherche du temps perdu and Giotto’s Chapel, I can’t say I was totally lost, but the insistence in weaving them and other common art pieces together seemed ceaseless by the end (“Proust, again??”).

At the end of the day, this book felt like it was made by Mavor for Mavor, and I think I’m just not on her train on thought to appreciate it. I didn’t particularly learn much, and instead, I felt whisked into her musings on the most esoteric of films and art. It was ultimately her playground of the obscure and I just wasn't there for the ride.

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm obsessed with blue, and the ending on Utopias honestly made this a 4 star, it was inspiring, but also not necessarily original connection the author made but some. While I felt unread Black and Blue rather easily this book honestly took me a year to finish, 3/4 of the way through it became a but contrived. Would I recommend it? Probably. Is it for everyone? No definitely not.

[Anton Løkke Laursen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vivid study of the colour blue. Some entries are concise and subversive, while others tend to be somewhat far-fetched. That being said, Mavor is a great tour guide, guiding us into the web of blues spilled through decades of culture.

[Anna · Rating 1 out of 5]

🙄🙄🙄

ma'am PLEASE put the French philosophers down -- they do not deserve to suffer in this way. I bought this book years ago at the National Gallery of Art because, well, I love the color blue, ever since I was a child. This book is really not an ode to blue in the way I expected it would be (for a Real and Certified Ode to Blue, please see Bluets by Maggie Nelson). The book is essentially just a collection of every thought the author has ever had, sloppily tied together with the color blue (and the aforementioned overworked French philosophers). After finishing the book, I returned to the introduction to see what, if anything, the theme/takeaway/point of it all was, only to find there really wasn't one. Strictly vibes here and the vibes are rancid.

[AraLucia Ashburne · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was like an amazing cultural dessert platter of blueness. I didn't know about most of the sources she lightly touched on and she almost always left me wanting more. The plates chosen were a great dialogue with the narrative. Fascinating. Loved it!

[Courtney · Rating 1 out of 5]

It’s a beautiful book—I enjoyed the many full color graphics and the blue ribbon bookmark—but I had hoped for more. I learned a little, but mostly it felt like reading someone’s scatterbrained journal. I should have expected this from the title, though. It lives up to “Reflections.”

[Rickerdoo · Rating 5 out of 5]

As one who emprically believes blue is the most important color to my imagination, this book testifies.

[Paige]

review: http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/las...

[Michaela · Rating 2 out of 5]

Peculiar but curious.

[Carol Mavor]

This book is original. It is a theory-poem with beautiful reproductions and the plus of a blue ribbon bookmark.