With their parallels between the contours of the female body and the curves of domestic objects like toasters, these paintings might be thought to offer some kind of crypto-feminist attack on the affluent society. But Hamilton seems to be offering a more ambivalent commentary. Chrome, especially in its automotive guise, had acquired a macho appeal that persists today especially on American trucks and motorbikes. Yet, as Hamilton’s next major painting was to observe, chrome was also found desirable by women. The work is called $he and shows in semi-abstract form part of a woman’s torso, an apron, a pink fridge door hanging open, and, in the foreground, a mutant chrome appliance that appears to be part-toaster, part-vacuum cleaner. ‘This relationship of woman and appliances is a fundamental theme of our culture,’ Hamilton said of the work, ‘as obsessive and archetypal as the Western movie gun duel.’ Whatever they thought of such paintings, women were not slow to appreciate that chromium’s pristine white shine represented a sharp improvement on the metals formerly used for housewares, copper and pewter, which needed frequent polishing. ‘No metal, it seems to me, is quite so complete an answer to the housewife’s prayer as chromium,’ wrote the pre-eminent American social commentator Emily Post, who found it ‘appealing not only to the eye, but to practical requirements’.
Very quickly, however, chrome seemed to change from a material promising a kind of universal glamour to one that was flash and even tawdry. Writers were first to see past the glitter. One cultural critic observed: ‘there is little wrong with the American car that is not wrong with the American public’, neatly inverting the nostrum of the General Motors president that ‘what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa’. Vladimir Nabokov describes Lolita’s mother’s ‘depressingly bright kitchen, with its chrome glitter and Hardware and Co. Calendar and cute breakfast nook’–one of many writers’ images of the territory that Don DeLillo identifies in his massive novel Underworld as ‘lonely-chrome America’.
Chromium had lost its grip on the imagination of the socially aspirant, and the metal’s reputation now fell from the cliff edge where it was perched. The fetishistic quality of polished chrome was exploited in erotic art, where the naked female body was displayed as gleaming machine. Chrome (‘her pretty childface smooth as steel’) is the name of a prostitute in William Gibson’s short story of that name, written in 1982. Post-modernist artists like Jeff Koons gave chrome another shove on its way, recreating the kind of worthless bauble normally found dangling from a rear-view mirror on a monumental scale in polished chromium stainless steel, and relishing the irony of his super-size shiny tokens of extreme bad taste–with names like Rabbit, Candy Heart and Balloon Dog–selling at auction for millions of dollars. At the same time, ‘chrome’ surfaces themselves have grown more fake than ever as it has become possible to coat even plastics with glossy metallic finishes.
At another remove from material truth, the visual simulation of chrome–hard to achieve because the eye is acutely sensitive to irregularities in the polished surface–became a benchmark for realism in computer graphics, recorded in cult films such as Lawnmower Man and Terminator 2. Yet even the computer graphics wizards have begun to see past the surface, for, since those films were made, in the early 1990s, they have started to use ‘chrome’ as a term of abuse for work that strives too much for effect.
Abbé Suger’s Sheet Sapphire
The approach to the abbey church of St Denis outside Paris is less than promising, and the first sight of it across bleak urban plazas is little better. The building is squat, lopsided and somewhat dishevelled. But I have come for what is inside, and as soon as I have adjusted to the dimness I realize I am not to be disappointed. My first impression is of a soaring verticality, created by ranks of columns rising cleanly to the roof. Despite the charmless grey stone, the interior is light by medieval standards because of the great number of stained-glass windows and the slenderness of the piers between them. Towards the altar, a deep blue light preponderates, seeming almost to magnify the sunlight even as it transforms its colour. Other colours in the stained glass cast jewelled strands of light across the floor. The blue radiance, on the other hand, seems not so much to strike in one place as to ooze around and slowly engulf me. The effect is submarine.
St Denis is the prototype of the Gothic cathedral, the magnificent creation of the famous Abbot Suger. We tend to think of Gothic architecture as heavy and spooky, but this is not the case here. The blue glass, one of many beautiful and novel materials that Suger employed, is concentrated for maximum effect in the windows at the east end of the cathedral, where the expectant gaze of worshippers is answered by the morning sun. Suger said the church ‘shone with a marvellous, uninterrupted light’.
Where some of the windows were restored in the nineteenth century, the colours are brighter in the replaced panes, and the detail is sharper where they have been etched. But the authentic Gothic blue remains quite as intense as the new. It is clear from the nativity window that its medieval craftsmen knew the colour was special: Christ himself is swaddled in the rich blue, and Mary, too, is draped in it.
Blue has always been one of the hardest colours to extract from nature, often seeming as intangible as the sky itself. But Suger was able to take advantage of newfound sources of top-quality blue, which was obtained from ores of the as yet unknown metal cobalt. Cobalt compounds can attain an intensity of colour five times that of any other colorant of glass, and the availability of these exceptional minerals sparked a remarkable fashion for blue in the twelfth century. Following the example of St Denis, first Chartres, then Le Mans and other great churches of the period flaunted ‘precious sheets of sapphire’ in their windows. Inspired by the glass-makers, other crafts began to make more frequent use of blue in enamelwork, painting, clothing and heraldry. The colour came to be favoured for the Virgin Mary’s dress, and through this holy association was also adopted by the French monarchy. I realize as I leave St Denis and make my way back into Paris that this blue is all over the city: on the traditional blue-and-white enamel street names and on the signs in the Métro.
By the end of the century, demand for blue glass was so great that other blues, derived from copper and manganese, had to be employed to meet ecclesiastical demand. But while these less stable tones have deteriorated over the centuries, the cobalt blue at St Denis and wherever else it has been used has remained as true and intense as in Suger’s day, its ‘luminous darkness’ considered by some to be the perfect representation of ‘Divine presence’.
By analysing its characteristic impurities, it is possible in principle to trace any mineral back to its source, like a detective analysing soil from a shoe. In practice, though, the work of matching the elements found in finished artefacts with the composition of specific mine ores has hardly begun. It seems likely, however, that Suger’s blue came one way or another from mines in Persia. Traders may have carried raw smaltite ore–or the glassy derivative of it known as smalt–directly to France, but it is impossible to be sure of this as medieval glass was often made from recycled Roman glass and Byzantine mosaic tiles, whose raw materials would have come from the same Persian sources.
Smaltite is a shiny grey mineral that offers little clue to the intense colour that lies hidden within it. The cobalt oxide that is obtained by roasting it in air is also dull in appearance. Only when this material is fused together with quartz or potash does it form the bright blue smalt. As a glassy material itself, smalt is perfect for fusing into glass and ceramics, but despite its intense colour it is less suitable as a pigment in paint. If ground too fine, it begins to scatter all light rather than just reflecting the blue, and this makes it appear pale. But too coarse-ground, it leads to a streaky finish in oil paint. Nevertheless, smalt pigments were used by sixteenth-century artists often as a base or thinly dispersed in painted skies. Painters such as Titian, who conspicuously included many blue garments in their paintings and who did use smalt, still preferred to use ultramarine, made from lapis lazuli, for
the finish.
I buy a small pot of smalt from an artists’ supplier. It is not a powder like other pigments, but grainy to the touch like a very fine sand. Under a bright light, I can see that the intense blue is subtly modulated: the colour of the material itself is darker than I first perceived but is lightened by the sparkle from its crystal grains. I mix some with linseed oil, working like the artists of the Renaissance. The mixture crunches gently under my spatula and darkens almost to black as the liquid spreads through the pigment. Colour returns as I spread the mixed paint on canvas, but no matter how thinly I do this I cannot produce a pale blue, only ever scratchier flecks and streaks of the intense original colour.
A new, European, source advanced the popularity of blue in the sixteenth century, when it was found that the long-established silver mines in the mountains between Saxony and Bohemia were also rich in smaltite. The Saxon ore miners, traditionally regarded as the best in Europe, hated the toil of extracting the new mineral, however. The labour was hard and involved exposure to harmful fumes, released when the ore’s other main ingredient, arsenic, was roasted off. The miners blamed their woes on a little earth demon named Kobold.
When Goethe’s Faust first summons the figure of Mephistopheles, he invokes ‘the elemental four’ of fire, air, water and earth in turn, with earth personified by this evil spirit:
First, to confront this thing of hell,
I must repeat the four-fold spell:
Salamander bright shall burn,
Sylph invisible shall turn,
Undine flow within her wave,
Kobold shall slave.
The Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg titled a growling, aggressive little piano scherzo of his ‘Smatrold’ (meaning ‘little troll’); the Germans call the same piece ‘Kobold’, but the chosen English translation, ‘Puck’, fails to capture the real nastiness of the character.
Of course, the fact that its chemical constitution wasn’t properly known and that the element behind it lacked a name of its own did nothing to prevent the blue pigment from becoming a highly marketable commodity. Cobalt prospered anonymously for centuries before it was eventually discovered, in around 1735, when the chemist and controller of the Swedish mint Georg Brandt divined that smaltite was not merely the compound of known metals and arsenic that had been assumed. He named the new metal cobalt after this incubus of the underground in tribute to those unlucky miners–and perhaps also as a way of wresting this name from its pagan associations and fastening it instead to the shield of Enlightenment science.
Smalt was highly compatible not only with glass-making but also with the materials and processes of pottery. It was one of the few substances that kept its colour when the pottery was fired. Indeed, heat intensified the blue. Other colours could always be painted on afterwards, but the opportunity to seal in the colour beneath the glaze guaranteed its dominance. The earliest European wares to use this blue in their designs, such as majolica and faience, relied on cobalt from Persia, as did the glass-makers of Venice. Though compositions vary, the blue glasses and ceramics used in Islamic and Christian decorative arts of the medieval period also contain cobalt from this fruitful source. The jewel of Persian civilization is the public mosque that Shah Abbas I built at the beginning of the seventeenth century in Isfahan, its façade a blaze of golden Arabic script set against this same blue glaze. The Chinese, who had been creating blue designs in their ceramics since the ninth century, also relied on Persian supplies of ‘Mohammedan blue’, transported along the Silk Road. This art reached its apogee during the Ming Dynasty. The craftsmen of this period often restricted their palette to this single colour, preferring its stylized contrast with the icy white of the porcelain to more naturally coloured scenes.
In my mind’s eye I have an image of dusty blue tracks radiating east and west from the mines of Persia and Saxony to the great artistic centres of the world, like the starbursts on an airline route map. The lines kept on spreading. European potters, inspired by the Ming porcelain first introduced to Portugal by returning explorers and then imported in greater quantities by the Dutch East India Company, sought to emulate the Chinese artistry using the local smalt from Saxony. Delft became the centre of this activity, and the city’s name has become synonymous with the blue-and-white pottery that was created throughout the Netherlands at this time. In 1708, a new mix of clays and hotter kilns finally enabled Europe to rival Chinese porcelain. Royal Saxon porcelain produced at Meissen, close to sources of smalt as well as the new clays, soon came in many patterns, but one of the most enduring is Blue Onion, a floral design loosely based on a Chinese original. Other porcelain factories quickly sprang up throughout Europe. Despite the advent of pigments in other colours, the blue designs that many of them have produced from the outset remain some of their most popular.
In Britain, too, Chinese-inspired blue designs were an early success for the eighteenth-century porcelain factories of Royal Worcester and Spode, which found ways to industrialize the production of tableware. One of these designs, Willow Pattern, is still sold today. The first English maker of fine porcelain was William Cookworthy, a Plymouth pharmacist who founded his own works in order to exploit the china clay deposits he had discovered in Cornwall. He was also to be the key to the smalt trade in Britain. Cookworthy’s trade and location were essential to his achievement. In the busy naval port, he had the pick of exotic raw materials from Britain’s overseas colonies and foreign lands. He bought pottery clay from Virginia and chemicals to make up the medicines that he then supplied to the navy and other outbound shipping. He recognized the superiority of Saxony smalt and moved to gain a monopoly of the material imported to Britain. When Cookworthy later shifted his own china production to Bristol, he was in a good position to control the supply of imported smalt taken up the River Severn into the heart of the Potteries, where, in 1784, the manufacturer Spode began transfer-printing images using a cobalt underglaze to create the most distinctive of all English blue tableware.
Cookworthy’s smalt soon found favour with the city’s glass industry, too. Bristol was one of the vertices in the ‘triangular trade’ linking Britain with Africa and the Caribbean via the slave trade. The sugar arriving at Bristol from plantations in Britain’s Caribbean colonies provided an incentive to set up local distilleries, and these in turn generated a demand for bottles. Bottles were one of the many manufactured goods then exported to Africa and elsewhere, completing the infamous triangle.
Although coloured glass and clear glass are similar in chemical composition and basic properties, coloured glass attracted a lower excise duty than clear glass, which was usually destined for the table, or for windows and chandeliers. In order to avoid the higher duty, bottle-glass-makers made sure to colour their glass. By the second half of the eighteenth century Bristol was famed for its coloured glasses: as well as greens and browns due to iron impurities, they developed a deep blue glass from Cookworthy’s smalt. Most bottle glasses didn’t merit a second glance, but the blue glass, which was novel and unquestionably beautiful, quickly found a market. This glass was made into decanters and stemware in the height of Georgian style, appealing to the prosperous merchants of the city and the nouveaux riches of nearby Bath and beyond. The boom was short-lived, however. The loss of the American colonies after the War of Independence precipitated the collapse of the entire industry, leaving behind little more than the phrase Bristol Blue.
In 1996, Harvey’s, a sherry importer long based in the city (now swallowed up by some placeless international conglomerate), decided to commemorate its centenary by putting its most popular Bristol Cream sherry in blue bottles. The marketing idea was a great success, and the sherry comes arrayed in Bristol Blue to this day.
I bought my smalt from a famous old artists’ materials shop, J. Cornelissen and Son in Bloomsbury. The place looks much as it must have done when Monet and Pissarro bought supplies for their London townscapes and André Derain selected the flamboyant new cadmium colours for his psychedelic visi
on, The Pool of London. Black wooden shelves rise on all sides from the plain board floor right to the ceiling. Tubes of paint are set out in racks at eye height, but the most striking feature is the rows of huge glass-stoppered bottles above them, containing violent shades of powdered pigment. This is colour as pure as it comes. The cobalt blue was brighter and paler than my sandy smalt, with a distinct hint of red. Alongside it was manganese blue, a fabulously bright, green-tainted blue based on barium manganate, as well as chrome yellows and greens, a wide range of brilliant cadmiums and cobalt violet, a confectionery shade so improbable that it could hardly be imagined to have a natural origin.
Later I pay a visit to Cornelissen’s warehouse to see the pigment buyer. A curious affinity must have drawn him to work here, for his name is Ole Corneliussen. Danish by birth, he insists he is unrelated to the Belgian who established the business in 1855, and he spells his name differently. I am mildly disappointed to learn that his job does not involve touring mineral deposits in far-off lands. ‘I don’t know if you’ve seen the spice market in Istanbul,’ Ole ventures a little ruefully. I nod. ‘It’s not like that.’ Instead, samples are requested from the manufacturer and sent in for approval; where the pigment was extracted or refined seldom figures in the buying decision. Siennas may still come from near Siena and copper colours such Terre Vert from Cyprus, but material quality always overrides sentimental history.
All the old pigments are still obtainable, even orpiment and realgar, the ancient yellows and reds based on deeply unpleasant sulphides of arsenic, which are bought by specialists restoring old artworks. Often the colours are not quite as they first appear to be. Even black and white are not black-and-white. Ordinary lamp black, the carbon powder traditionally made by burning oil lamps, I see, is not really black but a very deep blue-grey; spinel black, based on manganese and copper oxides, is far blacker. Ole shows me some of the last Flake White he will be able to sell before new European health and safety regulations come into force, after which artists will have to make do with titanium white. They are not all happy at the prospect. ‘Titanium is very sticky when you grind it, whereas Flake White has this elastic feel you get from the lead,’ he explains. Flake White is lead carbonate made from a mille-feuille of sheet lead and chalk layers–hence ‘flake’. The mixed paint feels heavy on the brush because it is so dense, and handles and dries in a way that artists love.
Periodic Tales Page 29
