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The Blue Hour in Symbolism and Surrealism

(12.4.2023) Here we are going to inspect what is known as the ›fin de sičcle‹. We are contemplating the motif of the blue hour in painting and literature at around 1900 in Europe, we will also provide some useful data, and it seems reasonable to map the territory with defining two points of entry: Symbolism and Surrealism. We will realize that what painter and poets ›make‹ of the phenomena of dusk and dawn at around 1900 has to do with observation, but can turn into reflection, and vice versa. One cannot be thought without the other. And there is no definition of a fin de sičcle blue hour, of course. What we are observing are movements, configurations, and we are assembling some possibilities rather than to systematically explore the field.

1) Observing the Light, Analyzing the Mood

The 1887 painting Avenue de Clichy by Louis Anquetin (on the left) could simply be read as a document concerning the social history of light. One might see a café, but actually (if informed) we see a butcher’s shop, not a café, and the kind of urban life we might think to observe might be actually another kind of urban life.
At any rate we see gaslight on the one hand, but twilight, urban twilight on the other. Is is a painting about observing the urban life, or about observing the atmospheres in which urban life takes place?

A year later, in 1888, Max Klinger embarked on painting the work which perhaps might serve as a main point of reference in fin de sičcle culture (on the right): his The Blue Hour painting was finished in 1890 and acquired by the Museum der Bildenden Künste of Leipzig in 1904. Informations and also a key of how to read that painting go back to the artist, and perhaps this was necessary, because on some level what Klinger did was new (while on some other level it was old).
According to the artist it is a depiction of three ways of dreaming, a dull daydreaming (probably the figure in the middle), a visionary dreaming with references in the open wide (the figure on the left), and a ›getting the creeps‹ dreaming (figure on the right). Although the painting, on first sight, has nothing to do with urban life, it seems that it started with observing the atmospheres of twilight in Paris. Not every viewer did or does identify the hour as an evening mood, which seems to be the general trend today, yet a 1893 reviewer described the atmosphere as that of morning with a double light: a fading moonlight contrasting with a light by fire, which is placed behind a rock.

With this painting, one might say, the blue hour motif turned towards reflection. Towards an analysis of how people do dream, perhaps their kind of dusk- or dawn-dreaming, as one might say, being triggered by actually experienced atmospheres, but the more reflective, analytical approach is obvious, since three types of dreaming are presented. These are some quintessential human stances, or moods, or experiences, the painting seems to say, and although observing and studying atmospheres of evening at the Seine might have been the initial impulse.

It was unfamiliar what Klinger did, in 1893, since a reviewer had to explain to his audiences that this was not a painting with a ›story‹, but a painting that showed human beings, three nudes, or three versions of a human figure (lit by fire), in the atmosphere of blue twilight. But on some other level one might compare what Klinger did, who also painted mythological paintings (a Judgment of Paris, for example, and at the same time), with what Titian did in his painting which is known as the Sacred and Profane Love, which might show a golden hour (before the sun actually has sunk below the horizon) and not a blue one (after the sun has sunk below the horizon), but also might be described as displaying a more analytical approach, if, indeed it is a depiction of sacred vs. profane love, represented by, as one might think, one and the same human, or apparently human figure.

In 1895, when Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck coined the expression of ennui bleu, he exemplified, according to Angelika Overath, what decadent poets made of the motif of the blue hour: the mere display of a mood which is no longer directly related to the observation of real atmospheres, but rather a state outside actual time and space, a state of boredom, lack of energy, in which, however (and as one may add), some joy or at least motivation of observing that very state and its (inner) references can be found.

(Picture: wikiart.com)

We might also discuss the 1899 Blaue Stunde by Stefan George here, which, however seems to have been inspired by social gatherings rather than by mere introspection; but it seems more important to me to say once that the other, perhaps also quintessential blue hour painting, that by Albert Besnard, seems to be lost. I have not been able, at any rate, to identify it or to find a picture of it, but, again according to Overath, it was painted at the same time as the painting by Klinger. Other paintings by Besnard, portraits of people at the time of the wilight hour, seem to show comparable moods.

2) The Blue Hour (Phase; Period) in Picasso

While the Blue Period in Picasso seems to be generally known, it should also be stressed that Picasso seems to have explored all possibilities of painting of his day: we find a 1903 study of dawn (on the left), which is definitively not a Symbolist, but rather an Impressionist painting (although Picasso seems to have disliked Impressionism). In his Blue Period, on the other hand, Picasso seems to have turned more towards Maeterlinck and Klinger, with analysing the bodily stance of people daydreaming, and perhaps the expression of dull daydreaming is very concise as to describing what many paintings of the blue period of Picasso were about: about showing how various people dealt with poverty and misery, which is not necessarily the same thing as displaying ennui bleu, but rather a turning back towards raising the social question of who and why is living in misery and poverty and how (we see Picasso’s friend and later secretary Jaime Sabartčs).

3) The Blue Hour in Surrealism

(Picture: Louis Aragon; photo by Man Ray)

With Surrealism, with the literature of Surrealism, we are returning to the observation of urban life, which might not be that obvious. But I am thinking of Louis Aragon, and of Louis Aragon as a flaneur and observer of urban life, researching the labyrinths of urban life, of shops, department stores, and describing the confusing worlds of confusing objects interacting in artificial light. Personally I see Surrealism as a return of the Romantic Movement, a return focussing on urban life, but as a stance which always hopes for what actually might be underneath or behind surfaces and settings, hoping for marvellous things, but fearing also that things might get you the creeps. And the setting is now urban Paris. At dusk. But a commercially lit big city, with its department stores, advertisements, on the one hand, but also the Paris of marginal scenes and objects. And everything is interacting with everything else – in the mind of the observer and writer, a vague de ręves:

»Il y a une lumičre surréaliste: celle qui ŕ l’heure oů les villes s’enflamment tombe sur l’étalage saumon des bas de soie; celle qui flambe dans les magasins de la Bénédictine et sa sśur pâle dans la perle des dépôts d’eau minérale; celle qui éclaire en sourdine le bureau bleu des voyages aux champs de bataille, place Vendôme; celle qui subsiste tard avenue de l’Opéra chez Barclay, quand les cravates se muent en fantômes; la lumičre des lampes de poche sur les assassinés et l’amour. Il y a une lumičre surréaliste dans les yeux de toutes les femmes.« (Une vague de ręves, 1924, p. 15)

We might think back of Louis Anquetin, when a café turns out to be actually a butcher’s shop, but this is exactly the experience of the big city, the ›surreal light‹, the surreal gaze, as being displayed already, perhaps, by Anquetin in 1888, when Surrealism (of the 1920s) was still to come. But different worlds of different imaginations are clashing in this picture, as they were going to clash in the literature of Surrealism. And the twilight, when everything seems to be in evolution, in movement, preparing for metamorphoses, may be the right time to observe – or to stage – such clashes. Or revelations.