Dietrich / MulticulturalTwilight

Multicultural Twilight

(10.6.2023) This is a premiere: the first essay ever discussing the blue hour in terms of global popular culture. And it is K-pop, Korean popular music, that brought the blue hour back – on the level of global popular culture. To which, in 1912, a French perfumer, Jacques Guerlain (see picture above) had brought it, with issuing a perfume called L’Heure Bleue. So it is about discernment, about clarifying things and relations between things here: there is a blue hour on the level of poetry (and we have to think of Rimbaud); and there is the phenomenon of twilight in nature. There are the names that various cultures have given twilight (and often without knowing of Rimbaud; and there is cultural appropriation as well as a general flow of global popular culture. And there is a certain genealogy of things that we have to understand: which is why we will start with talking about a Korean boy band here, a band named TXT, and their 2020 song: Blue Hour.

1) Issuing a Song – Uploading the Blue Hour

In global popular culture anything can suddenly float on the surface: another K-pop band (Tri.be; a girl band) now brought the Latin language back – with the line veni, vidi, vici, appearing within the lyrics of their 2021 song Would You Run. And in 2020 we had the blue hour, with TXT.
May one dare to propose a hypothesis? A hypothesis that it was the perfume, issued in 1912 by Guerlain, invented in 1911 by Jacques Guerlain, a perfumer who also loved the Impressionist painters, a perfume that, during the course of the 20th century, internationalized the expression of l’heure bleue, with the effect that also the English language – which has expressions such as ›gloaming‹, ›dusk and dawn‹ or ›twilight‹ – adapted the French expression, turning it into ›blue hour‹ (and occasionally – see our contribution on Joan Mitchell – even into the more French-sounding ›hour blue‹)? So we have to think of a complicated genealogy of the blue hour – in terms of a name – before we can address the question of how various local cultures are referring to the phenomena of dusk and dawn in nature: it was the Belle Époque, the Fin-de-siècle that indeed saw poets and painters, painting the blue hour, and speaking of the blue hour. But it needed the perfumer, inspired – according to tradition – by a Parisian twilight in 1911, to ›upload‹ (as one may say) the name L’Heure Bleue into the sphere of global bourgeois culture, and into the sphere of global popular culture. ›Bourgeois›, because a perfume was a luxury product, and a perfume by Guerlain still is a luxury product. But it is also the myth of a product, its aura, on all levels of society, and including all the informations as to ingredients (some ot them rather exotic), and as to the type of woman (blonde, according to the firm’s advertisements) the perfume was meant to fit, it is the myth that spilled the name ›blue hour‹ (as a name, referring to a particular aspect of twilight, namely the aspect of color) into the global cultural sphere. So that – this is the genealogy I am thinking of –, in 2020, the name appeared as the title of a song by a Korean boy band. There is no direct link, thus, from Rimbaud to the band (and their producers), but there are indirect links, since we might ask for the cultural knowledge of Jacques Guerlain, to find out, what exactly did motivate him, in 1911/12 to call his perfume (which was based on an earlier perfume, issued by another perfumer) L’Heure Bleue. A perfume that was, according to perfume historians, one of the last ›peace time‹ perfumes; and history also has it that Jacques Guerlain had had a premonition. Apparently he had sensed the Big War, the twilight of Fin-de-siècle European culture to come.

2) But What About Cultural Appropriation?

Individuals – if they develop – do adapt (things). Cultures – if they develop – do adapt (things). And if we start to look – at a level of detail – who is borrowing from whom, things get very complicated. During the 19th century Japanese prints began to inspire Europeans, and these prints also came simply as paper, which had been used to wrap things. A particular blue, the blue used by Hokusai, did inspire the Europeans who got to see it, due to imported Japanese products (wrapped in paper). And if a perfumer like Jacques Guerlain was inspired by the Impressionist painters – who even might have influenced the way Guerlain perceived the Parisian twilight sky that, apparently, inspired his perfume in 1911, then not indirect Korean influence, but indirect Japanese influence might be found in the genesis of the perfume itself, which, by the way, has, according to people who seem to know it well, a floral-oriental flavour, and probably can be seen, has to be seen within the more broad cultural trend of European Orientalism (which was exploiting real or imagined Oriental sceneries and atmospheres), while some of its ingredients also may have come from South America (without anyone being aware of it, since the molecules do not speak openly).
But cultural appropriation, in terms of heightened sensibilities as to all-too-bold and direct adaption and exploitation of authors who are not able to protect their author’s rights, may also part of the history of the blue hour. And I am thinking of the term ›gloaming‹, which according to the writer Joan Didion, is a term the English language offers to describe the effects of evening twilight. But ›gloaming‹ actually goes back to Scottish ways of referring to the natural phenomena of evening twilight. And if the English language adapted that term, we might speak of a phenomenon rather similar to global popular culture, incorporating the name of ›blue hour‹, which has its origins in French perfume history (and everything that inspired French perfume history). And not everyone might be pleased to see these things happen, but these things do happen, and there is not much individuals can do about it, except: to make such processes more transparent as they are happening.

3) The Universal Twilight

All cultures, all individuals are confronted with twilight. We might use the names that our own culture has transmitted to us. German culture does know the term of Zwielicht – it was rather new at around 1800 – and it is the equivalent of ›twilight‹, and it is used as another word for ›Dämmerung‹. It was adapted immediatedly by poets like Jean Paul, who also did use the term in a metaphorical sense. Poets of the 20th century – Gottfried Benn as well as Ingeborg Bachmann – have published poems under the title of Blaue Stunde, respectively Die blaue Stunde. ›Blaue Stunde‹ is understood today as a poetic way of referring to twilight, but the history of the perfume, as one perhaps may say, has colored that understanding in an perhaps also rather unwanted way. Because the notion, now is also influenced by everything the perfume may stand for, and by everything a perfume, as such, may stand for (and a poet like Paul Celan probably would never have used such – used – expression, which already carried things unwanted with it, things like Orientalism, for example, or mundane luxury).

Thus we find a rich cultural heritage anywhere, and we have hardly begun to study the ways of how Oriental cultures are referring to twilight. We might start with that in a while, and also with going back to a Bamboo poem from the oldest collection of Japanese poetry, the Man'yōshū. The Belgian artist Anne Herbauts, by the way, in her charming 2000 children’s book called L’heure vide, which is about the blue hour, respectively, about the hours of dusk and dawn, does not exclusively use the notion of l’heure bleue, but also the notions of l’heure vide, respectively l’heure grise. And it might be only an effect of global popular culture that the English-speaking world might tend to think that the French languange (used by a Belgian writer here), exclusively uses the expression of the blue hour, if referring to twilight.

Selected Literature:
Joan Didion, Blue Nights, New York 2011;
Anne Herbauts, L’heure vide, Brussels 2000

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
HOME

---

Top of the page

Microstory of Art Main Index

Dietrich Seybold Homepage

---

Titian, Leonardo and the Blue Hour

The Blue Hour Continued (into the 19th century)

The Blue Hour at Istanbul (Transcription of Cecom by Baba Zula)

The Blue Hour in Werner Herzog (Today Painting V)

The Blue Hour in Louis Malle

Kafka in the Blue Hour

Blue Matisse

Blue Hours of Hamburg and LA

The Blue Hour in Chinese Painting

Dusk and Dawn at La Californie

The Blue Hour in Goethe and Stendhal

The Blue Hour in Raphael

Who Did Invent the Blue Hour?

The Blue Hour in Paul Klee

The Blue Hour in Guillaume Apollinaire

The Blue Hour in Charles Baudelaire

The Blue Hour in Marcel Proust

The Contemporary Blue Hour

The Blue Hour in 1492

The Blue Hour in Hopper and Rothko

The Blue Hour in Ecotopia

Historians of Light

The Hour Blue in Joan Mitchell

Explaining the Twilight

The Twilight of Thaw

The Blue Hour in Pierre Bonnard

Explaining the Twilight 2

The Blue Hour in Leonardo da Vinci and Poussin

The Blue Hour in Rimbaud

Faking the Dawn

Historians of Picasso Blue

The Blue Hour in Caravaggio

Watching Traffic

The Blue Hour in Camus

The Blue Hour in Symbolism and Surrealism

Caspar David Friedrich in His Element

Exhibiting the Northern Light

Caspar David Friedrich in His Element 2

Robert Schumann and the History of the Nocturne

The Blue Hour in Robert Schumann

The Twilight of Thaw 2

MICROSTORY OF ART ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM A History of the Blue Hour Painting by Arkhip Kuindzhi

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
HOME

---

Top of the page

Microstory of Art Main Index

Dietrich Seybold Homepage

---

© DS