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The Hour Blue in Joan Mitchell

(Picture: FK1954)

(19.10.2022) It’s in the ARTE documentary on Joan Mitchell (director: Stéphane Ghez; see section starting at 47:42) that printmaker Ken Tyler speaks about the ›Hour Blue‹ in Joan Mitchell, about cobalt blue, and about the use of that particular blue in one of the painter’s prints.

(Picture: Robert Freson)

(Picture: Marabeth Cohen-Tyler)

In referring to the atmosphere of light at dawning at Vétheuil (and on how much artist Joan Mitchell did like it – the intense blue permeating all other colors), Ken Tyler uses the expression of ›hour blue‹, perhaps signalling – in a most subtle manner – that there might be a history behind that expression, and that this history has to do also with the French language, as well as with French poetry. If Tyler says ›hour blue‹, this might be a translation of the French ›l’heure bleue‹, and it is interesting to note that the French version of the documentary retranslates this into ›l’heure du bleu‹.

(Picture: youtube.com / ARTE)

In her collaboration with Ken Tyler Joan Mitchell demanded a particular kind of blue, refusing the cobalt blue usually used by the printmaker’s workshop, and Tyler did find a solution for that problem by making use of the cobalt blue taken from oilsticks.
While it is not becoming clear from the documentary to which of Mitchell/Tyler prints the printmaker was referring, resources offered by the Joan Mitchell Foundation (as well as by Ken Tyler; see here, here and here) can help to solve that problem (see pictures below).

(Picture: Joan Mitchell Foundation)

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