I am a writer, but once upon a time I was also an artist. I studied painting as an undergraduate, and maintained some form of modest studio practice until I was in my early thirties. Sometimes all that meant was that a corner of my bedroom or apartment was devoted to canvases and glass palettes, their edges blunted by masking tape. Newspapers or drop cloths were spread across the floor. For a long time there was always a pair of jeans ruined by slashes of gesso and careless daubs of color, the places where I wiped my palette knife, hanging on a hook. There was the mineral smell of pigments, cobalts and cadmiums, and the lintseeds and turpentines I used to thin them, an eau de studio which clung to my winter coats.

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Yesterday on the rainy market street I bought a bouquet of lilacs wrapped in packing tape. The flower seller spoke neither French nor English. In a cardboard box at his feet he had the bouquets arranged with no water; daffodils in various hues, and the lilacs. They are the kind of lilacs one might steal from a public park or a roadside, which is surely where these came from.

Almost every day I see them, these young men, selling their stolen flowers. The bug-eaten petals that probably looked better under cover of darkness. Good or bad, I encourage this enterprise with my crumpled five euro notes.

I can see them there, in the spring night, the river of headlights and taillights flashing white and red over them as they gather the goods in the rain. This city and its suburbs coming into flower, awash in a language they don’t know.

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I went out for dinner at the Café de la Mairie on Place Saint-Sulpice, and watched the last of the bright blue evening sky deepen into navy behind the gold-splashed facade of the church. Through the browning leaves of the chestnut trees in the square, the front of the mairie was flooded with light that was brilliant red, and cool lilac, and two shades of cerulean.

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In 1959, the French artist Yves Klein sold certificates of authenticity for nothing. For the price of “three hundred and twenty grams of fine gold” (about €17,000 today), buyers became the proud owner of one “zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility”—that is to say, physically, nothing at all. Not a canvas or a sculpture or even a container. You could say it was the air in a room where Klein had held an exhibition (an exhibition of nothing, for the room was “empty”), but it was not really even that; not the air, or even the space that the air had occupied, but the concept of that air, the pictorial sensibility of the air in the space with which Klein had imbued it.

This sensibility had a color, although it existed only in the minds of the artist and the viewer, and that color was blue.

To process the sale of the zones, Klein had counterfoil notebooks made up, like old fashioned tear-away checks. On the outside was a cover of deep, highly saturated, ultramarine blue. This was International Klein Blue, a color he had started to make the central focus of his work the year before, in striking monochrome canvases and sculptures. He would later register it with the French National Institute of Industrial Property—not quite a patent, but similar. He created the highly pigmented color with Parisian art paint supplier Edouard Adam, using synthetic binding agents to allow the shade to retain its matte intensity.

But once a buyer had purchased one of the zones, the certificate was torn off and separated from the blue. In much the same way that visitors to the exhibition of the zones had passed through a blue curtain to find themselves in a blank white room, a room (filled with “zones”) in which the blue was to be imagined, the buyers left the blue behind.

Klein was born in Nice in 1928 to artist parents. He studied at the National Merchant Navy School, and then at the School for Oriental Languages. He was a Judo prodigy, and even traveled to Japan to complete his studies. One day at the age of nineteen, as he lay on a southern French beach with two friends, they decided to divide the world between them. Arman, a painter, chose the earth. Claude, a composer, chose words and the world of language. Yves chose the atmosphere surrounding the planet and the depths beyond that stretched into infinity. That is to say, the sky. The sky, he said, was his first great artwork, a readymade to end all readymades, and with a flourish of his arm, he signed it.

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Walking back from the Jardin du Palais-Royal, the sky was so beautiful, that heavy violet-gray color, pressing down against the slate roofs of the buildings, the gold-splashed walls, the glowing windows, the Paris evening coming on. I despaired a little then, feeling how useless it is to try to describe these moments in words. What can one say except th…

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Once, while boarding a flight to Seattle from Frankfurt during Covid, the German captain came on the loud speaker to make an announcement. He said that passengers needed to respect the rules and wear a mask at all times, except when eating or drinking. If not, they would …

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On a visit to the Musée Rodin a few years ago, I was reminded of something: the great sculptor Auguste Rodin once dabbled in landscape painting. He lived in Belgium for seven years in his thirties, and would often take walks in the countryside. This thoroughly Parisian young man—an aspiring artist, of course—was learning to enjoy nature. It was the 1870s, his friends were Impressionists, and so, using loose, daubing brushwork, Rodin sought to capture the pastoral settings around him.

My favorite thing about these paintings by Rodin is that, while they are certainly not terrible, they aren’t all that remarkable either. Not when you consider Rodin’s colossal artistic talents in other media. His sculptures are transcendent, revolutionary. His informal drawings of nudes are an arresting tangle of pure form and eroticism. But his landscape paintings? I mean…meh? Considering that this is Rodin we’re talking about, they’re sort of just okay.

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From a notebook entry originally written in 2021.

One of the most beautiful things in the world to me is the stretch of river between the Pont Neuf and the Pont Royal at nightfall. The light on the Seine between these bridges slides liquid over the surface. Sometimes it is like shattered gold, and sometimes like colored silks or a school of flashing fish, and sometimes like quicksilver. It reflects the blue or gray of the evening sky, and the lamps that have just come on, and the floodlights of the monuments that line the banks on both sides. Stop lights and the lights from boats throw shivers of pinkish-red and mermaid-green over the broken surface. As boats move past, a current of water wells up from the bottom to form a fleeting smooth mirror, the color of the atmosphere. The blue, the gray, the bright spots on the water, the reddish blur of leafless trees in winter, green in summer, and the blue of the sky, the gold of the sky, the pink of the sky, and of the light on the buildings, the pale stone facades turning violet in the golden streetlights of a winter dusk.

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