Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

Joan Mitchell, Les Bluets, 1973

In German, to be blue—blau sein—means to be drunk. Delerium tremens used to be called the “blue devils” (Burns, 1787.) In England “the blue hour” is happy hour at the pub. Joan Mitchell—abstract painter of the first order, American expatriate living on Monet’s property in France, dedicated chromophile and drunk, possessor of a famously nasty tongue, and creator of arguably my favorite painting of all time, Les Bluets, which she painted in 1973, the year of my birth—found the green of spring incredibly irritating. She thought it was bad for her work. She would have preferred to live perpetually in “l’heure de bleu.” Her dear friend Frank O’ Hara understood. Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days, he wrote, and did.

—An excerpt from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2012 at 8:00 am. It is filed under Creative Culture, Nature, New York City. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.