Klein had devoted himself during the preceding year to “experimenting with the most perfect expression of blue”. The colour of the majestic cloak of the Virgin, the Queen of Heaven, blue is associated symbolically with eternity. In the words of one dictionary of symbols, “blue is the deepest of colours: one’s gaze sinks into it without encountering any obstacle and loses itself in infinity, as if drawn by a perpetual elusiveness in the hue. Blue is the most immaterial of colours: when it occurs in nature it generally consists of transparency, that is to say of accumulations of emptiness, the void of air, water, crystals and diamonds. A precise void, pure and cold. Blue is the coldest of colours and, in the absolute, the purest, aside from the total void of neutral white. Its fundamental properties determine the range of its symbolic uses.”
