Yellow is the color of some rain.
January is Maurice Utrillo month. Utrillo is usually thought of as somewhat of a naïf painter of Paris streets. What has not been remarked about Utrillo is his petit mal sensitivity, verging on depression, attributable to the leaden Paris sky. It is the best excuse I can offer why I have never visited Paris.
Why go, when I have Utrillo? It's simply not necessary to travel -given the many fine reproductions available of Utrillo's brooding on the subject of Paris grey. I have long considered existential despair a neurological disorder, what psychologists call depression, a predisposition exacerbated by bad weather. Utrillo's painting is a Bromide for those who suffer from being absent from Paris.
It's an instance of what Charcot might have called le trouble névrotique -except for Utrillo's redeeming talent, which lifts the dullness of the complaint above itself. I doubt Utrillo knew how bad the weather of Paris really was, having been born, and lived his whole life, there. Utrillo is a naïf and a natural, living like an outsider from within, unaffected by the stylistic, attention-seeking Modernism, of his contemporaries.
To psycholog-ize art is absurd. Psychology is a condition of the mind, while a painting is an inanimate object. What is relevant, diagnostically, is the evaluation of the painting's condition. That, too, may be rationalized as a projection of the viewer's own condition. As an example of art as diagnostic, pick a painting that perfectly describes your current mood. Show me. Without a word spoken between us I can see what you mean, feel how you feel.
We suffer art. Any one of these Utrillo reproductions I am looking at is a better diagnosis of my despondent emotional state than I can articulate in words. For Utrillo, there are as many different types of overcast sky as there are shades of gray. They blend together endlessly like a floating decimal continually updated, like calendar days, the years, one the same as the last.
At this point more specificity is needed than a gray scale of 1 to 10. The overcast in a painting by Utrillo is distinctly yellow, but not a jolly Lemon yellow, or a sober Gamboge. Utrillo yellow looks like dusty, hazy, polluted, malaisial air. Something is in the air, as surely as the glob of oil paint used by Utrillo was once pure paint from the tube contaminated, infected, by the incidental environment (to put it politely) of his studio.
The yellow cast of Utrillo's impending storm paintings can be attributed to the mixture of Yellow ochre with blues and gray. As everyone knows, when you mix yellow and blue, the resulting hue is green. Green sky is unarguably out of the ordinary, a weather portent not to be ignored. Like green bile produced by a patient in medical treatment, it is symptomatic, telling of what cannot be seen, a portent.
Analysis doesn't begin to express the emotional effect of these paintings on the viewer. They are as if Utrillo wished to say, through the medium of painting, "being in Paris is bilious," but cannot. It is a silent groan of pain, likened unto the passing agony of Gallstones, sin of high living and to excess. All the poor patient can say is he does not feel well. We can do nothing but nod understanding.
All things in moderation. Yes, even grey. The emotional effect of Utrillo's couleurs neutres is not produced by incidental weather conditions alone. The neutral palette has distinct connotations not limited to the painting of overcast sky. If one and the same color has connotations for contexts as different as medical diagnosis and weather prediction, an essence is presupposed, a middle term.
Essence, however, is too vague for art. What essence can do is lead us to the once universal, but now arcane theory of the humors, once essential to medical diagnosis, and still effective for the evaluation of painting. Beneath one or other of the four general headings of Melancholic, Choleric, Sanguine, and Phlegmatic can be classified all the indefinite emotional states of color.
One-of-a-kind works of art can be viewed at: https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1840403