The Story Behind the Superblue Name

Great art movements are unusual, bold, and audacious. Ideally, so are their names. 

So why “Superblue”? The story begins with a spellbinding color and its relationship to a long history of artists. It ends by naming a new genre of art—the kind that shifts perspectives, alters surroundings, and stimulates long-buried, undiscovered senses. 

For as long as artists have turned minerals into pigments and pigments into compositions, they’ve used blue to represent the sky and the sea—and, more abstractly, the heavens, the infinite, and the unknown. In age-old spiritual ritual, blue symbolized a direct channel between the earth and something greater. Ancient Egyptians swathed mummies in blue cloth and decorated funerary portraits with paint derived from lapis lazuli, a deep azure stone.

Later, in the early 1900s, blue became a calling card for a radical group of artists who invented abstraction. Led by Wassily Kandsinky and Franz Marc, they boldly scrapped art depicting history, beauty, and the physical world in favor of compositions expressing emotions and the unseen. By 1912, they were calling their movement Der Blaue Reiter, or Blue Rider. The name referenced a recurring symbol in their paintings: a rider and blue horse hurtling through a blur of vibrant color. It suggested the journey towards a new form of art that harnessed senses rather than depicted surroundings. 

Color played an essential role in Kandinsky and Marc’s vision of abstraction, where each tone symbolized different emotions and ideas. Blue was their favorite. It represented the awakening of the spirit, like a portal connecting man to the spiritual realm. “All other colors exist only to wake the longing for blue,” gushed Marc. According to Kandinsky: “The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural.”

Blue Rider artists applied these ideas to paintings and drawings that thrummed with color and line. They also pioneered total works of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk: room-sized, multisensory environments that fused light, color, gesture, music, and architecture. In turn, the group sparked a lineage of modern artists who used abstraction to alter space and perspective. In their hands, blue became a symbol of innovation, progress, and change.

As soon as in 1917, Dada artist Marcel Duchamp took the Blue Rider’s lead, claiming that anything could be art—even a urinal turned on its head—as long as it had an audience. In the 1920s, artists organized around the Bauhaus School carried on Blue Rider’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, forging large-scale, inhabitable artworks that dissolved the boundaries between art and functional objects. And starting in the 1940s, painters like Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, and Agnes Martin pushed at the boundaries of abstraction, translating raw emotions and spiritual impulses into frenzied drips of paint, saturated fields of color, and zips of vibrating line. 

There was Yves Klein, too, who patented his own shade of blue in 1960, rethinking what both painting and performance could be. James Turrell, who framed blue skies and bent light in his mind-bending sculptural environments. And the groundbreaking feminist artist Louise Bourgeois who used sculpture to make space for the female experience and the color blue to express freedom of speech. “The color blue means you have left the drabness of day-to-day reality to be transported into not a world of fantasy,” she said in a 1995 interview, “…But a world of freedom where you can say what you like and what you don’t like.” 

These artists not only transformed what art looks like, but how its viewers perceive the world, fueling imagination and opening new paths of thought. The word Superblue recalls not only this radical history, but also points to the ongoing power—we might even call it a superpower—of artists to create experiences that change you as you walk through them.