Blue-sky thinking: eight artworks inspired by gazing into the infinite

‘The sun is God,’ declared the painter J.M.W. Turner on his deathbed, signifying the source of his faith and the motive of his art. Yet he could have been speaking for everyone, for ours is a solar culture. Over the centuries, the sun has illuminated art and radiated throughout philosophy and literature, standing as a metaphor for what is most valued: vision, order and reason. In the wake of a partial eclipse of the sun and following a mesmerising lunar display in March, we explore art’s complex relationship with light, atmosphere and space, featuring works offered in the 20/21 Century Art — Evening Sale on 9 April at Christie’s in Paris.

Josef Albers, Study for Homage to the Square: Two warm orange with greenish and pale yellow, 1958

A pioneer of colour theory, the German-born American artist Josef Albers was fascinated by the properties of light and space, and created high drama in his deceptively simple, geometric abstract paintings. By layering different colours onto one another, Albers discovered he could transform the emotional intensity of a picture, something he explored in depth for more than a decade in his ‘Homage to the Square’ series. In this study, two squares in shades of orange seem to radiate out from a pale green and a warm yellow — colours the artist associated with the sun and wellbeing. The result is an exquisite conjuring of the universe as a modernist geometric form.

Max Ernst, Nuit claire, circa 1943

Just as its gravitational force propels our tides, the moon has pulled at artists for thousands of years. Its symbolic power is virtually inescapable — so much so that the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti sought to annihilate it in his 1909 manifesto, declaring: ‘Let’s Kill Moonlight’.

The Surrealist painter Max Ernst was having none of it. A master of the dystopian atmosphere, the German artist knew exactly how to subvert the romantic power of moonlight into something deceptive and uncanny. Nuit claire (‘clear night’), painted during the Second World War, suspends a shimmering orb over a barren landscape. There is a golden tranquillity to the scene, suggesting a primordial otherness lingering at the edge of the cosmos — something the American playwright Arthur Miller described as ‘the residual traces of a supra-sensual world’.

Nicolas de Staël, Paysage au nuage, 1953

The art critic John Berger described Nicolas de Staël as ‘a painter who never stopped looking for the sky’. The gifted Russian-born French artist spent the summer of 1953 in Lagnes, Provence, where he painted the atmospheric abstract work Paysage au nuage (‘landscape with cloud’). Living in a place he described as ‘simply paradise, with infinite horizons’, de Staël sought to capture the transitory nature of life through the depiction of clouds.

Unusually for the artist, who was celebrated for his heightened use of colour, this painting is nuanced and less violently extreme than many of his works. Using a palette knife, he has spread expressive layers of dense grey and silvery paint across the canvas. ‘I need to intensify my arguments,’ he said to his sister that summer, ‘and this implies being very familiar with everything that happens in the sky, the movements of clouds, shadows, light and quite simply the fantastic composition of the elements.’

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, 1967, and Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, 1968

In 1961, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin described the horizon from space: ‘This dividing line is very thin, just like a belt of film surrounding the Earth’s sphere. It is of a delicate blue colour.’

Gagarin’s perilous launch into orbit and his observations from space inspired many artists, not least the Italian innovator Lucio Fontana, the founder of Spatialism. Fontana was a conceptual genius who sought to articulate the universe through vertical slits into nothingness, which he titled ‘Spatial Concept, Waiting’. The artist would hold a Stanley knife over a canvas, waiting for the perfect moment to strike, then he would boldly slice through the material. ‘My cuts are the mystery of the unknown in art,’ he said. ‘They are the expectation of something that must follow.’

Léon Spilliaert, Galeries royales d’Ostende et plage, après l’orage, 1907

The self-taught Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert was a chronic insomniac who found a foil for his melancholia in the nocturnal world of his home city of Ostend. His night-time perambulations often brought him to the quayside, where he observed the encroaching darkness, translating its velvety blackness using an India ink wash on paper.

In his 1907 work Galeries royales d’Ostende et plage, après l’orage, the evening sky and the thunderous clouds are contrasted with a weak light emanating from two windows. The receding perspective of the building and its barely visible stonework gives the work a timeless quality, reminiscent of Piranesi’s Baroque capriccios. This work, in which the sky and the sea appear to melt into one another, reveals Spilliaert to be a pioneer of abstraction. The author François Jollivet-Castelot wrote that the artist ‘communicates, above all, the vertigo of the infinite’.

Réne Magritte, La Peine perdu, circa 1965-67

The artist Réne Magritte could make even the most ordinary sky haunting. The Surrealist painter was deeply fascinated by the workings of the mind, and a keen student of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and his influential work The Interpretation of Dreams. Magritte sought to illustrate Freud’s observations in paint, resulting in artworks that attempt to tap the wellspring of the imagination.

He painted the sky as a metaphor for the mind, and the clouds, lazily drifting across the scene, as representative of thoughts. La Peine perdu (‘wasted effort’), painted between 1965 and 1967, depicts an icily blue midday sky and three theatre curtains. The work reflects the Belgian artist’s interest in the interior in relation to the exterior world. ‘The sky is a form of curtain, because it conceals something from us,’ he said enigmatically. ‘We are surrounded by curtains.’

Alighiero Boetti, Il dolce far niente, 1975

Once challenged about the confusing nature of his art, the Italian artist and inveterate nomad Alighiero Boetti replied that, while his works might appear to be visually complex, they were in fact highly organised. ‘It’s just a question of knowing the rules of the game,’ he explained. ‘It’s like looking at a starry sky. Someone who does not know the order of the stars will see only confusion, whereas an astronomer will have a very clear vision of things.’

Steeped in esoteric philosophy, the ever-engaging conceptual artist was such a wayward presence in the art world that he defies categorisation. However, one thing is certain: his beautifully glistening ‘Biros’ — made by colouring thousands of tiny grids with a ballpoint pen — are some of his most stunning works. The overall effect is like a panorama of the night sky.

The 20/21 Century Art — Evening Sale is on view at Christie’s in Paris until 9 April 2025, as part of the 20th and 21st Century Art spring auctions. Find out more about the preview exhibition and sales in April