Blue crops up in all sorts of idioms and registers. But, as a new National Gallery of Victoria exhibition demonstrates, there’s more to the colour, and its long history, than meets the eye.

From planting periwinkles on the graves of slaves, to the blues itself, the colour blue was core to Black Americans’ pursuit of beauty and joy in the face of brutalization, argues Harvard ...

Kelly Grovier traces the pigments that make up hidden layers in masterpieces – some of them toxic – from Picasso and Hokusai's Prussian Blue to Vermeer's shade of red.