Somewhere beyond the rainbow the sky is blue and impossible dreams come true.
Who doesn't know the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow, sung by actress Judy Garland in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz? Garland rose to the status of a gay icon and this particular song became a symbol of gay pride. Members of the gay community all over the world began to identify not only with the song, but with Dorothy herself – the protagonist of the film, who accepts people different from her and who makes friends with a Cowardly Lion, a Scarecrow and a Tin Man, all of whom begin to call themselves a ‘Friend of Dorothy’.
Judy Garland died in London at just 47 years old on June 22, 1969, a few days before the Stonewall Riots (29 June 1969), a series of violent clashes generated when the police broke into the Stonewall Inn, a well-known gay community haunt in New York. This event was later considered a defining moment in the birth of the gay liberation movement around the world. For this reason, June has begun to be called Pride Month.
Also in this month, on precisely June 25, 1978, the Rainbow Flag (sometimes called Freedom Flag) – created by Gilbert Baker, artist, activist and admirer of the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow – began to be waved during the Gay Parade in San Francisco. Originally, the flag had eight colors, each of which had its own meaning (Sex, Life, Healing, etc.). For reasons around price and difficulty in finding some of the colors, these were later reduced to six.
In June 2015, the original eight-color flag was exhibited in MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York, as a symbol of diversity and, above all, love.
We at Barnebys had fun putting together an artistic Rainbow Flag, made up of the colors of 6 famous paintings.
Red
Starting at the top, red is the first color of the Rainbow Flag and symbolizes Life. For our artistic flag we have chosen the work Pictorial Realism of a Peasant Girl in Two Dimensions, more commonly known as Red Square. It is a 1915 painting by Kazimir Malevich, comprising a red quadrilateral on a white field. According to New York Times art critic Grace Glueck, the ‘peasant’ of the work's title is depicted in the red color of traditional Russian religious icon paintings.
The Russian Malevich founded the artistic avant-garde movement called Suprematism, explaining its meaning with these words: "By Suprematism, I mean the supremacy of pure feeling or sensation in the pictorial arts".
Orange
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The second color of our flag is orange, symbolizing Healing. The painting we have chosen to accompany this color is the 1895 Flaming June by Sir Frederic Leighton, a work which caused a sensation for its suggestive eroticism and which is now considered one of the symbols of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The Michelangelo-esque anatomy of the florid figure of a sleeping woman, wrapped in a warm and bright orange of a June day, gives the image power, sensuality and a sense of relaxation all at the same time.
Yellow
The third color on our imaginary rainbow canvas, yellow, symbolizes Sunlight. To represent it we chose the iconic gold used by Gustav Klimt in his 1907-08 masterpiece The Kiss. Here, a man and a woman huddle in a place out of time and space, almost suspended over Nothing. Nothing seems to exist beyond their embraced bodies immersed in a golden aura. Klimt took inspiration for the golden yellow of this and other paintings from the Byzantine mosaics admired in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy.
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There are many details to note in this work, but here we focus on three in particular: the perfectly square canvas (180 x 180 cm), used to further highlight the centrality of the two lovers; the garland of ivy leaves in the man's hair, which recalls the Greek mythology of Dionysus and seems associated with the intoxication of love; and the outfits of the lovers, with the man's tunic decorated mainly with black and white rectangles, and the woman's dress adorned with colored circles, as if to indicate that these different shapes blend and complement each other in a single embrace.
Green
For the green color of our artistic flag, which symbolizes Nature, we borrow the woman’s dress in Jan Van Eyck’s well-known Arnolfini Portrait. The clothes in this painting are very important: their richness underlines the allegory behind the work, that is the social ideal of marriage that brings prosperity. Green, in particular, at the time symbolized fertility, here also suggested by the high belt, the hand on the stomach and the particular curvature of the woman's body.
Blue
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The penultimate color of the Rainbow Flag is Blue, which symbolizes Serenity. These are the same sensations found in this painting by Vincent van Gogh, made in 1888, when the artist was in Arles, a small French city overlooking the Rhône river. The Dutch painter loved this town and often went out at night to seek inspiration. From these nocturnal walks, masterpieces like this and the well-known Café Terrace at Night were born.
Violet
The final, violet color on the Rainbow Flag symbolizes Spirit. The last painting we have chosen for our artistic flag belongs to Claude Monet's Water Lilies series, a cycle of about 250 works created by the Impressionist painter. Monet was almost obsessed with these fascinating aquatic flowers and decided to capture their beauty at various times of the day, in order to depict the passage of time changing the reflections of light on a body of water.
Here, our artistic rainbow is now complete. We imagine that it was created by the tears of all people who, in one way or another, have suffered from some form of discrimination. Those tears, crossed by the sun, created this wonderful and colorful play of light.
Let's close this article as if it were a circular ring and return to the words of the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow: somewhere, beyond the rainbow, art is a blue sky, and the impossible dream that we hope will one day come true is that no one is judged ever again for their nature.
