The starry Night
The Starry Night is an oil on canvas by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence just before dawn, with the addition of an imaginary town. It has been in the collection permanent at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City since 1941, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Widely considered Van Gogh's masterpiece, The Starry Night is one of the most recognized paintings in the history of Western culture.
The Asylum
Following the crisis suffered on December 23, 1888, which resulted in the self-mutilation of his left ear, Van Gogh voluntarily entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum on May 8, 1889. Housed in a former monastery, Saint-Paul-de-Mausole that catered to the wealthy and was at less than half capacity when Van Gogh arrived, allowing him to occupy not only a bedroom on the third floor, but also a room on the ground floor to use as a painting studio.
During the year that Van Gogh was in the asylum, he continued the prolific production of paintings that he had begun in Arles. During this period, he produced some of the best-known works of his career, including the May Lilies of 1889, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the blue self-portrait of September 1889, in the Orsay Museum. The Starry Night was painted in mid-June (around June 18), when he wrote to his brother Theo to tell her that he had a new study of a starry sky.
The painting
The Starry Night was painted by Van Gogh during the day in his studio on the ground floor of the Saint-Paul-de Mausole asylum. The view has been identified as that of his bedroom window, facing east, a view of which van Gogh painted variations. [citation needed] "Through the iron-barred window," he wrote to his brother, Theo, around May 23, 1889, "I can see a closed square of wheat (...) over which, in the morning, I see the sun rise in all its splendor (...)".
Van Gogh depicted the view at different times of the day including sunrise, moonrise, sunny days, cloudy days, windy days and a rainy day. Although the hospital staff did not allow van Gogh to paint in his bedroom, he was able to sketch in ink or charcoal on paper there; eventually, he would base newer variations on earlier versions. The pictorial element that unites all these paintings is the diagonal line coming from the right that represents the low, rolling hills of the Alpilles mountains. In several versions, the cypress trees are visible beyond the back wall enclosing the wheat field. Van Gogh enlarged the view in six of these paintings, most notably in F717 Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night, which bring the trees closer to the picture plane.[citation required]
One of the first paintings on view was F611 Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint-Rémy, now in Copenhagen. Van Gogh made several sketches for this painting, of which F1547 The Closed Wheat Field After a Storm stands out. It is not clear if the painting was done in his studio or outside. In his letter of June 9 describing it, he mentions that he had been working outdoors for a few days. Van Gogh described the second of the two landscapes, which he was working on, in a letter to his sister Wil the June 16, 1889. This is F719 green wheat field with cypresses, now in Prague, and the first painting in the asylum that he definitely painted outdoors. F1548 Wheat field, Saint-Rémy de Provence, now in New York, is a study for him. Two days later, Vincent wrote to Theo that he had painted "a starry sky."
The Starry Night is the only night view in the series seen from your bedroom window. In early June, Vincent wrote to Theo: "This morning I saw the countryside from my window long before dawn with nothing but the morning star, which looked very large." Researchers have determined that Venus was visible at sunrise in Provence in the spring of 1889, and at that time was about as bright as possible. So, the "star" brightest in the painting, just to the right of the cypress, is actually Venus.
The Moon is stylized. Astronomical records indicate that it was actually waning gibbous at the time Van Gogh painted the painting, and even if the Moon's phase had been waning quarter at the time, Van Gogh's Moon would not have been astronomically correct. The only pictorial element that was definitely not visible from Van Gogh's room is the village, which is based on a sketch F1541v made on a hillside above the village of Saint-Rémy. Pickvance thought that F1541v was done later, the bell tower more Dutch than Provençal, a feature of several Van Gogh paintings and drawings in his Nuenen period, and thus the first of his " reminiscences of the north" that he was to paint and draw early the following year.Hulsker thought that a landscape on the F1541r reverse was also a study for painting.
F1548 Wheatfield, Saint-Rémy de Provence, Morgan Library and Museum
F719 Green wheat field with cypresses, National Gallery of Prague
F1547 The closed wheat field after a storm, Van Gogh Museum
F611 Mountain Landscape behind Saint-Rémy, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
F1541v Panoramic view of the village, Van Gogh Museum
F1541r Landscape with cypresses, Van Gogh Museum
Interpretations
Despite the large number of letters Van Gogh wrote, he said very little about The Starry Night. After reporting that he had painted a starry sky in June, Van Gogh mentioned the painting in a letter to Theo around September 20, 1889, when he included it in a list of paintings he was sending to his brother in Paris, referring to it as an 'evening study'. Of this list of paintings, wrote: "In general, the only things that I consider a bit good in it are the wheat field, the mountain, the orchard, the olive trees with the blue hills, the portrait and the entrance to the quarry, and the rest tells me nothing"; "the rest" would include The Starry Night. When he decided to withhold three paintings from this lot to save money on shipping, The Starry Night was one of the paintings he did not send. Finally, in a letter to the painter Émile Bernard dated late November 1889, Van Gogh referred to the painting as a "failure".
Van Gogh argued with Bernard and especially Paul Gauguin over whether one should paint from nature, as Van Gogh preferred, or paint what Gauguin called "abstractions": paintings conceived in the imagination, or de tête. In the letter to Bernard, van Gogh recounted his experiences living with Gauguin for nine weeks in the fall and winter of 1888: "When Gauguin was in Arles, once or twice I let myself be led astray into abstraction, as you know... But that was an illusion, dear friend, and soon one finds oneself up against a wall... And yet once more I let myself lead astray to reach stars that are too big, another failure, and I've had enough of it", Van Gogh refers here to the expressionist swirls that dominate the top center of The Starry Night.
Theo referred to these pictorial elements in a letter to Vincent dated October 22, 1889: "I clearly perceive what troubles you in the new canvases like the village in the moonlight [ The starry night] or the mountains, but I feel that the search for style takes away from the real feeling of things". Vincent responded in early November: "Despite what you say in your previous letter, that the pursuit of style often damages other qualities, the fact is that I feel very driven to seek style, if you will, but by that I mean a more masculine and deliberate style of drawing. If that will make me more like Bernard or Gauguin, I can't do anything about it. But I am inclined to believe that in the long run you get used to it. And later in the same letter, he wrote: "I know very well that the studies drawn with long and sinuous lines of the last shipment were not what they should be, nevertheless, I dare to exhort you to believe that in the landscapes he will continue massifying things through a style of drawing that seeks to express the entanglement of the masses".
But while Van Gogh periodically defended the practices of Gauguin and Bernard, each time he inevitably repudiated them and continued his preferred method of painting from nature. Like the Impressionists he met in Paris, especially Claude Monet, Van Gogh he was also in favor of working in series. he painted his series of sunflowers in Arles, and also the series of cypresses and wheat fields in Saint-Rémy. The Starry Night belongs to the latter series, as well as to a small series of nocturnes initiated in Arles.
The nocturnal series was limited by the difficulties posed by painting such scenes of nature, i.e., at night. The first painting in the series was Cafe Terrace at Night, painted in Arles in early September 1888, followed by The Starry Night Over the Rhône later that month. Van Gogh's written statements on these paintings provide further insight into his intentions for painting nocturnal studies in general and The Starry Night in particular.
Shortly after his arrival in Arles in February 1888, Van Gogh wrote to Theo: "I need a starry night with cypresses or, perhaps, over a field of ripe wheat; here are some really beautiful nights". That same week, he wrote to Bernard: "A starry sky is something I would like to try to do, just as during the day I will try to paint a green meadow dotted with dandelions." He compared the stars to dots. on a map and reflected that, just as one takes a train to travel the Earth, 'we take death to reach a star'. Although at this point in his life Van Gogh was disillusioned by religion, seems not to have lost his faith in an afterlife. He expressed this ambivalence in a letter to Theo after he had painted The Starry Night Over the Rhône, confessing to a "tremendous need for, shall I use the word, religion, so I go out at night to paint the stars".
He wrote about the existence of another dimension after death and associated it with the night sky. "It would be so simple and it would explain so much the terrible things in life, which now amaze us and hurt us so much, if life had another hemisphere, invisible it is true, but where one arrives when one dies". " 34;Hope is in the stars" he wrote, but quickly pointing out "the earth is a planet, and consequently a star, or a celestial orb". And he declared flatly that The Starry Night was not "a return to romanticism or religious ideas".
Noted art historian Meyer Schapiro highlights the expressionist aspects of The Starry Night, saying it was created under the "pressure of feeling" and that it is a "visionary [painting] inspired by a religious mood". Schapiro theorizes that the work's "hidden content" references the New Testament book of Revelation, revealing an "apocalyptic theme of the woman in labor, girded with the sun and moon." and crowned with stars, whose newborn is threatened by the dragon". (Schapiro, in the same volume, also professes to see an image of a mother and child in the clouds in Landscape with Olive Trees, painted at the same time and often thought of as a pendant from The Starry Night).
Art historian Sven Loevgren broadens Schapiro's approach, calling The Starry Night a "visionary painting" that "was conceived in a state of great agitation". during one of Van Gogh's disabling collapses Loevgren Compares the "religiously inclined longing for the afterlife" of Van Gogh with the poetry of Walt Whitman. He calls The Starry Night "an infinitely expressive image symbolizing the artist's final absorption by the cosmos" and that "gives an unforgettable feeling of being on the threshold of eternity". Loevgren praises the "eloquent performance" Schapiro's view of the painting as an apocalyptic vision and continues his own symbolist theory with reference to the eleven stars in one of Joseph's dreams in the Old Testament book of Genesis. Loevgren states that the pictorial elements of The Starry Night "they are visualized in purely symbolic terms" and points out that "the cypress is the tree of death in Mediterranean countries".
Art historian Lauren Soth also finds a symbolist subtext in The Starry Night, saying the painting is a "traditional religious theme in disguise" and a "sublimated image of [Van Gogh's] deepest religious sentiments". Citing Van Gogh's admiration for the paintings of Eugène Delacroix, and especially the earlier painter's use of Prussian blue and citron yellow in paintings of Christ, Soth theorizes that Van Gogh used these colors to represent Christ in The Starry Night. which incorporates elements of the Sun. He says it is simply a crescent moon, which, he writes, also had a symbolic meaning for Van Gogh, representing "consolation".
It is because of the symbolist interpretations of The Starry Night that art historian Albert Boime presents his study of painting. As previously noted, Boime has shown that the painting depicts not only the topographical elements of Van Gogh's view from the asylum window, but also celestial elements, identifying not only Venus but also the constellation Aries. He suggests that Van Gogh originally intended to paint a gibbous moon but "returned to a more traditional image" of the crescent moon, and theorizes that the glowing halo around it is a remnant of the original gibbous version. It recounts Van Gogh's interest in the writings of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne as possible inspiration for his belief in an afterlife in the stars. or planets. And it provides a detailed discussion of the well-publicized advances in astronomy that took place during Van Gogh's lifetime.
Boime claims that while van Gogh never mentioned the astronomer Camille Flammarion in his letters, he believes that van Gogh must have been aware of Flammarion's popular illustrations, which included drawings of spiral nebulae (as galaxies were called in the time) as they were seen and photographed through telescopes. Boime interprets the figure that swirls in the central part of the sky in The Starry Night to represent a spiral galaxy or a comet, whose photographs have also been published in popular media. He states that the only non-realistic elements in the painting are the town and the swirling sky. These swirls represent Van Gogh's understanding of the cosmos as a living, dynamic place.
Harvard astronomer Charles A. Whitney conducted his own astronomical study of The Starry Night contemporaneously, but independently of Boime (who spent most of his career at U.C.L.A.). While Whitney does not share Boime's certainty regarding the constellation Aries, she agrees with Boime on the visibility of Venus in Provence at the time the painting was executed. She also sees the depiction of a spiral galaxy in the sky, although he credits the Anglo-Irish astronomer William Parsons, whose work Flammarion reproduced, for the original.
Whitney also theorizes that the eddies in the sky could represent wind, evoking the mistral that had such a profound effect on Van Gogh during the twenty-seven months he spent in Provence. (It was the mistral that triggered his first collapse after enter the asylum, in June 1889, less than a month after painting The Starry Night). Boime theorizes that the lighter shades of blue just above the horizon show early morning light.
The village has been variously identified as a reminder of Van Gogh's Dutch homeland, or based on a sketch he made of the town of Saint-Rémy. In either case, it is an imaginary component of the painting, not visible from the nursing home bedroom window.
Cypress trees have long been associated with the death of European culture, although the question of whether Van Gogh intended them to have such a symbolic meaning in The Starry Night is openly debated. In an April 1888 letter to Bernard, Van Gogh referred to "dye cypresses," although this is possibly similar to saying "majestic oaks" or "Weeping Willows." A week after painting The Starry Night, he wrote to his brother Theo, "Cypress trees always occupy my thoughts. I'd like to do something with them like the sunflower canvases, because I'm astonished they haven't been done yet the way I see them'. In the same letter he mentioned "two studies of cypress trees of that difficult shade of bottle green& #34;. These statements suggest that Van Gogh was more interested in trees for their formal qualities than for their symbolic connotation.
Schapiro refers to the cypress tree in the painting as a "vague symbol of human endeavor". unorthodox." Vojtech art historian Jirat-Wasiutynski says that for Van Gogh cypresses "work like rustic and natural obelisks" which provide a "link between the heavens and the earth". (Some commentators see one tree, others see two or more.) Loevgren reminds the reader that "the cypress is the tree of death in Mediterranean countries".
Art historian Ronald Pickvance says that with "its arbitrary collage of separate motifs," The Starry Night "is clearly stamped as an 'abstraction& #39;" Pickvance claims that the cypresses were not visible looking east from Van Gogh's room, and includes them with the town and the eddies in the sky as a figment of imagination. Cypresses were visible in the east, as was Jirat-Wasiutyński. Van Gogh biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith agree that Van Gogh "telescoped" the view in some of the window view images of him, and it's only logical that Van Gogh would do this in a painting with the morning star.Such depth compression serves to enhance the brightness of the planet.
Soth uses Van Gogh's statements to his brother that The Starry Night is "an exaggeration from the point of view of arrangement" to further his argument that the painting is "an amalgamation of images. " However, it is not certain that Van Gogh used "arrangement" in his work. as a synonym for "composition". Van Gogh was, in fact, talking about three paintings, one of which was The Starry Night, when he made this comment: "The olive trees with white cloud and mountains background, as well as the moonrise and night effect', when he called it, "these are exaggerations from the point of view of the arrangement, its lines are crooked like that of old woodcuts". It is universally recognized that the first two images are realistic and not composite views of their subjects. What all three images have in common is exaggerated color and brushwork of the kind Theo referred to when he criticized Van Gogh for his "search for style [that] takes the feeling out of things"; in The Starry Night.
On two other occasions around this time, Van Gogh used the word "arrangement" to refer to color, similar to the way James Abbott McNeill Whistler used the term. In a letter to Gauguin in January 1889, he wrote, "Like an arrangement of colours: reds move to pure oranges, intensify further in flesh tones to chromes, pass into pinks and marry with the olive tree and the veronese. green. As an Impressionist arrangement of colours, I have never devised anything better." (The painting he is referring to is La Berceuse, which is a realistic portrait of Augustine Roulin against an imaginative floral background.) And to Bernard at the end of November 1889: "But this is enough for you to understand that I would long to see things of yours again, like the painting of you that Gauguin has, those Breton women walking through a meadow, whose disposition is so beautiful, the color so naively distinguished. Ah, you're trading that for something artificial".
When Van Gogh says that The Starry Night is a failure because it is an "abstraction," he blames it on having painted "stars that are too big".
Naifeh and Smith discuss The Starry Night in the context of Van Gogh's mental illness, which they identify as temporal lobe epilepsy or latent epilepsy. "Not the kind", they write, "known since antiquity, to cause the limbs to jerk and the body to collapse ('the disease of falls,' as it was sometimes called), but a mental epilepsy. A seizure of the mind: a breakdown of thought, perception, reason, and emotion that manifested entirely in the brain, often leading to bizarre and dramatic behavior". Seizure symptoms " 34;resembled fireworks of electrical impulses in the brain".
Van Gogh experienced his second collapse in seven months in July 1889. Naifeh and Smith theorize that the seeds of this collapse were present when Van Gogh painted The Starry Night, which upon surrendering to his imagination "its defenses had been breached." On that mid-June day, in an "augmented reality state," he launched into painting the stars, producing, they write, "a night sky the likes of which no other in the world had seen with his ordinary eyes".
Provenance
After initially withholding it, Van Gogh sent The Starry Night to Theo in Paris on September 28, 1889, along with nine or ten other paintings. Theo died less than six months later. de Vincent, in January 1891. Theo's widow, Jo, became the caretaker of the Van Gogh estate. She sold the painting to the poet Julien Leclercq in Paris in 1900, who sold it to Émile Schuffenecker, an old friend of Gauguin's, in 1901. Jo then bought the painting from Schuffenecker before selling it to the Oldenzeel Gallery in Rotterdam in 1906. From 1906 to 1938 it was owned by Georgette P. van Stolk of Rotterdam who sold it to Paul Rosenberg of Paris and New York. It was through Rosenberg that the Museum of Modern Art acquired the painting in 1941.
Painting materials
The painting was investigated by scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Pigment analysis has shown that the sky was painted with ultramarine blue and cobalt, for the stars and the Moon, Van Gogh employed a rare indian yellow pigment along with zinc yellow.
- Details of Van Gogh's The Starry Night exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art of New York.
Moon
Venus
Hills and sky
Part left of the canvas and frame
Stars in the sky
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