With his bright sunflowers, searing wheat fields and blazing yellow skies, Vincent van Gogh was fanatic about light. "Oh! that beautiful midsummer sun here," he wrote to the painter Émile Bernard in 1888 from the south of France. "It beats down on one's head, and I haven't the slightest doubt that it makes one crazy. But as I was so to begin with, I only enjoy it."
Van Gogh was also enthralled with night, as he wrote to his brother Theo that same year: "It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day....The problem of painting night scenes and effects on the spot and actually by night interests me enormously."
What van Gogh fixed on, by daylight or at night, gave the world many of its most treasured paintings. His 1888 Sunflowers, says critic Robert Hughes, "remains much the most popular still life in the history of art, the botanical answer to the Mona Lisa." And van Gogh's visionary landscape The Starry Night, done the next year, has long ranked as the most popular painting at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). This inspired the museum, in collaboration with Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, to mount the exhibition "Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night" (through January 5, 2009). It will then travel to the Van Gogh Museum (February 13-June 7, 2009).
"The van Gogh we usually think of, that painter of the most audacious, crazy, passionate, frenzied, unleashed bursts of brushwork, may be more evident in his daylight paintings," says MoMA's curator for the show, Joachim Pissarro, great-grandson of the French Impressionist Camille Pissarro. "But in paintings such as the Arles café at night, his touch is more restrained and you really see his intelligence at work. Despite all the mental anguish and depression he experienced, van Gogh never ceased to enjoy an astonishingly clear self-awareness and consciousness of what he was doing."
In an essay for the exhibition catalog, Pissarro tries to clear up some popular mythology: "Contrary to an enduring misconception of van Gogh as a rough and ready chromomaniac driven by his instincts to render what he saw almost as quickly as he saw it, the artist's twilight and night scenes are actually elaborate constructions that also call on his vast literary knowledge." Van Gogh himself hinted at this in a letter to his sister Wil, written in 1888 as he was painting his first starry night canvas. He was inspired, he said, by imagery in the poems by Walt Whitman he was reading: "He sees...under the great starlit vault of heaven a something which after all one can only call God—and eternity in its place above the world."
It seems that van Gogh never dreamed his paintings would become such fixed stars in the art firmament. In 1890, less than two months before he ended his life with a pistol shot, he wrote to a Paris newspaper critic who had praised his work, "It is absolutely certain that I shall never do important things." He was then 37 years old, had been painting for less than ten years and had sold next to nothing. In his last letter to Theo, found on the artist at his death, he had written: "Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it, and my reason has half foundered because of it."
Like his paintings, van Gogh's biography has gone into legend. He was born in 1853 in the Netherlands; his father was a minister, his uncles, successful art dealers. He was dismissed while working as a missionary in southwest Belgium for being too zealous and failed as an art salesman by being too honest. When he took up drawing and painting, his originality offended his teachers. One student later described the scene at the Antwerp Academy where van Gogh enrolled: "On that day the pupils had to paint two wrestlers, who were posed on the platform, stripped to the waist. Van Gogh started painting feverishly, furiously, with a rapidity that stupefied his fellow students. He laid on his paint so thickly that his colors literally dripped from his canvas on to the floor." He was promptly kicked out of the class.
But alone in a studio or in the fields, van Gogh's discipline was as firm as his genius was unruly, and he taught himself all the elements of classical technique with painstaking thoroughness. He copied and recopied lessons from a standard academic treatise on drawing until he could draw like the old masters, before letting his own vision loose in paint. Although he knew he needed the utmost technical skill, he confessed to an artist friend that he aimed to paint with such "expressive force" that people would say, "I have no technique."
This is the best-written brief writing on Van Gogh I have seen: thanks, and congratulations to Paul Trachtman.
Posted by Glenna Elliott on December 20,2008 | 11:47AM
The Van Gogh article was very interesting, I particularly enjoyed the paintings.
Posted by W. F. Weeks on December 20,2008 | 12:23PM
i really enjoy not only the document but also the paintings he was a really fantastic painter i woould like to go to amsterdam to watch them personally
Posted by peteguzmandmguez on January 3,2009 | 10:40AM
Our son, Jamie, traveled by st. remy while a student and told me while he was very ill that both the painting and the don mclean song "vincent" were very real to him. Not really art but reality. He was ill for a couple of years and died of cancer. His mother and I went to MoMA show in order to see st. remy and the rest of the Van Gogh show. I stood in front of this painting, Starry Night and finally wept. It took me 7 years of grief to stand inches from Van Gogh's night and realize all we'd lost and all we'd gained in our lives. The MoMA show is very approachable and is both public and private. The way a good church should be. Grief and love are knitted together in starry night, and we'll treasure always, the gifts we've been given as humans. Thank you MoMA for such a beautiful show and thank all the beautiful strangers who gave me some private space on that public day.
Posted by ernie shankles on January 3,2009 | 04:51PM
there was a beautiful umusual video that went thru the internet last year showing his pictures with Starry Night and musical background sung by Willie Nelson.
Posted by herbert mars on January 8,2009 | 05:05PM
It is such a beautiful heart-felt story that Mr. Eddie Shankles tells of his and his late son, Jamie's experiences with the healing capabilities of Vincent van Gogh. I can appreciate his pain and suffering, and also the great relief he and his family feels from such a moving event as presented by MOMA. Thank you to Mr. Shankles for his honesty and candor about the human condition. And also to Mr. Trachtman for his fine article. It is most inspiring.
Posted by Peter Magurean III on January 9,2009 | 01:48PM
Absolutely love Van Gogh and have followed many exhibitions as well. Thanks to Paul Trachtman for not letting us forget this great artist with this great story.
Posted by Heidi Liebwein on January 9,2009 | 03:52PM
Van Gough has always been one of my favorite artists. I was very moved by this short article by Paul Trachtman. As someone else commented he seems to have told us so much of Vincent that we had not known before. Also, another reader commented on what it meant to stand and behold Starry Night and realize it's connection between this world and eternity. I too, lost a son {an artist} and understands how he felt. Imagine the uncountable number of people who have been touched in the same way. This article has brightened, for me, a dark and snow laden day.
Posted by June Hubatsek on January 10,2009 | 11:04AM
Read the article, read the comments, wrote this poem:
A Pilgrimage of Inches
In a voice etched by human frost,
his son had spoken of St. Remy
and how the wind shook the trees
above the autumn, and beyond it.
This had been recalled as bells
and sirens scattered through
the hospital twilight merely days
before his son's eyes faltered, fell.
So much death to reach a star!
So much trembling in an arc
of hand pressed to brush and
canvas swept to human core.
Many years after his son's name
—Jamie— lay etched in granite on a slab
beneath a crow-reeling sky,
he came to stand aside the same
pictures that had clapped an inner
storm upon an inner field
in a wilderness of gazing
towards a single blade of— Vincent.
The blade had flashed in France.
And now it swayed in flames
eclipsing ash-white walls
in a series of halls in New York.
At last Jamie's father's unshed tears erupted...
one deep glance stabbing home the tip
of the blade of how far he'd traveled to come
inches from Van Gogh's night.
Posted by Lucien Zell on January 14,2009 | 08:01PM