Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.1 cm (The Museum of Modern Art). A conversation with Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker.
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re on the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, looking at probably their most famous painting, Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:12] This is something that Van Gogh had been interested in. Before he painted this particular painting, he did another version of a night sky, which is very different.
[0:21] In the foreground, we see the giant undulating form of a cypress tree.
Dr. Zucker: [0:25] We don’t see the bottom of that cypress tree. It’s cut off at the bottom edge of the frame, and so we get the sense that it must be close to us.
[0:33] The sky takes up almost three-quarters of the canvas. It reminds me of the great Dutch landscapes of the 17th century, of artists like Ruisdael, who was interested in the movements of clouds through the sky and the play of light there. But, of course, this is night. The only light is from the moon and from the stars.
Dr. Harris: [0:52] We’re looking down past that cypress into a valley, where we see some small cottages and a church very prominently, centrally placed, with a steeple that just breaks the horizon line formed by those mountains. The village seems very humble but also embraced by the mountains behind it and that cypress in front.
[1:15] There’s a band of lighter yellows and blues just above the hills, further protecting that landscape below. It feels protected to me at the same time that there’s all this turmoil in the sky that we see in these circular brushstrokes.
Dr. Zucker: [1:33] The brushwork has tremendous energy. One stroke follows another, linking to create these streams of energy through the sky. And although the paint is somewhat thick in certain areas, we can also see the canvas in certain areas. And so it is not that heavily painted. Nevertheless, there is a kind of energy and velocity, a kind of dynamism, as those clouds roll through the sky.
Dr. Harris: [1:57] And I think that dynamism, that energy that’s in the brushwork in the clouds or forms that swirl through the sky, the way that the moon emits a pulsing light, and even the stars and planets emit that brighter light than they do in reality, that, for me, contrasts with the tranquility of the village below that’s nestled in that valley.
[2:22] There’s a sense of a presence of activity in the sky, which we associate with the heavens and the divine, as though those things were alive and somehow protecting the village underneath. At least, that’s one way that I read this painting sometimes.
Dr. Zucker: [2:38] Some art historians have looked then at the cypress, a tree that symbolizes death, in part because it’s often found in cemeteries.
Dr. Harris: [2:46] There’s a linking of the earthly and the heavenly with that cypress that undulates almost like fire.
Dr. Zucker: [2:53] And is mimicked by the steeple of the church in the valley, so that there’s this pairing where the tree and the steeple are both reaching up to the heavens.
Dr. Harris: [3:02] Van Gogh, like other artists of the 1870s and ’80s, is thinking about complementary colors. He’s thinking about blues, and yellows, and oranges, and how colors can intensify one another and work together to communicate ideas and feelings.
[3:18] This is definitely not a landscape that Van Gogh saw. This is something constructed from memory and from his imagination. Think about how brave this painting is. To do something with brushwork this visible, this sketchy, this energized.
Dr. Zucker: [3:37] I would say this [is] divorced from what he would have seen. There’s an abstraction of form here that the artist is comfortable with which is absolutely radical.
Dr. Harris: [3:46] And if you think about so much of his work, it is images of what he could see and that he went out specifically to paint. But here, this incredible bravery to do something based on his emotions, his memories, his experiences, and his imagination.
Dr. Zucker: [4:02] In 1889, Van Gogh was in an asylum in Saint-Rémy in Southern France, what had once been a monastery. Van Gogh had a view out his window that was relatively close to this, but there is no church there. There is no village there.
Dr. Harris: [4:18] Van Gogh is in this asylum because he suffered a series of breakdowns. He suffered from mental illness for much of his life, although it got worse after a fight with his fellow painter Gauguin, when he cut his ear.
Dr. Zucker: [4:32] Van Gogh was encouraged to paint at the asylum and was given a studio space where he had no view at all, and where this was likely painted. So this was not painted in plein air, this was not painted out-of-doors.
[4:43] What a journey this painting has taken from that room in Saint-Rémy to the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, reproduced around the world, recognized by people everywhere. It’s a fate that I don’t think the artist could have ever imagined.
[4:58] [music]
A rare night landscape
The curving, swirling lines of hills, mountains, and sky, the brilliantly contrasting blues and yellows, the large, flame-like cypress trees, and the thickly layered brushstrokes of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night are ingrained in the minds of many as an expression of the artist’s turbulent state-of-mind. Van Gogh’s canvas is indeed an exceptional work of art, not only in terms of its quality but also within the artist’s oeuvre, since in comparison to favored subjects like irises, sunflowers, or wheat fields, night landscapes are rare. Nevertheless, it is surprising that The Starry Night has become so well known. Van Gogh mentioned it briefly in his letters as a simple “study of night” or ”night effect.”
Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.1 cm (The Museum of Modern Art; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
His brother Theo, manager of a Parisian art gallery and a gifted connoisseur of contemporary art, was unimpressed, telling Vincent, “I clearly sense what preoccupies you in the new canvases like the village in the moonlight… but I feel that the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things” (813, 22 October 1889). Although Theo van Gogh felt that the painting ultimately pushed style too far at the expense of true emotive substance, the work has become iconic of individualized expression in modern landscape painting.
Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night over the Rhone, 1888, oil on canvas, 72 x 92 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)
Technical challenges
Van Gogh had had the subject of a blue night sky dotted with yellow stars in mind for many months before he painted The Starry Night in late June or early July of 1889. It presented a few technical challenges he wished to confront—namely the use of contrasting color and the complications of painting en plein air (outdoors) at night—and he referenced it repeatedly in letters to family and friends as a promising if problematic theme. “A starry sky, for example, well – it’s a thing that I’d like to try to do,” Van Gogh confessed to the painter Emile Bernard in the spring of 1888, “but how to arrive at that unless I decide to work at home and from the imagination?” (596, 12 April 1888).
As an artist devoted to working whenever possible from prints and illustrations or outside in front of the landscape he was depicting, the idea of painting an invented scene from imagination troubled Van Gogh. When he did paint a first example of the full night sky in Starry Night over the Rhône (1888, oil on canvas, 72.5 x 92 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), an image of the French city of Arles at night, the work was completed outdoors with the help of gas lamplight, but evidence suggests that his second Starry Night was created largely if not exclusively in the studio.
Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.1 cm (The Museum of Modern Art; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Location
Following the dramatic end to his short-lived collaboration with the painter Paul Gauguin in Arles in 1888 and the infamous breakdown during which he mutilated part of his own ear, Van Gogh was ultimately hospitalized at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, an asylum and clinic for the mentally ill near the village of Saint-Rémy. During his convalescence there, Van Gogh was encouraged to paint, though he rarely ventured more than a few hundred yards from the asylum’s walls.
Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy, France (photo: Emdee, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Church (detail), Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.1 cm. (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Besides his private room, from which he had a sweeping view of the mountain range of the Alpilles, he was also given a small studio for painting. Since this room did not look out upon the mountains but rather had a view of the asylum’s garden, it is assumed that Van Gogh composed The Starry Night using elements of a few previously completed works still stored in his studio, as well as aspects from imagination and memory. It has even been argued that the church’s spire in the village is somehow more Dutch in character and must have been painted as an amalgamation of several different church spires that van Gogh had depicted years earlier while living in the Netherlands.
Van Gogh also understood the painting to be an exercise in deliberate stylization, telling his brother, “These are exaggerations from the point of view of arrangement, their lines are contorted like those of ancient woodcuts” (805, c. 20 September 1889). Similar to his friends Bernard and Gauguin, van Gogh was experimenting with a style inspired in part by medieval woodcuts, with their thick outlines and simplified forms.
Stars (detail), Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.1 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The colors of the night sky
On the other hand, The Starry Night evidences Van Gogh’s extended observation of the night sky. After leaving Paris for more rural areas in southern France, Van Gogh was able to spend hours contemplating the stars without interference from gas or electric city street lights, which were increasingly in use by the late nineteenth century. “This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big” 777, c. 31 May – 6 June 1889). As he wrote to his sister Willemien van Gogh from Arles,
It often seems to me that the night is even more richly colored than the day, colored with the most intense violets, blues and greens. If you look carefully, you’ll see that some stars are lemony, others have a pink, green, forget-me-not blue glow. And without laboring the point, it’s clear to paint a starry sky it’s not nearly enough to put white spots on blue-black. (678, 14 September 1888)
Van Gogh followed his own advice, and his canvas demonstrates the wide variety of colors he perceived on clear nights.
Invention, remembrance and observation
Impasto and brush strokes (detail), Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.1 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Arguably, it is this rich mixture of invention, remembrance, and observation combined with Van Gogh’s use of simplified forms, thick impasto, and boldly contrasting colors that has made the work so compelling to subsequent generations of viewers as well as to other artists. Inspiring and encouraging others is precisely what Van Gogh sought to achieve with his night scenes. When Starry Night over the Rhône was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, an important and influential venue for vanguard artists in Paris, in 1889, Vincent told Theo he hoped that it “might give others the idea of doing night effects better than I do.” The Starry Night, his own subsequent “night effect,” became a foundational image for Expressionism as well as perhaps the most famous painting in Van Gogh’s oeuvre.
