WEBVTT

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Art...

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ArtSleuth

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The moon,

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a church,

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a cypress tree.

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A picture by Vincent van Gogh.

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A peaceful night in the country?

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Yet

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repose seems unlikely beneath that angry sky,

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In fact, Van Gogh painted this nightscape in a lunatic asylum,

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a year before he killed himself.

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The rebellious cry of a genius ahead of his time?

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While his contemporaries succumb to the city’s bright lights,

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Van Gogh flees Paris and gives us a stressed-out urbanite’s dream.

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So - let us find release in the madness of art,

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and reconnect with the quiet pleasures of country life.

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Is his frenzied vision of night and stars simply that - a longing for the past?

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Van Gogh - The Starry Night - Transfigured Night

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Part 1 : Madness -with Method

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Is his picture the spontaneous product of insanity?

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A rash conclusion:

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Van Gogh’s nightscape dates from 1889 - when astronomy is attracting amateur enthusiasts, inspired by a string of popular handbooks,

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containing the first-ever photographs of the night sky.

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This spiral, for example, is based on a real nebula.

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Venus, nearing the end of its cycle, was unusually bright that year

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And the moon is just as the painter might have seen it from his cell ...

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… before dawn on 25 May 1889

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But the view from Van Gogh’s window stops short at a wall.

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So he invents a landscape,

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adding the cypress and the village steeple,

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which give the picture depth

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and structure it.

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And even the wild spiral keys in the vanishing point, directly below it.

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If sanity rules the composition,

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surely madness powers the turbulent brushwork?

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Van Gogh is working so fast he leaves part of the canvas bare!

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In fact, his handling of the paint strengthens the contrast between the picture’s two halves.

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At the bottom, the houses are outlined in black, like the figures in a stained glass window,

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the trees resemble dense skeins of wool,

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and the earth has a carved solidity,

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while the sky swirls and surges, like a shoal of fish,

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and the starlight spreads outward in concentric waves.

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In short, the picture’s pulsing movement is a conscious effect, and Van Gogh uses it to create a powerful opposition between:

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the earth’s tangible solidity,

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and the sky’s wave-like dynamism.

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Viscous as tar, vibrant as flame, the cypress links them like a bridge.

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Why does Van Gogh pump all this drama into a potentially peaceful nightscape?

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Part 2: Night -danger and deliverance

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Van Gogh’s vision of night...

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as a star-filled sky,

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has been preceded by another - night as a time of release, when the day’s work is done.

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A massive contrast with those avant-garde artists who revel in the glitter and bustle of the after-hours city.

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Van Gogh takes a very different line

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He sees the nobility of the peasants’ dimly-lit meal....

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… and the bright city’s dehumanising effect on its denizens.

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At first glance, primitive and gloomy ...

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This mealtime scene, where the eaters exchange looks and words

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in a single lamp’s consoling glow, is a celebration of well-earned rest from labour.

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The family is united, like these small houses clustered round a single steeple, which stands for Christian belief.

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Van Gogh is not the first to celebrate the peasants’ simple dignity:

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his revered predecessor, Jean-François Millet, has been there first.

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The sense of communion with heaven and earth which pervades Millet’s “The Angelus”...

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makes Van Gogh’s pictures of nightlife in the city seem like visions of hell.

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In “The Dance-Hall in Arles”, the light which brings people together has gone, and a swarm of dim lamps have taken over.

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Individual dancers seem lost in the whirling, hysterical throng.

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This is an all-night café, and an all-night haze of alcohol envelops it.

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The complementary reds and greens combine garishly

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a billiard table replaces the respectable piece of furniture in the family kitchen:

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a passion for gaming has sapped these people’s strength, and also their ability to connect with one another.

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The drunks adrift on the edges of the picture seem to be shrivelling, like moths,

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in the burning glare of these three false suns.

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In these pictures, Van Gogh seems to be using Japanese print techniques to unmask the falsity of modern life.

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Exploiting the emotional power of black outline,

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sharply contrasted planes,

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and harshly juxtaposed complementary colours,

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he pits the star-filled sky’s eternal order against the city’s tinsel and glitter.

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But the outcome is uncertain.

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The sky may be solid and convincing,

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but the stars look pale and insipid …

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beside the livid glare of streetlamps reflected in water.

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Van Gogh has discovered what we now call “light pollution”:

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artificial light blinds us to the stars

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and even invades the cities’ surroundings - like this streetlamp, which shows that yet another slice of countryside will soon be absorbed,

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or this NASA satellite image, over a century on from Van Gogh, where the earth itself resembles a star-filled sky

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Before trying again, Van Gogh retreats from Arles to a village…

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where his brushwork changes radically:

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the earth becomes as solid and immutable as the heavens,

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while the sky and stars take on the pyrotechnic sharpness and dynamism…

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of modern artificial lighting.

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The result is spectacular but - frankly - over the top: this is genius run mad - yet again!

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Why is Van Gogh so bent on glorifying the power of the heavens?

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Is forgetting the stars really such a big deal?

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Part 3: Night strikes back

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Regardless of what Van Gogh and other artists do with it, the night sky fascinates us because it puts us in touch with two fundamental things

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beauty and the sublime.

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The classic vision of the heavens is that of an immense vault, which is beautiful because it stands for order and perfection.

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Seen from afar, the bright and everlasting stars

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seem utterly remote from our drab and battered world, where change and corruption are the norm!

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Modern physics may have shattered this innocent vision, but the yearning for perfection remains.

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Van Gogh sees the star-filled sky as a map, and death itself as a kind of space shuttle.

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“The sight of the stars sets me dreaming quite as simply as do the black dots which denote towns and villages on a map.”

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“I think it not impossible that cholera and cancer may be celestial means of locomotion...

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... like steamships, omnibuses and the railway.”

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His two nightscapes are the product of this vision:

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The first, where the sky seems a divine and unchanging masonry, and his treatment of the stars is conventional,

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and the second, where the cypress - the traditional cemetery tree - evokes death, which transports us from our world to the realm of celestial light.

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But the latter also reflects a more modern response to the heavens - a response linked with a sense of the infinite and the immense.

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In the world of music, the vault of heaven recurs as the image behind this set design for Mozart’s “Magic Flute”.

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But the tingling sublimity which we feel in the Queen of the Night’s aria no longer reflects a yearning for order, but a sense

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of our littleness in the face of immensity.

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In architecture, too, holes in the vaulting of Etienne-Louis Boullée’s huge Cenotaph for Isaac Newton

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simulate starlight and make humans ant-sized.

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Immensity is also Van Gogh’s theme in his second nightscape.

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He breaks new ground by giving his sky the elemental power, effectively captured by other artists, of:

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volcanoes

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avalanches

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and floods.

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He is celebrating, not scientific knowledge, but the willpower

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which enables human beings to defy even forces which threaten to destroy them.

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This is the “dynamic sublime”, as embodied in minute, but steadfast figures who stand firm against the elements.

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In El Greco’s seventeenth-century vision of Toledo, the cathedral forms an unshakable landmark beneath the stormy sky.

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Van Gogh shifts these elemental forces to the star-filled sky above Saint-Rémy’s proud steeple.

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Reason, not madness, guides his brush, and this nondescript Provençal village acquires mythical status,

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as a sublime fixed point in a world rocked and buffeted by the swirling currents of modernity.

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Special thanks : English translation Vincent Nash