Introduction
One of the most popular, most respected, and most controversial visual artists of all time, Vincent Van Gogh remains an enigma and an inspiration to many artists who are not after fame and money decades after his works are first recognized. He inspired many works of art including pop music that until today use his story or themes in their compositions (Giancarlo Scalla, Don McLean, Joe Satriani).
Van Gogh’s Starry Night is also one of the most popular artworks of all time displayed today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, reproduced worldwide numerous times. It is considered his opus.
This paper shall try to provide an overview of Van Gogh’s Starry Night as a work of art with a personal narrative.
Discussion
Biographical Information
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born March 30 1853 and died July 29, 1890. He is a Dutch post-impressionist artist. He was born in Groot-Zundert in the province of North Brabant in the Netherlands. His parents are Anna Cornelia Carbentus and Theodorus van Gogh, a minister. Art and religion was a major preoccupation of the family. At age 15, he became an art dealer and was quite successful. He later became a Methodist minister’s assistant (Hammacher, 1985, p 61). Van Gogh became an art dealer with Goupil & Cie in The Hague. He later went to England to do unpaid work as a supply teacher and started sketching the harbor in Ramsgate. In a temporary post as a missionary in the village of Petit Wastes in Belgium, he recorded peasant miners’ lives in his drawings. Theo his younger brother advised him to take up arts by 1880. He went to Brussels to study with Dutch artist Wilhelm Roelofs who later encouraged van Gogh to study at the Royal Academy of Art. Van Gogh detested formal art education and most many forms of formalities.
He was further encouraged by his cousin-in-law painter Anton Mauve. In Nuenen, North Brabant in the Netherlands, in his parent’s home, Van Gogh painted with dark brown and using somber earth tones and in two years, he completed about 200 oil paintings, drawings, and watercolors.
In November 1885, van Gogh went to Antwerp and studied color theory using Peter Paul Reubens’ works, adding the colors carmine, cobalt, and emerald green (Hammacher, 1985, p 32). He was later exposed to Impressionist artists’ works and became friends with many Post-impressionist painters of his time in Paris. He later is said to have inspired Expressionism, of adding dimension aside from actual images to add emotion to works of art.
Artist’s Place
As an artist, Van Gogh was not much of a celebrity during his time unlike many other artist-celebrities of his caliber who enjoyed their place in society. Van Gogh was from a family of religious workers and mainly, art dealers. He had been exposed to Impressionism which was prevalent at that time. He saw how art was commercialized and resented it, but he had been a successful art dealer. He later on painted as a Post-impressionist artist but influenced expressionism that mostly came after his time. Van Gogh is considered one pioneer in his style using vivid colors and bold strokes, his swirling patterns notably, that defied prevailing norms in his time.
Title, Dimensions, and Type of Medium
The Starry Night is an oil on canvass painting done in 1889, with 73 cm X 92 cm in diameter (or 28 2/3” X 36 ¼”).
Genre
The work is considered a Post-impressionist, landscape done while Van Gogh was confined in a Sanitarium in Arles. It depicts the night view overlooking the village. It has been seen as a result of a private mystical experience. Soth (1986) believed it was a biblical episode, therefore religious, related to the Agony in the Garden. In his letter to his friend Emile Bernard, Van Gogh said, “The imagination is certainly a faculty which we must develop, one which alone can lead us to the creation of a more exalting and consoling nature than the single glance at reality – which in our sight is ever-changing, passing like a flash of lightning – can let us perceive… A starry sky, for instance — look that is something I should like to try to do,” (qtd by Soth, 1986, p 301).
He rendered several starry night paintings including the Café Terrace at Night and Starry Night Over the Rhone.
He was in the hospital St. Paul de Mausole at St. Remy when he painted Starry Night over an imaginative landscape. He stayed at the hospital for several weeks and sketched at the garden or from his cell window. Precisely, it was said to be painted between June 16 and 18 1889. It is drawn what he could see around and about him and from his imagination or memory bank. It is unclear for much of his work is generally religious or personal, but I would rather categorize it as personal in a way that it is depicted not as can be seen from the same point of reference or view but as can only be imagined by an artist, rendered not through the influence of Impressionist or post-impressionist images of his time but rather in distinct bold strokes using a swirling pattern that was not also previously seen in other paintings.
Source of Information and Inspiration
Information and information about Starry Night abound. As Van Gogh previously did other several starry night renditions, his letters to his friend Emile Bernard, brother Theo, sister Wilhelmina, and Eugene Boch provided insights into his painting.
To Bernard, he wrote, “I am still charmed by the magic of hosts of memories of the past, of a longing for the infinite, of which the sower, the sheaf is the symbols — just as much as before. But when shall I paint my starry sky, that picture which preoccupies me continuously?” (Pomerans, 1996, 492).
By September 9, he wrote to Wilhelmina, “…at present I want to paint a starry sky,” (Pomerans, 1996, 444) and later to Theo, “As for the Starry Sky,” I’d like very much to paint it, and perhaps, one of these nights I shall be in the same plowed field if the sky is sparkling,” (Pomerans, 1996, p 229). It is said that Van Gogh painted the enclosed field beneath his cell while the landscape is straightforward and the Alpilles Mountains exaggerated.
Narrative
Starry Night is a 2 dimension or flat composition as it is an oil painting on canvas. The strong line is depicted by the cypress tree in a steep pyramidal form at the foreground’s left side. The swirling light trails of the constellation of stars, however, seem to be the focus of lines on Van Gogh’s Starry Night, softening the rather imposing and misplaced pyramid of the cypress. The painting is balanced on one side by the crescent moon’s light spread throughout the landscape, the mountain range’s peaks, against the dark cypress on the foreground.
The use of yellow and blue had been linked to Eugene Delacroix’ Christ on the Lake of Gennesaret which used the “condemned colors” citron yellow and Prussian blue, thus, Van Gogh wrote, “the two colors which are most condemned, and with most reason, citron-yellow and Prussian blue. All the same I think he did superb things with them — the blues and the citron-yellows,” (Pomerans, 1996, 597).
Starry Night is a perfect example of Chiaroscuro, with an exaggerated lighting effect that overwhelms the whole painting. It provided deep texture that is real and deformed, exaggerated, and providing a character and depth that is difficult to place. The lighting and texture of Starry Night are at most mysterious and expressive.
I find Starry Night as an escape of Van Gogh from the harsh reality of his life. At that time, he was confined to a cell, a hospital cell for the mentally deranged. All his life, he had negative family associations except maybe, for Theo who supported him. He had been romantically broken-hearted several times and he has been grieving for a lot of things that include the injustices that surround his favorite subjects: peasants.
Conclusion
It is not so much about perfection, strict following of art forms and rules as well as the close depiction of reality that made Van Gogh’s paintings and the artist immortal. As can be seen on Starry Night, any unlearned viewer may dismiss it as substandard or neophyte work due to the onslaught of “abstract” and “avant-garde” -ism in the arts today. But for historical reasons, Van Gogh represented a true image of an artist who was not after fame and money but pursued the visual arts for the simple joy of sketching, drawing, and painting.
Van Gogh was devoted to showing light in dimmed settings. He viewed life itself as dark and reality as morbid. He abhorred formality and formal learning about art, but he had to suffer going to art schools to improve his craft, as he believed he had to learn a lot of things including anatomy, perspectives, and colors to draw the least.
Van Gogh’s Starry Night is a rendition of a world half-seen and half-imagined that brought him solitude, probably a sense of home away from the harsh reality of daytime and what is seen as reality.
Reference
Soth, Laren (1986) “Van Gogh’s Agony.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 68, No. 2, pp. 301-313.
Hammacher, A.M. Vincent van Gogh: Genius and Disaster, Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, New York, 1985.
Pomerans, Arnold. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Penguin Books: London. 1996.