Van Gogh's nocturnal backgrounds can be found in a number of his paintings, combined with other longstanding themes of his art such as peasant life, wheatfields, and sowers. Painting in the dark was a challenge in the late nineteenth century, particularly for an artist who relied merely on his powers of observation; Van Gogh refused to be bound by this alternative to work strictly from observation, or from imagination. Instead, he relied on both.
Thus, he was also an artist for whom the real was intertwined with the symbolic, and who set out to capture the spiritual qualities he sensed in the world around him. It was during the night hours that his experiments with imagination, memory and observation all together went the farthest.
According to Curator Joachim Pissarro, Van Gogh’s night scenes offer rich layers of significations and associations. "Some show the strong relationship that he perceived between the cycles of nature and those of rural labor. Others evoke poetic associations of the evening with either the vagaries of life in modern times or with profound metaphysical questions.
Van Gogh’s works and letters not only carried on the art historical tradition of twilight and night scenes but also reflected how his thoughts were influenced by abundant literary sources. The powerful technical innovation—Van Gogh’s signature—that he applied to capture the effects of dark and light proved to be a rewarding field of investigation,” Pissaro said.
Four-Part Exhibition
The exhibition is divided into four sections.
- “Early Landscapes” features Van Gogh’s earliest landscapes at dusk, painted in 1883-84.
- “Peasant Life” refers to Van Gogh’s study of peasants in Nuenen in the southern Dutch province of Brabant, and features, most notably, The Potato Eaters (1885).
- The third section, “Sowers and Wheatfields,” addresses his interest in the sowing of wheat, which formed the basis of many of his works, including The Sower (1888).
- The last section, “Poetry of the Night, ” focuses on Van Gogh’s lyrical view of the night and is divided into two parts: “The Town,” which features works such as The Night Café (1888), which will only be shown in the MoMA presentation, and The Starry Night over the Rhône (1888); and “The Country,” which centers on Van Gogh’s iconic painting The Starry Night (1889) from MoMA’s collection.
The Town
Van Gogh looked hard at the world around him, and his depictions of night extended to the after-dark entertainments of urban life, such as cafés and dance halls. In The Night Café, for example, he observed the listless patrons of a bar underneath the harsh glare of gas lamps at night. Despite their obvious differences, he connected this work to his earlier painting The Potato Eaters, an equally ambitious rendering of a complex figure arrangement in a nocturnal interior. Yet he was still preoccupied with nature, and after finishing The Night Café he wrote to his sister Wil, “I definitely want to paint a starry sky now.”
He had expressed this aspiration in letters throughout 1888, but the painting had not yet materialized. Eventually he had the idea of setting up his easel under the outdoor gas lamps of an Arles café, which lit the canvas enough for him to paint a street scene below twinkling stars. Twelve nights later, emboldened by the results of this endeavor, Van Gogh embarked on his seminal painting The Starry Night over the Rhône, which features a vast expanse of night sky in the upper half of the canvas.
The Country
Van Gogh’s interest in working from both observation and imagination fused in the night scenes he made in 1889 and 1890. Among these was The Starry Night, the culmination of his intense effort to conquer the problems of using color to depict darkness, as well as to register the spiritual and symbolic meanings that he saw in the nighttime hours
The Starry Night has become an iconic image, an emblem not only of Van Gogh’s own work but also of modern art in general. It shows a fantastical sky above a town and hills lit only by the stars and moon—which, however, are vibrant and alive. The little village and the hills beyond were inspired by Saint-Rémy and the nearby Alpilles mountain range, but were not modeled on them closely, and the cypress trees and the thickly painted, swirling astral sky stemmed from Van Gogh’s imagination. In the open night skies Van Gogh perceived formidable forces of nature, capable both of providing consolation amid life’s daily adversities and of evoking eternity.
European-American Collaboration
The special exhibition was prepared in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. It was organized by Joachim Pissarro, Adjunct Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art; Sjraar van Heugten, Head of Collections at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; and Jennifer Field, Curatorial Assistant of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.
It will be on view at MoMA from September 21, 2008, to January 5, 2009, and then it travels to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where it will be on view February 13 to June 7, 2009.
The 23 paintings and 10 paper works span all periods of Van Gogh's career, and a selection of his letters and examples of the rich literary sources that influenced the artist’s work in this area by writers such as Hans Christian Andersen, Jules Michelet, and Emile Zola.
