Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889)
Oil on canvas, 29 x 36 1/4" (73.7 x 92.1 cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889)

Kirk Varnedoe:

When Vincent van Gogh was a patient in an asylum at Saint-Rémy in the south of France, he wrote to his brother Theo: "This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big." The morning star is another name for Venus, and it may be the large white pulsating form, just to the left of center in this painting. Van Gogh stayed up three nights in a row to paint the view from his window in the asylum, because, as he said, "the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day."

But van Gogh was not just painting an image of what he saw. In fact, the church spire here is typical of Holland, the artist's native country. So this is a picture rooted in his imagination and memory as well— a fantastic, apocalyptic vision of the night sky. What others might have viewed as a placid scene, van Gogh has rendered in heaving and churning waves. Each stroke of paint is more than a dab of color— it's a field of energy, as well.

The contrast between the chaos of the heavens and the quiet order of the village below is remarkable. The cyprus tree— known as the tree of death for its traditional associations with graveyards and mourning— creates a flamelike connection between the earth and sky. But for van Gogh, a man of strong Christian faith, death was not ominous; it was the path to heaven. He himself said:

Van Gogh (actor's voice):
"...looking at the stars always makes me dream... Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star."


Van Gogh in the South of France

Kirk Varnedoe:

In 1888, after two years in Paris, van Gogh moved to the South of France. There, he wrote, "I let myself go, paint what I see and how I feel, and damn the rules!"

He dreamed of founding an artistic community, and his dream seemed to come true when Paul Gauguin joined him. But their two months together ended in a violent dispute, and van Gogh's first major breakdown. Modern doctors have speculated that van Gogh's sickness may have been a form of epilepsy, possibly exacerbated by glaucoma, poisoning from herbal medication, syphilis or the effects of a bitter licorice-flavored liqueur called absinthe. Whatever the cause, van Gogh did not paint in the grip of inspired madness, instead he painted in periods of lucidity between incapacitating bouts of illness. In the spring of 1889, he voluntarily entered the St. Paul asylum at Saint-Remy, and the next year, at the age of thirty-seven, he took his own life.

In his final seventy days, van Gogh painted seventy canvases, pursuing art with an almost religious fervor. "I would rather die of passion than boredom" he once said, and as he lay dying, he told his brother Theo that saving him would be pointless, because, he believed, "the sadness will last forever."

©1997 The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Audio files: http://www.moma.org/docs/collection/paintsculpt//c58.htm