An analysis of Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”
Unlike many of his contemporaries, such as Georges Seurat and Paul Cezanne who sought by almost scientific investigation new rules for the ordering of the experience of color, Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) impetuously and arbitrarily exploited new color dimensions in order to express his emotions while being confronted by the beauties of nature. As a painter, Van Gogh mastered the Post-Impressionist technique through which he found a means to communicate his experiences of the sun-illuminated world via his landscapes that were often represented pictorially in terms of his favorite color, yellow. His insistence on the expressive values of color led him to develop a corresponding expressiveness in the application of the paint upon his canvases.
The thickness, shape, and direction of his brush strokes created a tactile counterpart to his intense color schemes through thickly loaded brush moves back and forth or at right angles, giving a textile-like effect; Van Gogh also would take the paint tube and squeeze dots or streaks upon the canvas. This bold, almost slapdash attack upon his canvases, at least in the eyes of his contemporary art critics, was viewed as highly disturbing; thus, it could be said that Van Gogh, through the use of different paint strokes, both infuriated and calmed the viewer. According to Van Gogh, as mentioned in a letter to his brother Theo, “Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself forcibly” and then adds that the color in his paintings is “not locally true from the point of view of the realist, but is there to suggest the emotion of an ardent temperament” (Tralbaut, 1969), which indicates that Van Gogh’s color schemes are ambiguous, meaning that they have the capacity to overwhelm the viewer to the point of utter confusion while expressing a strange calming effect almost as if the viewer was experiencing lucid dreaming.
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Before commencing on a discussion of Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” is seems appropriate to include at least two other painting by Van Gogh that expresses this infuriation and calmness via his brush stokes and color schemes. In his “The Night Café” (1888, oil on canvas), Van Gogh conveys an oppressive atmosphere of evil through the very distortion of color. The scene, a café interior in a dreary provincial town, is supposed to be felt rather than only observed. The slumped denizens are the very color of the mood in which they are drawn, a melancholy pale blue. The ceiling is a poisonous green in dizzying contrast with the red walls; the floor is an acid yellow contrasted with the green shadow upon the billiard table. The yellow halos of light are like accumulations of noxious gases, while the proprietor, the pale demon that rules over the place, rises like a specter from the edge of the billiard table, itself in a steeply tilted perspective that suggests the spinning world of nausea. This description of “The Night Café” is highly reminiscent of “The Starry Night,” due to its images and distortions of color, especially the yellow halos of light and the suggestion that the entire room is a gyroscope, much like a spinning galaxy or a gaseous nebula.
Van Gogh’s “Wheat Field and Cypress Trees” (1889, oil on canvas), rendered the same year as “The Starry Night,” speaks to the viewer of that “kingdom of light” which Vincent had found in the south of France and of his mystic faith in a creative force animating all forms of life (Ingo, 1990). In this painting, Van Gogh wished to express the sun-drenched Mediterranean countryside which evoked a very different response in him, for he saw it filled with ecstatic movement instead of stability and permanence. The images in this work are also very similar to “The Starry Night” in that the earth and the sky are filled with overpowering turbulence, while the wheat field resembles a stormy sea. The trees spring flame-like from the ground and the hills and clouds heave with the same undulant motion. The dynamism contained in every brush stroke makes each of these images not merely a deposit of color but an incisive graphic gesture. Yet to Van Gogh, it was the color, not the form that determined the expressive content of this painting and “The Night Café.” In another letter to his brother Theo, Vincent offered many descriptions of his choice of hues and the emotional meaning he attached to them. Although he acknowledges that the desire “to exaggerate the essential and to leave the obvious vague” (Tralbaut, 1969), made his colors look arbitrary by Impressionist standards, he nevertheless remained deeply committed to the visible world. As Walther Ingo (1990) maintains, in these two paintings Van Gogh’s “brushwork became stronger and more rhythmic and colour took on its own symbolic function. . . the quality of paint, laid on thick and rough and violent, is no less telling than the use of color.”
But even more illustrative of Van Gogh’s brushwork and color schemes is his “The Starry Night” (1889, oil on canvas). This painting does not envision the sky as a person would normally see it when looking up on a clear, dark night, for it exudes a spangling of twinkling pinpoints of light set against a deep curtain of exquisite blue. In this work, it is obvious that Vincent must have conjured up what it would be like to be immersed within the vastness of the universe filled with whirling and exploding stars and galaxies of stars beneath which the earth and its inhabitants “huddle in anticipation of cosmic disaster” (Ingo, 1990). It appears that some kind of great, mysterious entity is in the process of rapid growth far above the terrestrial earth while in a state of utter combustion and chaos. With this, Van Gogh was apparently not seeking or trying to analyze the harmony in nature, but was attempting to transform it by projecting upon it a vision entirely of his own creation.
The infuriation and calmness expressed in Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” as well as in the two other paintings, can best be explained by focusing on exactly how Post-Impressionist renderings were viewed by not only contemporary art critics but also the general public. By 1886, the Impressionist were accepted as serious artists by most of the critics and by a large segment of the public, but just at the time when their colorful studies of contemporary life no longer seemed crude and unfinished, the painters themselves and a group of young followers came to feel that too many of the traditional elements of painting were being neglected in the search for momentary sensations of light and color. A more systematic examination of the properties of three-dimensional space, of the expressive qualities of line, pattern and color, and the symbolic character of subject matter was undertaken.
A number of these Post-Impressionist painters, especially Van Gogh, set forth to exhibit the analysis of light in a new and monumental synthesis that seemed strangely rigid and remote. In addition, these painters were less concerned with the recording of immediate color sensations and sought to present images that at times were very nightmarish. The free and fluent play with color also evoked much ambiguity, for the surfaces of the paintings had both a surface pattern and a perspective depth. In essence, the aim of these painters was not truth as it appears in nature but a lasting structure behind the formless and the screens of color that the human eye takes in. But since color is only an optical sensation, as the Impressionists had shown, then the structure sought in the optical world must be related to the sensations of the viewer. This is where the idea of infuriation and calmness comes in, for the viewer is always subjective and the sensations or images created by a particular painting are all dependent on the eyes of the viewer.
With this in mind, the Post-Impressionists sought to create the illusion of forms bathed in light and atmosphere, two key ingredients for the formulation of a subjective emotional response to any work of art. Of course, this required an intensive study of light as the source of human color experience which revealed that the actual color of an object is always modified by the quality and quantity of the light in which it is viewed, usually through the reflection from other objects and the effects produced by juxtaposed colors. Complementary colors, for example, if used side by side in large areas, intensify each other; in small quantities, they fuse into neutral tones. Shadows do not appear gray or black but seem composed of colors modified by reflections or other conditions. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of colors on a canvas which the eye fuses at a distance produces a more intense hue than the mixing of the same colors on the palette. Thus, Post-Impressionists like Van Gogh achieved remarkably brilliant effects with their characteristically short, choppy brush stokes which accurately caught the vibrating qualities of natural and artificial light sources.
Much of the early criticism brought against the Post-Impressionists can be accounted for due to the illusion that the canvases looked unintelligible and that the forms and objects appear only when the eye fuses the brush strokes at a certain distance. But in the realms of artistic psychology, this idea can only be supported if every single viewer sees or feels the same emotions that arise from a certain painting. In the case of Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” one viewer may feel infuriated as a result of being unable to understand the context of the painting, while another may feel a sense of calmness, due to the colors on the canvas affecting certain areas of the brain related to emotional release and contentment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ingo, Walther. (1990). Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings.
Tralbaut, Marc. (1969). Vincent Van Gogh. New York: Viking Press.
The thickness, shape, and direction of his brush strokes created a tactile counterpart to his intense color schemes through thickly loaded brush moves back and forth or at right angles, giving a textile-like effect; Van Gogh also would take the paint tube and squeeze dots or streaks upon the canvas. This bold, almost slapdash attack upon his canvases, at least in the eyes of his contemporary art critics, was viewed as highly disturbing; thus, it could be said that Van Gogh, through the use of different paint strokes, both infuriated and calmed the viewer. According to Van Gogh, as mentioned in a letter to his brother Theo, “Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself forcibly” and then adds that the color in his paintings is “not locally true from the point of view of the realist, but is there to suggest the emotion of an ardent temperament” (Tralbaut, 1969), which indicates that Van Gogh’s color schemes are ambiguous, meaning that they have the capacity to overwhelm the viewer to the point of utter confusion while expressing a strange calming effect almost as if the viewer was experiencing lucid dreaming.
2
Before commencing on a discussion of Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” is seems appropriate to include at least two other painting by Van Gogh that expresses this infuriation and calmness via his brush stokes and color schemes. In his “The Night Café” (1888, oil on canvas), Van Gogh conveys an oppressive atmosphere of evil through the very distortion of color. The scene, a café interior in a dreary provincial town, is supposed to be felt rather than only observed. The slumped denizens are the very color of the mood in which they are drawn, a melancholy pale blue. The ceiling is a poisonous green in dizzying contrast with the red walls; the floor is an acid yellow contrasted with the green shadow upon the billiard table. The yellow halos of light are like accumulations of noxious gases, while the proprietor, the pale demon that rules over the place, rises like a specter from the edge of the billiard table, itself in a steeply tilted perspective that suggests the spinning world of nausea. This description of “The Night Café” is highly reminiscent of “The Starry Night,” due to its images and distortions of color, especially the yellow halos of light and the suggestion that the entire room is a gyroscope, much like a spinning galaxy or a gaseous nebula.
Van Gogh’s “Wheat Field and Cypress Trees” (1889, oil on canvas), rendered the same year as “The Starry Night,” speaks to the viewer of that “kingdom of light” which Vincent had found in the south of France and of his mystic faith in a creative force animating all forms of life (Ingo, 1990). In this painting, Van Gogh wished to express the sun-drenched Mediterranean countryside which evoked a very different response in him, for he saw it filled with ecstatic movement instead of stability and permanence. The images in this work are also very similar to “The Starry Night” in that the earth and the sky are filled with overpowering turbulence, while the wheat field resembles a stormy sea. The trees spring flame-like from the ground and the hills and clouds heave with the same undulant motion. The dynamism contained in every brush stroke makes each of these images not merely a deposit of color but an incisive graphic gesture. Yet to Van Gogh, it was the color, not the form that determined the expressive content of this painting and “The Night Café.” In another letter to his brother Theo, Vincent offered many descriptions of his choice of hues and the emotional meaning he attached to them. Although he acknowledges that the desire “to exaggerate the essential and to leave the obvious vague” (Tralbaut, 1969), made his colors look arbitrary by Impressionist standards, he nevertheless remained deeply committed to the visible world. As Walther Ingo (1990) maintains, in these two paintings Van Gogh’s “brushwork became stronger and more rhythmic and colour took on its own symbolic function. . . the quality of paint, laid on thick and rough and violent, is no less telling than the use of color.”
But even more illustrative of Van Gogh’s brushwork and color schemes is his “The Starry Night” (1889, oil on canvas). This painting does not envision the sky as a person would normally see it when looking up on a clear, dark night, for it exudes a spangling of twinkling pinpoints of light set against a deep curtain of exquisite blue. In this work, it is obvious that Vincent must have conjured up what it would be like to be immersed within the vastness of the universe filled with whirling and exploding stars and galaxies of stars beneath which the earth and its inhabitants “huddle in anticipation of cosmic disaster” (Ingo, 1990). It appears that some kind of great, mysterious entity is in the process of rapid growth far above the terrestrial earth while in a state of utter combustion and chaos. With this, Van Gogh was apparently not seeking or trying to analyze the harmony in nature, but was attempting to transform it by projecting upon it a vision entirely of his own creation.
The infuriation and calmness expressed in Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” as well as in the two other paintings, can best be explained by focusing on exactly how Post-Impressionist renderings were viewed by not only contemporary art critics but also the general public. By 1886, the Impressionist were accepted as serious artists by most of the critics and by a large segment of the public, but just at the time when their colorful studies of contemporary life no longer seemed crude and unfinished, the painters themselves and a group of young followers came to feel that too many of the traditional elements of painting were being neglected in the search for momentary sensations of light and color. A more systematic examination of the properties of three-dimensional space, of the expressive qualities of line, pattern and color, and the symbolic character of subject matter was undertaken.
A number of these Post-Impressionist painters, especially Van Gogh, set forth to exhibit the analysis of light in a new and monumental synthesis that seemed strangely rigid and remote. In addition, these painters were less concerned with the recording of immediate color sensations and sought to present images that at times were very nightmarish. The free and fluent play with color also evoked much ambiguity, for the surfaces of the paintings had both a surface pattern and a perspective depth. In essence, the aim of these painters was not truth as it appears in nature but a lasting structure behind the formless and the screens of color that the human eye takes in. But since color is only an optical sensation, as the Impressionists had shown, then the structure sought in the optical world must be related to the sensations of the viewer. This is where the idea of infuriation and calmness comes in, for the viewer is always subjective and the sensations or images created by a particular painting are all dependent on the eyes of the viewer.
With this in mind, the Post-Impressionists sought to create the illusion of forms bathed in light and atmosphere, two key ingredients for the formulation of a subjective emotional response to any work of art. Of course, this required an intensive study of light as the source of human color experience which revealed that the actual color of an object is always modified by the quality and quantity of the light in which it is viewed, usually through the reflection from other objects and the effects produced by juxtaposed colors. Complementary colors, for example, if used side by side in large areas, intensify each other; in small quantities, they fuse into neutral tones. Shadows do not appear gray or black but seem composed of colors modified by reflections or other conditions. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of colors on a canvas which the eye fuses at a distance produces a more intense hue than the mixing of the same colors on the palette. Thus, Post-Impressionists like Van Gogh achieved remarkably brilliant effects with their characteristically short, choppy brush stokes which accurately caught the vibrating qualities of natural and artificial light sources.
Much of the early criticism brought against the Post-Impressionists can be accounted for due to the illusion that the canvases looked unintelligible and that the forms and objects appear only when the eye fuses the brush strokes at a certain distance. But in the realms of artistic psychology, this idea can only be supported if every single viewer sees or feels the same emotions that arise from a certain painting. In the case of Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” one viewer may feel infuriated as a result of being unable to understand the context of the painting, while another may feel a sense of calmness, due to the colors on the canvas affecting certain areas of the brain related to emotional release and contentment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ingo, Walther. (1990). Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings.
Tralbaut, Marc. (1969). Vincent Van Gogh. New York: Viking Press.