November Cultural Passport Van Gogh
Boris Kalendariov
For Van Gogh, night is far from the absence of light
“It often seems to me that the night is much more alive than the day.” Those words stood high in big bold italic letters as an epigraph at the entrance to Van Gogh’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition was so popular that it required timed-entry tickets, and it was necessary to squeeze and weave in and out through the crowds if you wanted to catch a glimpse of what van Gogh meant when he preferred the life of the night to the day. This limited run of Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night, in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, brilliantly displayed 23 paintings, 9 drawings and several letters by van Gogh in six seductive galleries. By blockbuster standards, it is not a vast exhibition but its impact is far greater than shows of more quantity.
After unsuccessfully working as a clerk and art salesman, van Gogh decided to pursue a career as an artist in 1880. He had an intimate feeling for the night and like most artists he relied on the skills of observation for his work. But painting in the dark in the late 19th century had its difficulties. Although he admitted to not being able to work exactly from his imagination, he was able to work through this with his experiments through sleepless nights of combining his love for nature and the nocturnal landscapes, interweaving the images and color effects in the paradoxical representation of night by light and color.
The galleries presented the paintings chronologically beginning with his early landscapes and dramatic scenes. “The Potato Eaters” was believed to be one of his first paintings depicting the interior night scene. Van Gogh painted this under candlelight, indoors. He was able to discover new colors everywhere and presented them in his nocturnes. Moreover, nighttime brought a sense of relief to laborers; he believed that the laborers were closest to nature because they worked the fields and portrayed this belief in his earlier paintings.
His earlier paintings have a sense of peace and optimism, often showing the effects of the sun’s rays at dusk and dawn. It is almost a serene feeling seeing his art progress from “Sower” and “Landscape With Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon,” as his experiments with the different shapes and the shifting textures, the use of complementary colors and the depiction of light in the paintings reflected his connection to nature. Once past the third and fourth gallery he shifts from illustrating touches of light yellow and vivid orange colors to portraying the lights and colors of darkness. He now paints outdoors, and the night has deepened from the vestiges of color seen at twilight to a midnight palette.
Darkness is often defined as, in essence, the absence of light, yet he was somehow able to craft “The Starry Night over Rhone,” and the “The Starry Night” and conquered the problem of depicting night by the use of vibrant colors. Van Gogh was able to portray the night by using the stars and moon. His approach to paint with striking colors along with his rhythmic strokes fused both his powers of observation and imagination to create these iconic images. Is night really the absence of light? Not if you are Vincent van Gogh.
Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night is running until January 5 at the Museum of Modern Art at 53rd
Street and 5th Avenue.
