 FURTHER AFIELD
Van Gogh’s Night Pictures at MoMA
Night Moves
By Judy Pomeranz
One of the first true expressionist artists of modern times, Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) had a unique ability to transmit deep feelings, intense sensations and raw emotions through the way he put paint on canvas. With his signature brushwork and utterly subjective use of color, his work can make us feel ecstasy, peace, freneticism, vague discomfort or outright depression.
While Van Gogh’s mature work is most closely associated with and reflective of the amazingly special light that shines on Provence during the day, he created a number of equally, if not more, evocative images of the night. These views of the darkness can be soothing or scary, sweetly serene or sensationally spectacular, but they are never boring, and they are always and memorably his alone. The Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently hosting a special exhibition of Van Gogh’s nocturnal images that brings this point home as it’s never been delivered before.
Of course, Van Gogh’s most famous nighttime scene is MoMA’s own “Starry Night,” the work that presumably precipitated this examination of the artist’s explorations of evening. Painted in 1889, the year before his suicide, the picture is quintessentially and beautifully representative of Van Gogh’s late work. The colors are complementary, with brilliant blues and oranges, yellows and purples bouncing off each other, setting up vibrations in our optic nerves and swirling across the canvas to depict a huge sky filled with stars, moons and planets more exciting than anything man could possibly create and more thrilling than anything most of us could even imagine, all hovering over an almost incidental townscape.
The impasto brushwork is choppy, whirling and filled with a frenzied energy that makes viewers gasp when first seeing the original, no matter how often they have seen reproductions. This is an artist who intuitively understood the importance of line in a painting, one who knew that horizontals and verticals provide stability and that squiggles and diagonals imbue a work with movement and energy. This is an artist who generally chose to exploit his colors and lines for every bit of energy that could be wrung out of them but could also magically evoke a contemplative spirituality from those very same elements. And he does it all in “The Starry Night.”
 But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this masterpiece, when one stops to examine it objectively, is the way Van Gogh uses bright colors to convincingly and successfully evoke darkness. He uses just about everything other than the expected–there are no blacks or grays in evidence–to convey a sense of the night.
But it wasn’t always so. When Van Gogh began working as an artist, at the age of 27, his evening depictions showed the influence of his forebears like Rembrandt from the Golden Age of Dutch art and of the French Barbizon painters. Van Gogh’s earliest landscapes are dominated by dark colors and horizontals in both compositional lines and brushstrokes. They are subdued; they are landscapes that are about the landscape. But by 1885, we begin to see landscapes that are more about mood, and frankly about the artist.
In “Evening Landscape,” for example, Van Gogh’s brushwork loosens up to become more significant than the imagery it constructs; it becomes the single most important structural and design element in the canvas. While many of the colors are still subdued, the sky becomes an eerie green, as does the land that reflects it, and the great ball of setting sun becomes an almost frighteningly garish shade of orange, an orange which casts its brilliance across the sky and the water below, bringing the entire scene to life.
By 1887, in “Sunset at Montmartre,” Van Gogh’s palette takes on the cool tones of the Impressionists, and his brushwork both mimics and exaggerates that group’s loose choppiness. It is here that we see the artist bringing his own particular style to bear on the evening landscape, a style that will be fully realized in “The Starry Night” and the intensely lovely, if somewhat tamer, “Landscape at Twilight” from 1890.
 But evening was not all about landscapes for Van Gogh; he was equally interested in depicting interiors shot through with the visual and emotional effects of the end of the day. The seminal “Potato Eaters” from 1885, considered by many to be his first great work, is a dark scene whose subdued colors reflect the difficult circumstances of a peasant family sitting down to a humble meal of potatoes and tea. The heavy, globby paint application evokes the difficulty of the peasants’ lot while it helps sculpt their solid faces and bodies. Contrasting the gaslight that illuminates the scene with the interior itself, Van Gogh takes an early opportunity to play with the way light filters into, reflects off and illuminates a scene, even while it plays on the emotions. It is particularly wonderful in the MoMA show, to see a number of preparatory drawings that led up to this great work.
In 1888, Van Gogh painted his other great nighttime interior, “The Night Café,” in which jarring, garish, discordant colors–exemplified by the broad areas of complementary red and green illuminated by a horrifying shade of yellow–define the scene and, along with the jittery brushwork, evoke feelings of mania and lurking evils. This work is shown along with “Terrace of a Cafe at Night,” painted the same year, which presents an animated but far more serene depiction of nighttime in the city.
While “The Starry Night” has always been the blockbuster night scene and is presented as the centerpiece of this exhibit, “The Starry Night over the Rhone,” from the Musée d’Orsay, emerges as a bit of a show-stealer. Characterized by more horizontal brushstrokes and compositional lines, it is a peaceful image and, thanks in large part to the strolling couple in the foreground, it is a contemplative one, as well. In its own way, it is imbued with as much drama as MoMA’s “Starry Night,” but the drama is a subtler, human drama. The stars glitter, and lights play gently across the water. The sky is lovely and entrancing, even hypnotizing, but it does not grab the viewer by the throat the way “The Starry Night” does. Having said that, the intense beauty of this canvas stands out as one of the true high points of the exhibition.
Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night is on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art through January 5. For further information, phone 212-708-9400 or visit www.moma.org.
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