Van Gogh's Starry Night and 10 things to know about this painting

Considered to be the largest painting in Van Gogh The Starry Night depicts a view from outside his window at the asylum, although it was painted from memory during the day. From all the collection of Van Gogh paintings (available here) , it is undoubtedly the most famous painting.

The Starry Night is an interpretation of Van Gogh's view of his room at the asylum of Saint-Rémy de Provence. Although he painted this view several times, The Starry Night is the only nocturnal study of it. In addition, this added to the many letters he sent to his brother Theo, it gives us an idea of what the artist saw during his isolation.

An end-of-the-world cataclysm invaded Van Gogh's Starry Night, an apocalypse filled with melting meteorites and stray comets. One has the impression that the artist has thrown all his inner conflicts onto the canvas. Everything is mixed together in a cosmic fusion. The only exception is the village with its architectural elements. Several months after painting The Starry Night, Van Gogh wrote:

The artist looks at the village from an imaginary point of view. It is framed by new motifs: on the left a cypress tree points to the sky, on the right a group of olive trees crowd together like a cloud, and run along the undulations of the Alpilles on the horizon.
Van Gogh treated his motifs by associating them with fire, fog and the sea, and the elemental power of the scene blends with the intangible drama that unfolds in the stars.

The natural and eternal universe forms an idyllic cradle for the human colony, while at the same time surrounding it in a threatening way. The village itself could be anywhere , Saint-Rémy, or Nuenen remembered in a nocturnal mood swing. The tip of the church seems to stretch out in the elements all at once, like the antenna or the lightning rod of a sort of provincial Eiffel Tower. In his nocturnes, Van Gogh seems fascinated by the Eiffel Tower...

Van Gogh's mountains and trees, especially the cypresses, are barely visible, yet seem charged with electricity. Confident in the fact that he had captured their natural appearances, Van Gogh took it upon himself to redraw their image in the service of the symbolic. Together with the firmament, these landscape pieces sing the praises of creation in this unique canvas.

"I made another landscape with olive trees and a new study of the starry sky" was how Van Gogh described the painting in his letter to Theo. "Although I had not seen the paintings of Gauguin and Bernard , I'm pretty sure that these two studies are similar in design. When you see them [...] I will be able to explain to you better and give you an idea of what we are talking about with Gauguin and Bernard, better than I can do with words; It's not a return to romanticism or religious ideas, no. Through Delacroix , one can express more about nature and the countryside, by means of colours and a particular style of drawing, than it might seem."

Van Gogh specifies several points of detail here.
First of all, this synthesis of motifs was his first return to work with Gauguin since their dispute . The night scene offers the imagination its most distinctive field of action, since the lack of light encourages us to compensate with visual memory. Van Gogh used the method of visual memory in his night scene; his discovery of the luminous power of darkness was a personal aesthetic discovery that did not need Gauguin as a catalyst.
Then, Van Gogh drew following the models of Delacroix, and the principle of contrasts; Once he had settled on what he had designed in the previous weeks, he turned his attention back to the colorist techniques he himself had developed up to that point.
Third, he sought to discover the essence of the landscape, its Being—a way of representing its symbolic power, vitality, flow, and constancy, all in one.

The interpretations of this painting are legion.

Some claim that it is a realistic representation of the position of the stars in June 1889. Of course, this is perfectly possible. The twisted spiral lines have nothing to do with the North Star or the Milky Way or any other spiral nebula.

Others think that Van Gogh expresses a Personal Gethsemane .

They are based on a discussion about Jesus on the Mount of Olives that he had embarked on with Gauguin and Bernard.

It's possible; The premonition of future suffering was surely articulated on the web. Biblical allegories are present throughout Vincent van Gogh's work, and he doesn't need a particular motif, let alone a starry night, with all its associations with Arles and Utopian visions.
Van Gogh was trying to summarize; and its summary juxtaposes nature, science, philosophy, and personal elements. The starry night is an attempt to express a state of shock, and cypresses, olive trees, and mountains are Van Gogh's catalysts. More intensely than before, perhaps more than ever, Van Gogh was interested in the material reality of his motifs as much as in their symbolic dimension.

There were hills in Arles as well, of course. They entered their panoramic scenes like idyllic touches. His landscapes included the harvest, the passage of trains, isolated farms, and distant villages; and the hills were just another detail. In Arles, Van Gogh's dream was made of the harmony between the things of reality and the spatial dimension in which this harmony could be felt. None of that remains here. The hills rise, steep and steep now, threatening to drag the lonely soul into dizzying depths.

The starry night has reached the pinnacle of artistic achievement. Although Van Gogh sold only one painting in his entire life, The Starry Night is an icon of modern art, it is the Mona Lisa of our time. Just as Leonardo da Vinci evoked an ideal of serenity and self-control for the Renaissance, Van Gogh defined the way we view our time—plagued by loneliness and uncertainty.

Since 1941, Van Gogh's Starry Night has been part of the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art in New York .

10 Things You Don't Know About "The Starry Night":

1) Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889, from a room in the Saint-Rémy insane asylum, where he was recovering from mental disorders and having amputated an ear.

2) Van Gogh painted the view from the east façade of his window 21 times. Although the series depicts varied views depending on the time of day and different weather conditions, all of the works include the line of hills on the horizon. Not one of them shows the bars of her room.

3) He considered "The Starry Night", which would become his most famous painting, to be a failed painting, according to the letters he sent to his brother.

4) The physicist Louis Aragon compared the turbulent play of light and dark in this type of work to the mathematical expression of turbulence in the natural phenomena of whirlwinds and air currents. It turned out that they looked very similar. Two other paintings by Van Gogh from 1890, Wheatfield with Crows and Road with Cypresses and Stars, also present this mathematical parallel. Aragon suggests that since the artist created these particular works in periods of extreme mental turmoil, Van Gogh found himself in a unique position to accurately communicate this agitation using gradual levels of luminescence.

5) Analysts of The Starry Night emphasize the symbolism of the stylized cypress tree in the foreground, linking it to the death and incidentally to Van Gogh's suicide. However, the cypress tree also represents immortality. In the painting, the tree tends towards the sky, and serves as a direct connection between heaven and earth. Van Gogh's message through this painting was surely more positive than we would like to attribute to him. The positive interpretation of the cypress refers to a letter sent to his brother in which the artist compares death to a train that travels to the stars.

6) In his 2015 book, "Cosmography," Michael Benson hints that the inspiration behind Van Gogh's meandering sky is an 1845 drawing by astronomer William Parson, Earl of Rosse, of the vortex galaxy.

7) Research has confirmed that the dominant star in the painting is actually Venus, which was in a similar position when Van Gogh painted The Starry Night, and it would have shone exactly as he painted it.

8) The Moon in the canvas, as painted by Van Gogh, would not have been crescent at the time he made it. In truth, it would have been gibbous or three-quarters full.

9) Pathologist Paul Wolf argued in 2001 that the artist's penchant for yellow in the canvas was the result of taking too many digitalis, a treatment for epilepsy at the time.

10) Van Gogh's Starry Night speaks to art lovers and the general public alike, even today, due in part to its vibrant palette and swirling movements that draw the viewer right into the center of the artist's fantastical vision, at the heart of the work.