Van Gogh in a New Light

Vincent van Gogh was such a good painter that it is worth putting on a show of his work even when there is no particular reason to do so. A case in point: “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night,” which is set to open on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, with 23 paintings, 10 works on paper, and sundry illustrated letters in the artist’s own hand. The show’s stated subject, van Gogh’s interest in nocturnal scenes, is a little less compelling than the curators at MoMA and at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (their collaborators on this exhibition) seem to believe. And for a show consecrated to the night, a surprising number of sun-filled landscapes are on view. But none of this really matters — we must always welcome any opportunity to re-examine the works of van Gogh.Night scenes had been a preoccupation of the Dutch Masters for centuries before van Gogh’s birth. Indeed, the case could be made that, fully four generations before Caravaggio and his followers exploited the potential of chiaroscuro, van Gogh’s compatriot, the Leiden-born Geertgen tot Sint Jans, had painted the first night scene in the history of art, a depiction of Christ in his manger. And even when the Dutch painters of the Baroque returned to these nocturnal subjects, following Caravaggio and other Italian masters, they approached the challenge in a fundamentally different fashion from their Southern contemporaries. For the Dutch, night was not merely a formal element of their art, but a spiritual one as well. In the paintings of Hercules Seghers and Rembrandt van Rijn, night becomes a moody metaphor for the soul in a state of radical withdrawal from the sunlit world of men. Night is the outward, visual projection of an essentially internal condition, the soul in dialogue with itself.Some residue of that sentiment survives in the works of Vincent van Gogh that are on view at the Modern. It was part of van Gogh’s character, of his very nature, to respond to everything in his universe both visually and emotionally. He felt in color and color was itself an emotion. From this distance in time, it would be a fool’s errand to presume to psychoanalyze him, but he seems in many respects like a typical manic-depressive; that is, someone who is intensely happy until, suddenly, he is intensely sad.He must have been deeply unhappy if he took his own life. And yet, that one act aside, he seems in most of his art to have been almost shrilly happy, whether he was depicting night or day, as shown in his later and most typical works, those thickly impasted, post-Impressionist masterpieces executed from the mid-1880s on, rather than to such earlier works as his lugubrious “Potato Eaters” of 1885. In his much-loved “Starry Night” (1889) and his “Starry Night over the Rhone” (1888), van Gogh infuses the nocturnal sky with a whitish underpaint that renders it not black, as one might expect, but deeply and richly purple.Starting in the 19th century, there were two forms of night: that of the country, as it appears in “Starry Night,” and that of the city, where it was very different. The purple night of the country becomes a ravenous yellow in the city, since the defining color of urban night is, for van Gogh, the jaundiced glow of streetlamps and the gas lamps of the cafés. This chromatic choice is manifest in van Gogh’s “Terrace of a Café at Night” (1888), as well as in the glowing halation of the ceiling lamps in his stunning interior scene, “The Night Café,” from the same year.But in the works on view at the Modern, it is clear that day itself, no less than night, had great symbolic consequence for van Gogh’s highly impressionable soul. Though raging yellow would seem the obvious choice for his almighty sun, van Gogh takes a different view of it. His sun glows to whitish incandescence in “Summer Evening Near Arles” (1888), while it simmers as a molten orange orb in his several versions of “The Sower,” from the same year. In this latter work, the human figure, seen in silhouette, is uncharacteristically reduced almost to pure form. Rather it is the sun itself, no less than the stars in his nocturnal paintings, that assumes, in van Gogh’s cosmology, the majesty of a god and the intimacy of a friend.Until January 5 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).

Van Gogh in a New Light

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