[MUSIC PLAYING]
NATE: We're here at the Museum of Modern Art,
one of my favorite art museums.
We're going to get a chance to see some of the most
famous works of art.
Let's get inside and get started.
Follow me.
This episode is funded by The Glick Fund and the Christel
DeHaan Family Foundation, who inspire
philanthropy and creativity.
We are here with Larissa Bailiff.
Thank you so much for your time, for coming out here
to talk to us about-- and your title here at the MoMA
would be?
I'm an educator, Nate.
And I love educators, so this is fantastic.
So, thanks so much.
Talking about this, I mean, I think I know this painting,
right?
This is Starry Night, so yeah.
So can you tell us a little bit about just what you
know about it?
Especially how it got into the museum and the time frame
and-- yeah, just let me know about it.
Well, it's a work from the late 19th century.
It was painted in 1889 by Vincent van Gogh.
And we'll talk more about him.
In terms of coming into the museum,
it was a gift from one of our three founders.
And we were founded by three women.
And she gave this to us, I believe, in 1941.
NATE: I mean, where was he at when he painted this?
What was going on?
Sure, absolutely.
He painted this when he was in Saint Remy, France.
And it's painted at the hospital where
he put himself to take care of himself and recuperate.
And he had two rooms there.
And he could look outside the windows.
He could walk the grounds.
And so, it is essentially what he might have seen looking out
one of those windows.
But of course, he's done many different things
to it, combined art history, his emotions.
And that's what makes it so special.
NATE: Where did he get the influence of just wanting
to do so much with nature?
In terms of nature, that's something
that he loved from the get go.
And he talks about it in his letters
to Theo, memories of walking around and finding
different little animals and studying nature and plants
and sketching them from a very early time.
One thing that we get to see when we're here is texture.
And the other is the incredible amount
of color, which is amazing.
Do you know where he got some of these influences
and what pressed him to want to use so much paint?
I think that's one of the most amazing things about Vincent
van Gogh.
Because he tried on different styles
and was exposed to a lot of art history,
but he really settled upon this-- what we kind of call--
parallel brushwork.
Although there's nothing really parallel about it.
It's moving and undulating.
But very, very thickly encrusted, a lot of impasto,
a lot of paint on the surface.
And it seems to have been something
that allowed him to really express himself,
to really pour himself into the paint.
And that texture, I mean it's almost haptic and touchable.
And yet, in places, we can see the bare canvas.
So it's not completely covered.
It's where he's moved to paint and express himself.
In terms of the colors, I mean, they're bright and vibrant.
And a lot of that comes out of just having
been in Paris, living with his brother in 1886 to 1888.
He was exposed to Impressionism and what
the new artists were doing and using vibrant paint colors.
One thing that they were very influenced by
were Japanese woodblock prints with wide swatches of color.
And I think that that comes across in here,
that it's not boring colors.
It's not staid.
And it's not even a night sky that's so dark
that we can't see anything.
It's ablaze with blues and complimentary orange-yellows.
And there's color all throughout.
There's not just one single sense of blue, yellow, white.
Now, you've told me a little bit--
maybe math or science behind the way the sky looks?
Sure.
So just to say this has been such
a fascinating and compelling work of art
that all kinds of different people have analyzed it,
from psychologists to astronomers.
And more recently, mathematicians and people
involved in physics have really begun
to think about how van Gogh may have
had his finger on the pulse.
The pulse of light, for instance.
And that somehow he was able to convey or to translate
really complicated concepts, like the concept of turbulence.
So we know that he's made thousands
of paintings and hundreds and hundreds of sketches.
So why is-- I mean, this is iconic.
I would argue probably one of the most popular paintings
in the world.
Why was it--
I mean, he wasn't popular.
He couldn't sell them.
So how did-- what changed?
What happened?
I mean, he only sold one painting in his lifetime.
And that was to a friend's sister,
who appreciated his work.
And people really misunderstood him.
But as you said, he was extremely prolific,
putting his ideas out there in letters
and sketches and paintings.
But to why this is so compelling--
and in fact, he didn't consider it a masterpiece
as we do today.
But I think people are drawn to it for all different kinds
of reasons.
Partially because we understand more about his life now
and we know that this was a really difficult time
to be in an asylum.
A vulnerable time, where he's expressing his emotions.
But also, the compelling night sky that fills up almost all
of the composition and draws us in again
with this brushwork that is just and undulating.
And so different from what any painter was creating
at the time, when surfaces were really polished
and we were supposed to understand the meaning
and it was clear cut, a narrative, a story.
That's what you were supposed to get.
Or to understand that it's a direct transcript of what
you see outside.
And he is able to blend--
I would say magically or mystically--
this amazing picture for us.
Here he is at his lowest point almost humanly possible,
making his greatest work.
But is there any kind of religious connotation
with being at church?
I don't know if there's any symbolism there.
Absolutely.
So, you know, there are so many things going on in this work
that we could look to and think about,
in relation to his own experience and his own life.
So he was a very religious person, felt very spiritual.
And we do have a church there.
But interestingly, this is not what a church in Saint Remy
would have looked like.
In fact, the church that he would have seen or encountered
had a dome.
And this has a steeple.
And yet, it's in the center bottom of the picture,
so it has importance there.
He puts it in.
And many people think that it's a memory of the parsonage
that his father ran when van Gogh was growing up.
So again, he comes from a very spiritual background.
But he has to interpret that for himself.
Van Gogh, with his love of nature, came to, I think,
believe that there is spirituality in everything,
every blade of grass.
And I bring that up because he's reading
Walt Whitman and many other writers
and poets in many different languages.
But religion is there, imbued in--
or faith, I should say.
Spirituality in all aspects of this, in the beauty of things.
Since we're looking at the stars and it's called Starry Night,
I just wanted to point close to particularly this star
here, which seems to be one of the most important for him.
And he believed it was the morning star.
We can tell-- not from the naked eye, per se,
although if you look really close,
you'll see a lot of canvas--
that he painted the blue and left blank canvas.
And then painted the bright colors of the star
and moved out and out.
Wow, yeah.
That's one thing I love about being at the museum.
I mean, I can see the book and sort of-- but now, I
could come at this angle and really see what you're saying,
how he applied the different layers.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you so much for your time.
This is amazing, to get a few glimpses of what this work did.
Thanks, Nate.
It's my pleasure and one of my favorite paintings
the Museum of Modern Art.
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