(jazzy piano music)
- [Steven] We're on the fifth floor
of the Museum of Modern Art
looking at probably their most famous painting,
Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night."
- [Beth] This is something that van Gogh
had been interested in before he painted
this particular painting.
He did another version of a night sky,
which is very different.
In the foreground, we see the giant undulating form
of a cypress tree.
- [Steven] And we don't see the bottom of that cypress tree.
It's cut off at the bottom edge of the frame,
and so we get the sense that it must be close to us.
The sky takes up almost three quarters of the canvas
and it reminds me of the great Dutch landscapes
of the 17th century, of artists like Ruisdael,
who was interested in the movements of clouds
through the sky and the play of light there.
But of course this is night,
the only light is from the moon and from the stars.
- [Beth] And we're looking down past that cypress
into a valley where we see some small cottages and a church
very prominently centrally placed with a steeple
that just breaks the horizon line formed by those mountains.
And the village seems very humble
but also embraced by the mountains behind it
and that cypress in front.
There's a band of lighter yellows and blues
just above the hills,
further protecting that landscape below.
It feels protected to me at the same time
that there's all this turmoil in the sky
that we see in these circular brushstrokes.
- [Steven] The brushwork has tremendous energy.
One stroke follows another, linking to create
these streams of energy through the sky.
And although the paint is somewhat thick in certain areas,
we can also see the canvas in certain areas.
And so it is not that heavily painted, but nevertheless
there was a kind of energy and velocity,
a kind of dynamism as those clouds roll through the sky.
- [Beth] And I think that dynamism,
that energy that's in the brush work
in the clouds or forms that swirl through the sky,
the way that the moon emits a pulsing light,
and even the stars and planets emit that brighter light
than they do in reality,
that for me, contrasts with the tranquility
of the village below that's nestled in that valley.
There is a sense of a presence of activity in the sky,
which we associate with the heavens and the divine
as though those things were alive
and somehow protecting the village underneath,
at least that's one way that I read this painting sometimes.
- [Steven] And some art historians
have looked then at the cypress,
a tree that symbolizes death,
in part because it's often found in cemeteries.
- [Beth] This a kind of linking
of the earthly and the heavenly with that cypress,
that undulates almost like fire.
- [Steven] And is mimicked by the steeple
of the church in the valley.
So that there's this pairing where tree and the steeple
are both reaching up to the heaven.
- [Beth] Van Gogh like other artists of the 1870s and '80s
is thinking about complimentary colors.
He's thinking about blues and yellows and oranges,
and how colors can intensify one another,
and work together to communicate ideas and feelings.
And this is definitely not a landscape that van Gogh saw.
This is something constructed from memory
and from his imagination.
But think about how brave this painting is,
to do something with brushwork this visible,
this sketchy, this energized.
- [Steven] I would say this divorced
from what he would have seen.
There's an abstraction of form here
that the artist is comfortable with
which is absolutely radical.
- [Beth] And if you think about so much of his work,
it is images of what he could see
and that he went out specifically to paint.
But here this incredible bravery to do something
based on his emotions, his memories, his experiences
and his imagination.
- [Steven] In 1889, van Gogh was in an asylum in Saint-Remy
in Southern France, what had once been a monastery,
and van Gogh actually had a view out his window
that was relatively close to this,
but there is no church there.
There is no village there.
- [Beth] Van Gogh is in this asylum
because he suffered a series of breakdowns.
He suffered from mental illness for much of his life,
although it got worse after a fight
with his fellow painter Gauguin, when he cut his ear.
- [Steven] Van Gogh was encouraged
to paint at the asylum,
and was given a studio space where he had no view at all,
and where this was likely painted.
So this was not painted en plein air.
This was not painted out of doors.
What a journey this painting has taken
from that room in Saint-Remy
to the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art,
reproduced around the world
recognized by people everywhere.
It's a fate that I don't think the artist
could have ever imagined.
(jazzy piano music)