There we go.
Vincent the painter.
Hi. My name is Sheldon Clarke,
and I work in the Security Department here at the Museum of Modern Art.
My name is Anny Aviram. I'm a Senior Paintings Conservator.
I'm Cara Manes. I'm an Associate Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture.
I'm Robert Kastler. I'm the Director of Imaging and Digital Resources and today
we're going to be talking about "Starry Night."
The Museum of Modern Art developed this partnership with
the LEGO team trying to reimagine this iconic painting as a LEGO set.
Honestly, I knew nothing about "Starry Night" or Vincent before I started working here.
And I remember the first time I stood at that painting. First of all, I was so amazed at the reaction of the public.
There's always a group of people just fighting to just look at it, to take pictures, to take selfies.
And I was just curious to know, like, who is this painter? And why is everyone so excited to see this piece?
Vincent van Gogh is a Dutch artist. He was born in the Netherlands in 1853.
He started painting in his late twenties, eventually moved to Paris, started studying these Impressionist artists.
Traditionally, artists had measured success by their ability to capture the illusion of reality on a two-dimensional surface.
Van Gogh and his colleagues at the end of the 19th century really started questioning whether the goal of a painting
should be to reflect reality. Van Gogh painted "Starry Night" when he was in a self-imposed exile.
The artist had a mental break and decided to commit himself to the asylum and where he stayed for approximately one year.
He would spend time looking out of the window of his room, which is ostensibly the view that we're seeing in "Starry Night."
I think that that's what makes the painting so radical. While what you're seeing is recognizable,
it looks like a landscape, but in fact, it is a portrait of an inner landscape.
It's interesting that the set does have the basic building blocks and no pun intended that are within the painting itself.
There are very specific colors of paint that are juxtaposed. Van Gogh was not using a lot of colors within the painting.
There's probably a total of twelve different colors. The yellows in the painting are definitely described as chrome yellow.
That's all the yellow he used. But sometimes he would blend that color with a little bit of white to make it lighter.
It's always the same yellow. He doesn't use black, but he has three different blues.
For the white, he only uses zinc white and lead white, which is basically what you find in the ground of the painting.
And the colors in the cypress tree are really a blend of earth brown, emerald green, and Prussian blue.
Color is such a complex thing. It's like a 400 page—we could do a whole story just on color alone.
The accuracy of color is a very difficult thing. It seems so easy. You point your camera at something
and the camera knows what colors should be, but it's very far from that.
And so we take a lot of time ensuring that the colors that we're capturing are accurate to the original.
This whole palette was analyzed with such precision. The analysis gave us the exact components of all the pigments.
We were also able to take from the sides of the painting. Very small microscopic cross sections.
And those cross sections will indicate very clearly the layering of the paint.
I know that the piece is in here. You didn't trick me right? I'm going to skip that piece.
One of the key features of this painting is the surface texture itself. The strokes are very fluid, rapid.
If he does a very thick brush stroke with a lot of impasto, he leaves it. It's almost like a signature, the way he paints.
The uppermost register of the painting is this intense, swirling sky. You see this almost like wave of blue overtaking another
portion of the sky. There's a feeling of becoming almost lost in a circular swirl of the cosmos.
The "Starry Night" is the first time that we've attempted to create a 3D model of an object in the MoMA collection
The technology that we used is called photogrammetry, and it's essentially taking hundreds and hundreds of pictures
of the painting itself at different angles and using software to compile it into a three-dimensional model.
We can pass that information along to researchers sot hat they can tell us more about this work.
It's just wonderful to be able to zoom in and look at each brush stroke and see how
they're sort of dancing around the painting together. I feel like I'm getting somewhere.
Ok, I feel like I'm getting somehwere.
Van Gogh completed the work while he was living in the asylum. And it was very unclear what kind of
trajectory the work would have, certainly to van Gogh. He had no idea that it would become one of the
most iconic and beloved works in art history. I have a "Starry Night" print in my room.
Sometimes just waking up and looking at that painting, it just reminds me that it's so important
to just keep doing what we feel that we were put here to do.
Whether it's singing, whether it's dancing, whether it's painting, whatever you're doing right now,
you never know how it might impact the next generation in the next ten years or the next 100 years.