Starry Night

Van Gogh applied paint with a feverish physicality that transforms what might have been a landscape into a record of a mind perceiving. The night sky is not rendered but felt: swirling, thick impasto strokes — some applied with brush, some perhaps with the knife or even the tube itself — create an atmosphere of visible energy, as if the heavens were composed of actual living matter. The turbulent whorls in the sky were long thought purely expressionist, but researchers have identified patterns consistent with Kolmogorov turbulence — the mathematical description of fluid dynamics — suggesting Van Gogh's perception captured something physically real in the atmosphere. The village below is painted in a contrasting idiom: calmer, more horizontal, the church steeple reaching upward as the only structural rhyme with the swirling above. The cypress at left — dark, flame-shaped, a traditional symbol of death — bridges earth and sky and is the emotional spine of the work.

Van Gogh painted Starry Night in June 1889, during his voluntary stay at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had checked himself in following the crisis that resulted in the severing of his ear. He was permitted to work when his mental state allowed, and his output during the twelve months at Saint-Rémy was astonishing — over 150 paintings. The view from his room at the asylum, with the addition of the imagined village below (the actual view did not include such a settlement), became the stage for what would become his most famous composition. He described it in letters to his brother Theo as 'another attempt,' dismissing it with a characteristic mixture of self-deprecation and passion. He was 36 years old. He would be dead within 14 months.

Starry Night entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1941, and it is not an exaggeration to say that MoMA was built in its image as much as the reverse. The painting has become one of the defining icons of the idea that mental anguish and artistic genius are not merely compatible but somehow causally linked — a reading that is more mythological than historical, but one the image has come to embody. It has spawned an industry of reproductions, animated adaptations, academic papers on turbulence physics, and more popular culture citations than almost any other Western painting. Don McLean's 1971 song 'Vincent' transformed the painting's reception still further, embedding it in the popular consciousness of a generation that had little previous exposure to art history. For better or worse, this is the painting by which Van Gogh — and the figure of the tortured artist — is known to the world.

Van Gogh himself was ambivalent about the work, writing to his brother that he considered the starry night attempts a 'failure.' His friend and fellow painter Emile Bernard received a description but not universal praise. It was not until long after Van Gogh's death that critical opinion elevated it to masterwork status. Clement Greenberg and later Meyer Schapiro wrote about Van Gogh's handling of surface as a seminal contribution to the development of Abstract Expressionism. In his landmark television series and book 'The Shock of the New,' Robert Hughes placed Starry Night at the junction between naturalistic Impressionism and the emotional subjectivity of Expressionism — a hinge-point in the history of modern painting.