Incandescent Images

The art at the famous Paris Salon was now looked at by the light of arc lamps so that "one easily forgets the time, giving oneself over to examining the paintings with the same tranquility one would by daylight," as one observer put it in 1879. Paris itself had earned the title City of Lights because of the 20,000 street lamps installed by the famous Baron Haussmann. According to a German guidebook from 1867, "they wink and twinkle everywhere, and you can't imagine anything more beautiful."

Look at van Gogh's "Starry Night Over the Rhone," and you realize that most of the light in the scene is in fact coming from the bright row of gas lamps that lines the far rim of docks. This picture isn't really about a starlit sky; it's about a lamplit cityscape. Look at the two lovers in its foreground and you realize that they're not enraptured by the starscape in front of van Gogh; their attention's focused the other way, on the modern street lamps that shine out behind the painter.

In fact, it's that lamplight that lets the picture exist at all: It's the light van Gogh is painting by -- that all his nightscapes are painted by -- shining over his shoulder and onto his easel from a lamp that's just like the ones we see in the distance. (His letters often mention painting outdoors by gaslight. They also mention that he had gas installed in the Yellow House in Arles, to light his portrait sitters and so he could paint at night. In this show, a portrait of Eugène Boch, "The Poet," is clearly painted by gaslight, though the sitter's shown against a starry sky.)

When light can appear anywhere, at any time, at the turn of a knob or flick of a switch, it stops being a magical force and becomes a pedestrian, material fact. That's the disenchanted reality van Gogh has to cope with in his nightscapes. In September of 1888, van Gogh wrote that he felt "a terrible need for, shall I say the word -- religion -- so I go outside to paint the stars." But in his paintings, stars can no longer be some tiny twinkles in the night. They have to compete with gas lamps, and be rendered as big and bright as them. But that makes them only less important, not more. Stars are "just" more lights, in a world that's become filled with them.

As I write this article, three electric lights illuminate the space around me, but that doesn't leave me more impressed by them. It makes them fade into the background. Even as artificial lighting becomes something that we cannot live without -- to paint a picture, to take a nighttime stroll, to write an art review -- light itself becomes something we take for granted.

Van Gogh's pictures, with stars and moons and setting suns that shine as big and bright as lamps, but only as big and bright as lamps, record the moment when this happens. Light has stopped being a force. It has become one more datum in a modern life.

Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night runs through Jan. 5 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., New York. Call 212-708-9400 or visit http://www.moma.org.