Incandescent Images
Vincent van Gogh's Famed Starry Nights Are Presented in a Whole New Light At MoMA

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 14, 2008

NEW YORK

Look at the Museum of Modern Art's latest van Gogh show and you may spend most of it (including the two-hour wait one recent Sunday) feeling like it's a cynical exercise in ticket sales: Take "Starry Night," the MoMA painting that no doubt sells the most in posters and coasters, and build a blockbuster exhibition around it.

Yet another van Gogh show? It's almost enough to scare an art lover off. But not quite. I hate to admit it, but, cynical exercise or not, "Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night" changed the way I think about the subjects of van Gogh's art.

When he paints a starry night or moonlit view, van Gogh is not really giving us the starlight or moonshine on the landscape before him. What we're really seeing in those paintings is the bright new glare of artificial light that's hitting van Gogh's canvas as he paints the scene.

Van Gogh, it turns out, is not the last great painter of light. He's one of the first painters of a modern world that's subject to light ing-- a world that's lit by a new kind of disenchanted light that's everywhere around us and under our control.

The exhibition tries to link its hero to a 500-year tradition of artists who rendered strong nighttime effects. That link may be there in his neophyte works -- a number of them help pad this 23-painting show -- but once his art begins to matter, in the late 1880s, the link falls away. Rembrandt and the other Old Master painters of nocturnes often made a point of hiding the light sources in their pictures, so as to favor the light itself as it struck the objects in a scene. Van Gogh heads the opposite way. He skips the illumination, and shows the light sources themselves as just another kind of object to be painted: The moon or a gas lamp or a streetlight becomes more like a chair or a vase or a human face than like the source of all-enfolding energy that makes those objects visible.

In his "Dance Hall in Arles," from 1888, the 11 gas-lit globes that float above the dance floor are no brighter than the faces of the dancers they're supposed to be illuminating. The glaring gaslights are inventoried -- accounted for as important objects in the scene, almost as further protagonists -- but they don't light anything up in a convincing way.

In an 1888 drawing of the lamplit outdoors, now called "Cafe Terrace at Night," the gas lamps are drawn in outline like all the other objects. But van Gogh doesn't use any of the standard draftsman's tricks for making those lamps look lit. When you turn to the painted version of the same subject you realize that, for all the yellow paint van Gogh deploys, there's not much sense of a convincing nighttime scene, in the mode of Rembrandt or Whistler -- of light pushing back against an encroaching darkness.

That's true, too, in van Gogh's famous "Night Cafe," done the same year as the dance hall and the cafe terrace. The three kerosene lanterns and the large gas lamp that illuminate the interior are surrounded by dabs of paint that represent their rays, but those don't seem to strike the dark-red walls around them, or to illuminate the drinkers sitting below. Those rays of light, which are painted in surprisingly dim greens and ochres, are more like descriptive attributes attached to the lamps. (It's like the way, in an altarpiece, you can tell which saint is which by the things they hold.) Even the single token shadow in the room, cast under the billiard table, is closer to being an attribute of the globe above than an element in a convincing web of light effects. In this work, a bouquet of flowers can be more brightly painted than the lamps that are supposed to be lighting it. The four lamps' opaque bodies, along with their shades and rays, are rendered in thick gobs of paint that stress their materiality as objects.

Van Gogh's astral bodies are painted the same way. The stars in his starry nights are all gobbed up; their paint is too substantial to recall vaporous light. So are his brightly painted moons and suns. If you cover the actual sunset or moonrise that van Gogh shows, the rest of the landscape doesn't give much hint of the light that's striking it, and therefore of the time of day or night involved. (In one painting of a sower, van Gogh glopped the setting sun on as an afterthought, over what had been blue sky.)

All this may register the start of a new era in society's relationship to light. Van Gogh is working at just the moment when gas lamps and electric lights are eliminating night, as nothing had before. Thanks to new industrial technologies -- fossil fuels and piped-in gas and, by the 1880s, electricity -- even the most modest cafe could be filled from corner to corner with light. A low-end dance hall frequented by plebes could now be as bright as only the chandelier-lit ballrooms of aristocrats had been.

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.