834 Chapter 31 EUROPE AND AMERICA, 1870 TO 1900T
hroughout his life, Vincent van Gogh
wrote letters to his brother Theo van
Gogh (1857–1891), a Parisian art dealer, on
matters both mundane and philosophical.
The letters are precious documents of the
vicissitudes of the painter’s life and reveal
his emotional anguish. In many of the let-
ters, van Gogh also forcefully stated his
views about art. In one letter, he told Theo:
“In both my life and in my painting, I can
very well do without God but I cannot, ill
as I am, do without something which is
greater than I,...the power to create.”* For
van Gogh, the power to create involved the
expressive use of color. “Instead of trying to
reproduce exactly what I have before my
eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to
express myself forcibly.ӠColor in painting,
he argued, is “not locally true from the
point of view of the delusive realist, but
color suggesting some emotion of an ar-
dent temperament.”‡
Some of van Gogh’s letters contain
vivid descriptions of his paintings, which
are invaluable to art historians in gauging
his intentions and judging his success. For
example, about Night Café(FIG. 31-16), he
wrote:
I have tried to express the terrible passions
of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and
dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four
citron-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere
there is a clash and contrast of the most disparate reds and greens in
the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty, dreary room, in
violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard
table, for instance, contrast with the soft, tender Louis XV green of
the counter, on which there is a pink nosegay. The white coat ofthe landlord, awake in a corner of that furnace, turns citron-yellow,
or pale luminous green.§
* Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, September 3, 1888, in W. H. Auden, ed.,
Van Gogh: A Self-Portrait. Letters Revealing His Life as a Painter(New York: Dutton,
1963), 319.
† August 11, 1888. Ibid., 313.
‡ September 8, 1888. Ibid., 321.
§ September 8, 1888. Ibid., 320.The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
ARTISTS ON ART
31-16Vincent van Gogh,Night Café,1888. Oil on canvas, 2 41 – 2 3 . Yale University Art
Gallery, New Haven (bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark).
In Night Café,van Gogh explored the abilities of colors and distorted forms to express emotions. The
thickness, shape, and direction of his brush strokes create a tactile counterpart to the intense colors.thickness, shape, and direction of his brush strokes created a tactile
counterpart to his intense color schemes. He often moved the brush
vehemently back and forth or at right angles, giving a textilelike
effect, even squeezing dots or streaks directly onto his canvas from
his paint tube. This bold, almost slapdash attack enhanced the inten-
sity of his colors.
STARRY NIGHT Similarly illustrative of van Gogh’s “expres-
sionist” method is Starry Night (FIG. 31-17), which the artist
painted in 1889, the year before his death. At this time, van Gogh was
living at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, an asylum in Saint-Rémy, near
Arles, where he had committed himself. In Starry Night,the artist
did not represent the sky’s appearance. Rather, he communicated his
feelings about the electrifying vastness of the universe, filled with
whirling and exploding stars and galaxies of stars, the earth and hu-
manity huddling beneath it. The church nestled in the center of the
village is perhaps van Gogh’s attempt to express or reconcile his con-
flicted views about religion. Although the style in Starry Night sug-
gests a very personal vision, this work does correspond in many ways
to the view available to the painter from the window of his room in
Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. The existence of cypress trees and the place-
ment of the constellations have been confirmed as matching the
view van Gogh would have had during his stay in the asylum. Still,
the artist translated any visible objects into his unique vision. Given
van Gogh’s determination to “use color ...to express [him]self
forcibly,” the dark, deep blue that suffuses the entire painting cannot
be overlooked. Together with the turbulent brush strokes, the color
suggests a quiet but pervasive depression. Van Gogh’s written obser-
vation to his brother reveals his contemplative state of mind:
Perhaps death is not the hardest thing in a painter’s life....[L]ook-
ing at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over
the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask
myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the
black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to
Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.^101 ft.