135TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)
135Figure 31.27 VINCENT VAN GOGH, The Starry Night, 1889. Oil on canvas, 29 in. 3 ft.^1 ⁄ 4 in. In 1889 Van Gogh began a year’s
stay at the mental hospital in Saint-Rémy near Arles, an area of southern France renowned for its intermittent fierce winds, known
as “the mistral.” Mistral winds and clear night skies filled with shooting stars may have provided inspiration for this painting.
impression, the Postimpressionists gave increased emphasis
to color and compositional form. They embraced an art-
for-art’s sake aestheticism that prized pictorial invention
over pictorial illusion. Strongly individualistic, they were
uninterested in satisfying the demands of public and pri-
vate patrons; most of them made only sporadic efforts to
sell what they produced. Like the Impressionists, the
Postimpressionists looked to the natural world for inspira-
tion. But unlike their predecessors, they brought a new
sense of order to their compositions, following the incisive
observation of the French Symbolist Maurice Denis
(1870–1943) that a painting, before being a pictorial rep-
resentation of reality, is “a flat surface covered with shapes,
lines, and colors assembled in a particular order.” This
credo, as realized in Postimpressionist art, would drive most
of the major modern art movements of the early twentieth
century (see chapter 32).
Van Gogh
The Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was a
passionate idealist whose life was marred by loneliness,
poverty, depression, and a hereditary mental illness that
ultimately drove him to suicide. During his career he pro-
duced over 700 paintings and thousands of drawings, of
which he sold less than a half-dozen in his lifetime.
Van Gogh painted landscapes, still lifes, and portraits in
a style that featured flat, bright colors, a throbbing, sinuous
line, short, choppy brushstrokes, and bold compositions
that betray his admiration for Japanese woodblock prints.
His heavily pigmented surfaces were often manipulated
with a palette knife or built up by applying paint directly
from the tube. Deeply moved by music (especially the work
of Wagner), he shared with the romantics an attitude
toward nature that was both inspired and ecstatic. His
emotional response to an object, rather than its physical
appearance, influenced his choice of colors, which he
likened to orchestrated sound. As he explained to his
brother Theo, “I use color more arbitrarily so as to express
myself more forcefully.”
Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night(Figure 31.27), a
view of the small French town of Saint-Rémy, is electrified
by thickly painted strokes of white, yellow, orange, and