Van Gogh. "Starlight Night". 1889. Oil on canvas, 73.7 × 92.1 cm. Museum of Modern Art (New York).

It is appropriate to start a conversation about Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night with the question of whether we really have a night, as stated in the title of the picture? It is easy to doubt this, given the unusual brightness of colors for a night landscape and the dynamics of strokes. When the “starry night” sounds, our imagination draws an image of the peace and tranquility of heaven and earth, when the bright light of the stars in the sky penetrates the darkness, but does not disperse it, does not illuminate everything around like sunlight, but only gently touches the very surface of things, which is why creates the impression of mystery, ghostliness and immersion of the landscape in its depth. Van Gogh's painting with all his being contradicts the image of a starry night so familiar to us. There is not a trace of the expected calmness in it. Everything that exists seems to be captured by a single whirlwind and rushes in some kind of incomprehensible movement, intertwining with each other. There are no clear boundaries between things, they flow into each other and dissolve in a turbulent stream. The houses of a small village located in the lower part of the picture, it would seem, have a greater density than celestial bodies: some of them have contours. However, they do not at all insist on their geometricity and stability, as if one more gust of wind - and they will not be. And if you look a little higher, where the hills and trees are located, then that insignificant density that is guessed in the houses will disappear from the field of view. A white stripe sweeps over them, similar either to a cloud, or to the continuation of a mountain range, in any case, it is difficult to unequivocally attribute it to the sky or to the earth. And above, the most whirlwind begins: a huge curl in the center whirls and carries with it everything that comes into contact with it, except for the moon and stars, which do not succumb to the general flow, but create their own. One gets the impression that the night light does not come from the stars at all, but, on the contrary, by its circling in space it forms stars, as a kind of foci of accumulation of this light, which has neither a source nor an object of direction. A little to the left, like a tongue of flame, a cypress rises up. Due to its location directly in the foreground, it inevitably attracts a look that is tired of endless whirling. But the rhythm of the fluctuation of the cypress-flame turns out to be related to the rhythm of everything else, and, obeying it, one has to return back to the abyss of the cycle.

The swirling sky in the middle of the picture may seem like the epicenter of a raging hurricane or the spiral of the Milky Way (there are such interpretations). One way or another, when looking at the picture, it is unlikely that one will be able to get away from the impression of something like cosmogony, the ongoing formation of the world, the unfolding of space from some point tightness. And since the process of cosmogony is still far from complete, the resulting space is very much chaotic. The “boiling sea of ​​chaos” seems to be a hidden principle and driving force of the formation of a “thin apple peel” of an unstable order of things, ready at any moment to break back into the abyss. But, approaching the essence of the picture through an appeal to fundamentally mythological concepts, one must bear in mind that within the culture for which they are an integral constitutive and to which they are most related, the creation of a work similar to a Van Gogh painting is simply impossible. For example, an ancient Greek, for whom, as we know, the cosmos had the highest value, it would be unbearable horror to imagine something similar to the "Starry Night". Such an idea would be mercilessly banished to the periphery of consciousness, like a fleeting clouding, and perceived as unworthy of being embodied in a work of art. Only the cosmos, which is the end result of cosmogony, was for the ancient Greek the true world, only with it he could relate as "I". The same that was in the world from chaos - gave away imperfection and expected the cosmic efforts of man or gods.

The essential difference between the ancient Greek and the artist of the late 19th century, which allowed the Starry Night to come into being, is that for the latter, space will never come. It is not him that the soul of this era could wish for. Therefore, what is depicted in the picture is nothing but the eternal becoming, which has no end and no resolution. Things will never enter into their own unchanging being, between up and down, profane and sacred, no proper distance can be established, and ultimately the day will never be separated from the night. Let us pay attention to one defining detail: in almost all of Van Gogh's paintings there is no distance, which is traditionally responsible for the separation and distance between the profane and sacred realities. The distance in the paintings most often appears as the horizon line or heavenly heights. Meanwhile, we see how the sky in the picture hangs close above the earth, as if it consists of the same material with it. Of course, it is much less dense than the earth's surface, but essentially they do not differ from each other. The sky is the same earth. And here there can be no resemblance to the image of the firmament, since it necessarily implies the existence of a distance in relation to the earth. Rather, there is some kind of single space that contains a set of disparate particles of light and deprived of their ontological rootedness and depth of the "ghosts" of things.

Van Gogh. "Road with a cypress and a star." 1890. Oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm. Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo, The Netherlands).

The fusion of day and night can be seen more clearly in Van Gogh's painting "Landscape with Road and Cypress". At first glance, it seems obvious that we have a day ahead of us. Moreover - hot midday heat. However, it turns into its complete opposite if you focus on the two luminaries in the upper part of the picture: the stupor of noon suddenly coincides with the dead of night. If we project what we noticed in this picture onto the "Starry Night", then another additional meaning will open up. Based on the fact that Van Gogh's night and day are the same, we can conclude that the depicted night is in fact also day at the same time. But it would be a mistake to assume that both these concepts are equivalent in relation to each other. In the painting "Landscape with a road and a cypress" we see noon, which includes midnight, or rather, the transition to midnight. In Starry Night, it is night, referring to the reality of the day, which, strictly speaking, does not precede it, but there is no temporal relationship between them, day and night point to each other and each pass into its opposite. At the same time, the night in the picture is, as it were, an ancestral phenomenon of the day, its depth, seen by the artist. Then the clarity and distinctness of the day is nothing more than imaginary and illusory, and every now and then a ferocious hurricane of chaos is ready to break through this thin veil. But the participation of the primordial phenomenon in chaos means that it constantly cancels itself, exists in the mode of continuous self-negation. Since the existence of an eidos and a primordial phenomenon in such a mode is impossible, I think it would be appropriate to call what is depicted in the picture the “wrong side” of the world. And if the wrong side of the world is like that, then the “front” part, inescapably connected with it, hangs over the abyss of buzzing emptiness and decay.

Magazine "Beginning" №21, 2010

This famous painting by Van Gogh demonstrates the great power of the artist and his unique individual style of painting, his special vision of the world around him. The painting was painted in the Saint-Remy hospital in June 1889. By this time, Van Gogh had departed from the generally accepted Christian faith, but he wrote: “I still passionately need, - I will allow myself this word, in religion. Therefore, I went out of the house at night and began to draw stars.

The depiction of scenes in the moonlight has a long tradition in Dutch painting, but before Van Gogh, no artist painted the night sky with such awe of the grandeur and incomprehensibility of the universe. The sky, stars and crescent moon move in a single ecstatic undulating rhythm.

Despite the fact that the picture conveys the feelings that overwhelm the artist, it was not painted spontaneously, but carefully arranged. The trees depicted on it frame the starry sky and balance the composition.

Stars, deliberately enlarged, huge, surrounded by halos of flickering light, creating a sense of rotation in the bottomless depths of the Universe.

cypresses on the left side of the picture stretch to the sky like flames. However, the dark color gives them weight, grounds them, so that the feeling of the movement of celestial bodies does not overload the picture as a whole.

The abyss of stars is full.

The stars have no number, the abyss of the bottom.

Lomonosov M.V.

The starry sky as a symbol of infinity attracts and fascinates a person. It is impossible to take your eyes off the picture, which depicts a living, twisting sky in a whirlwind of eternal galactic motion. Doubts about who painted the painting "Starry Night" do not arise even among those who are poorly versed in art. Not a real, invented sky is written in rough, sharp strokes, emphasizing the spiral movement of the stars. No one had seen such a sky before Van Gogh. After Van Gogh, it is impossible to imagine the starry sky to others.

The history of the painting "Starry Night"

Vincent van Gogh painted one of the most famous paintings in the Saint-Remy-de-Provence hospital in 1889, one year before his death. The artist's mental disorder was accompanied by severe headaches. To somehow distract himself, Van Gogh painted, sometimes several paintings a day. The fact that the staff of the hospital allowed the unfortunate and no one at that time unknown artist to work was taken care of by his brother Theo.

Most of the landscapes of Provence with irises, haystacks and a wheat field, the artist painted from nature, looking through the window of a hospital ward into the garden. But "Starry Night" was created from memory, which was completely unusual for Van Gogh. It is possible that at night the artist made sketches and sketches, which he then used to create the canvas. Drawing from nature is complemented by the artist's fantasy, intertwining phantoms born in the imagination with fragments of reality.

Description of the painting by Van Gogh “Starry Night”

The actual view from the east window of the bedroom is closer to the viewer. Between the vertical line of cypresses growing on the edge of the wheat field and the diagonal of the sky is an image of a non-existent village.

The space of the picture is divided into two unequal parts. Most of it is given to the sky, the smaller part is given to people. Up, towards the stars, the top of the cypress is directed, similar to the tongues of a cold greenish-black flame. The spire of the church, towering between squat houses, also strives towards the sky. The cozy light of the burning windows is a bit like the glow of the stars, but against their background it seems weak and completely dim.

The life of the breathing sky is much richer and more interesting than human life. Unusually large stars radiate magical radiance. Spiral galactic eddies swirl with merciless swiftness. They draw the viewer in, take him into the depths of space, away from the cozy and sweet little world of people.

The center of the picture is occupied not by one stellar vortex, but by two. One is large, the other is smaller, and the larger one seems to be chasing the smaller one ... and draws it into itself, absorbs it without hope of salvation. The canvas evokes a feeling of anxiety and excitement in the viewer, despite the fact that the color scheme includes positive shades of blue, yellow, green. Vincent van Gogh's much more peaceful Starry Night Over the Rhone uses darker and gloomier tones.

Where is Starry Night kept?

The famous work, written in an asylum for the mentally ill, is kept at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The painting belongs to the category of priceless canvases. The price of the original painting "Starry Night" has not been determined. It cannot be bought with any money. This fact should not upset the true connoisseurs of painting. The original is available to any visitor to the museum. High-quality reproductions and copies, of course, do not have real energy, but they can convey part of the idea of ​​a brilliant artist.

Maria Revyakina, art critic:

The picture is divided into two horizontal planes: the sky (upper part) and the earth (urban landscape below), which are pierced by a vertical of cypresses. Soaring into the sky, like tongues of flame, cypress trees with their outlines resemble a cathedral, made in the style of "flaming Gothic".

In many countries, cypresses are considered cult trees, they symbolize the life of the soul after death, eternity, the frailty of life and help the departed find the shortest path to heaven. Here these trees come to the fore, they are the main characters of the picture. This construction reflects the main meaning of the work: the suffering human soul (perhaps the soul of the artist himself) belongs to both heaven and earth.

Interestingly, life in the sky looks more attractive than life on earth. This feeling is created thanks to the bright colors and the unique technique of painting for Van Gogh: through long, thick strokes and rhythmic alternation of color spots, he creates a feeling of dynamics, rotation, spontaneity, which emphasizes the incomprehensibility and all-encompassing power of the Cosmos.

The sky is given most of the canvas to show its superiority and power over the world of people

The celestial bodies are shown greatly enlarged, and the spiraling vortices in the sky are stylized as images of the galaxy and the Milky Way.

The effect of twinkling heavenly bodies is created by combining cold white and various shades of yellow. Yellow in the Christian tradition was associated with divine light, with enlightenment, while white was a symbol of transition to another world.

The painting is also replete with celestial hues, ranging from pale blue to deep blue. The blue color in Christianity is associated with God, symbolizes eternity, meekness and humility before His will. The sky is given most of the canvas to show its superiority and power over the world of people. All this contrasts with the muted tones of the cityscape, which looks dull in its peace and serenity.

"DO NOT LET THE MADNESS CONSUME YOURSELF"

Andrey Rossokhin, psychoanalyst:

At the first glance at the picture, I notice the cosmic harmony, the majestic parade of stars. But the more I peer into this abyss, the more clearly I experience a state of horror and anxiety. The vortex in the center of the picture, like a funnel, drags me, pulls me deep into space.

Van Gogh wrote "Starry Night" in a hospital for the mentally ill, in moments of clarity of consciousness. Creativity helped him come to his senses, it was his salvation. This is the charm of madness and the fear of it I see in the picture: at any moment it can absorb the artist, lure him in like a funnel. Or is it a whirlpool? If you look only at the top of the picture, it is difficult to understand whether we are looking at the sky or at the rippling sea in which this sky with stars is reflected.

The association with a whirlpool is not accidental: it is both the depths of space and the depths of the sea, in which the artist is drowning - losing his identity. Which, in essence, is the meaning of insanity. Sky and water become one. The horizon line disappears, inner and outer merge. And this moment of expectation of losing oneself is very strongly conveyed by Van Gogh.

The center of the picture is occupied by not even one whirlwind, but two: one is larger, the other is smaller. Head-on collision of unequal rivals, senior and junior. Or maybe brothers? Behind this duel one can see a friendly but competitive relationship with Paul Gauguin, which ended in a deadly collision (Van Gogh at one point rushed at him with a razor, but did not kill him as a result, and later injured himself by cutting off his earlobe).

And indirectly - Vincent's relationship with his brother Theo, too close on paper (they were in intensive correspondence), in which, obviously, there was something forbidden. The key to this relationship can be 11 stars depicted in the picture. They refer to a story from the Old Testament in which Joseph tells his brother: "I had a dream in which the sun, the moon, 11 stars met me, and everyone worshiped me."

The picture has everything but the sun. Who was Van Gogh's sun? Brother, father? We do not know, but perhaps Van Gogh, who was very dependent on his younger brother, wanted the opposite from him - submission and worship.

In fact, we see in the picture the three "I" of Van Gogh. The first is the almighty "I", which wants to dissolve in the Universe, to be, like Joseph, the object of universal worship. The second "I" is a small ordinary person, freed from passions and madness. He does not see the violence that is happening in heaven, but sleeps peacefully in a small village, under the protection of the church.

Cypress is perhaps an unconscious symbol of what Van Gogh would like to strive for

But, alas, the world of mere mortals is inaccessible to him. When Van Gogh cut off his earlobe, the townspeople wrote a statement to the mayor of Arles with a request to isolate the artist from the rest of the inhabitants. And Van Gogh was sent to a hospital for the mentally ill. Probably, the artist perceived this exile as a punishment for the guilt he felt - for madness, for his destructive intentions, forbidden feelings for his brother and for Gauguin.

And therefore, his third, main "I" is an outcast cypress, which is distant from the village, taken out of the human world. Cypress branches, like flames, are directed upwards. He is the only witness to the spectacle unfolding in the sky.

This is the image of an artist who does not sleep, who is open to the abyss of passions and creative imagination. He is not protected from them by church and home. But he is rooted in reality, in the earth, thanks to powerful roots.

This cypress, perhaps, is an unconscious symbol of what Van Gogh would like to strive for. Feel the connection with the cosmos, with the abyss that feeds his creativity, but at the same time not lose touch with the earth, with his identity.

In reality, Van Gogh had no such roots. Enchanted by his madness, he loses his footing and is swallowed up by this whirlpool.

One of the most famous paintings - "Starry Night" by Van Gogh - is currently in one of the halls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was created in 1889 and is one of the most famous works of the great artist.

History of the painting

The Starry Night is one of the most famous and popular works of fine art of the 19th century. The painting was painted in 1889 and it perfectly conveys the unique and inimitable style of the greatest

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy after being attacked by Paul and having his earlobe cut off. This year the great artist lived in France, in the town of Arles. After the inhabitants of this city appealed to the mayor's office with a collective complaint about the "violent" painter, Vincent van Gogh ended up in Saint-Remy-de-Provence - a village for the year of residence in this place, the artist painted more than 150 paintings, among which this very famous masterpiece of fine art.

Starry Night, Van Gogh. Description of the picture

A distinctive feature of the picture is the incredible dynamism, which eloquently conveys the emotional experiences of the great artist. Images in the moonlight at that time had their own ancient traditions, and yet no artist could convey such a force and power of a natural phenomenon as Vincent van Gogh. "Starry Night" is not written spontaneously, like many of the master's works, it is carefully thought out and arranged.

The incredible energy of the whole picture is concentrated mainly in the symmetrical, unified and continuous movement of the crescent of the moon, stars and the sky itself. Overwhelming inner experiences are wonderfully balanced by the trees depicted in the foreground, which, in turn, balance the entire panorama.

Painting style

It is worth paying utmost attention to the amazingly synchronized movement of the heavenly bodies in the night sky. Vincent van Gogh deliberately depicted the stars greatly enlarged in order to convey the flickering light of the entire halo. The light from the moon also looks pulsating, and the spiral swirls are very harmonious in conveying the stylized image of the galaxy.

All the riot of the night sky is balanced, thanks to the landscape of the city depicted in dark color and cypresses that frame the picture from below. The night city and trees effectively complement the panorama of the night sky, giving it a feeling of heaviness and gravity. Of particular importance is the village depicted in the lower right corner of the picture. He seems serenely calm in relation to the dynamic firmament.

Of no small importance is the color scheme of the painting "Starry Night" by Van Gogh. Lighter shades blend harmoniously with the dark foreground. And the special technique of drawing with strokes of various lengths and directions makes this picture more expressive compared to the previous works of this artist.

Reflections on the painting "Starry Night" and the work of Van Gogh

Like many masterpieces, Van Gogh's Starry Night almost immediately became fertile ground for all sorts of interpretations and discussions. Astronomers began to count the stars depicted in the picture, trying to determine which constellation they belong to. Geographers unsuccessfully tried to find out what kind of city is depicted at the bottom of the work. However, the fruits of research of neither one nor the other were not crowned with success.

It is only known for certain that, drawing "Starry Night", Vincent deviated from the usual manner of writing from nature.

Another interesting fact is that the creation of this picture, according to scientists and researchers, was influenced by the ancient legend of Joseph from the Old Testament. Although the artist was not considered a fan of theological teachings, the theme of eleven stars appears eloquently in Van Gogh's Starry Night.

Many years have passed since the great artist created this painting, and a programmer from Greece has created an interactive version of this painting masterpiece. Thanks to a special technology, you can control the flow of paints with your fingertips. The spectacle is amazing!

Vincent Van Gogh. Painting "Starry night". Does it have a hidden meaning?

Books and songs are written about this picture, it is also in electronic publications. And, perhaps, it is difficult to find a more expressive artist than Vincent van Gogh. The painting "Starry Night" is the clearest proof of this. fine art still inspires poets, musicians and other artists to create unique works.

Until now, there was no consensus about this picture. Whether the disease influenced her writing, whether there is some hidden meaning in this work - the current generation can only guess about it. It is possible that this is just a picture that the inflamed mind of the artist saw. However, this is a completely different world, accessible only to the eyes of Vincent van Gogh.