Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night--Paintings of Persons

The Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night exhibition at MoMA showcases several paintings that convey Van Gogh’s tender feelings towards the human person. Even if often he is painting his human subjects with stark realism, not much flattering them or their situation in life, he still conveys a sadness at an unhappy life, perhaps a reflection of his own unhappiness; and he paints many of his scenes to be suffused with a simple and tender human moment.

I would like to look at two of the paintings from the exhibition in light of their human subjects, and I will leave out some obvious other paintings, including The Potato Eaters, Eugene Boch, and Gauguin’s Chair.

I would like to look first at the painting The Night Cafe, not to be confused with the very famous Terrace of a Cafe at Night (Place du Forum). The Night Café I could have very easily written about yesterday in the blog on color. The painting is purposefully garish, with much less of the short brushstroke work that we are used to with Van Gogh. Unadulterated deep red and turquoise dominate the painting, at least color wise; the bold golden floor does little to mute them. In the middle of the painting, however, sits a gigantic pool table, presided over by the bartender, who stands as though he were without movement for all eternity; he looks out at us in his white eternal robes – his white bartender’s outfit – stuck in hell. And the rest of the scene is not charming. Two men appear drunk off to the right, one to the left, and just above the latter a man and a woman sit mysteriously, and seem to be meant to evoke a subtle lasciviousness in the background. This is not a happy place for Van Gogh, but he paints with empathy, allowing the bartender to plea with us that we might commiserate with him.

The second painting, The Cottage, is one of Van Gogh’s much older paintings. It is painted fairly realistically, a dark landscape with a fiery streak of sunset, dominated by a cottage. This is one of my favorite paintings from the exhibition, if not my favorite. I like it so much because of the woman standing at the cottage window. There is something loving about the way that she is leaned to the right; and the small fire that we see through the middle window is just the right touch of home, which Van Gogh would miss as his life came to a close.

Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night--Use of Color

Van Gogh would reinvent color if it meant the brushstroke that harmonized his painting. But this is only to say partly that he was influenced by the Impressionists, and partly that he was meticulous. What we see in this exhibition, however, we see through Van Gogh’s willingness to let color determine the realization of his vision of each piece.

I will talk about only two paintings from the exhibition, unfortunately leaving some other obvious ones out. The first is one of Van Gogh’s many paintings of a sower; the second is a painting entitled Night (after Millet).

The Sower, a smaller copy of a larger painting, is one of Van Gogh’s most striking experiments in color. A sower in the foreground casts seed along a broad path, and the small painting is cut in half by a Japanese-inspired tree. But the tree, which would otherwise be dominating, only draws our attention to the neon sky laced with pink clouds, and to the enormous and thickly painted sun setting over the field. The sky in this painting is an anomaly in my experience of art. And the original painting, which is in the exhibition catalogue, is gorgeous, complete, and refined; its smaller copy is shocking and just as charming.

It is almost impossible to describe the second painting that I have mentioned, Night (after Millet). A family of three sits before the hearth, the parents doing chores by the light of the lamp. The infant sleeps under the lamp, and is barely detailed. The mother half faces outward, reflecting whites and pinks and greens. The father gives us his back, a deep clay in the shadows. I mention this lovely scene of the holy family only because it is lovely.

Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night--Some Early Paintings

The exhibition offers a rare look at some of Van Gogh’s earlier paintings; and the juxtaposition of these early paintings with the paintings of Van Gogh’s mature style, for which he is so famous, also offers a rare look at the artist’s progress. In the first room of the exhibition, in the northeast corner of that room, three paintings, one from 1883, when he was living in the Hague, one from 1887, after he had moved to France, and one from 1890, one of the chronologically latest paintings in the exhibition, surprised me with the contrast between them but also with the continuity. In each painting the subject is not much different – a twilight scene – but each painting also marks a moment in the artist’s progress. The first, Twilight, Old Farm Houses in Loosduinen, is drab and conveys Van Gogh’s concern with painting realistically. The second, Sunset at Montmartre, is still concerned with realism, but evinces a striking shift in Van Gogh’s relationship with color and brushstroke. The declining sun reminds us of the Van Gogh we know, as it looks forward to his warm use of color – light oranges and yellows set against the blue-green sky – and his standout, powerful strokes with the brush. The third painting, however, Landscape at Twilight, finished not long before his death, calls the artist to mind without hesitation, as Van Gogh lacquers on thick brushstrokes in contrasting bright, deep, warm, dark, ocher hues.

Many of the other early paintings are certainly worthy of note, but I can only manage here to say that one of them in particular, Toward Evening, which Van Gogh painted in 1885, begins to show us, as a friend of mine said, his ability to cast a meditative quality. He does this by laying down a scene: the vastness of nature, with the human playing its tender part in the field.

Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night

This week’s topic is going to be the recent exhibition at MoMA entitled Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night. I have been to this charming exhibition four times, and I am excited to write about it. It is a very small display – 25 or so of his paintings, some drawings and letters, and some of his books – but it includes some major works along with some surprising works that are probably not often seen outside of their homes in permanent collections around the world.

The first two rooms of the exhibition include some works from the early part of his career that bear almost no resemblance to his later paintings but are quite lovely in their own right, and I will blog about these works tomorrow.

On Wednesday I will blog about the persons in some of these paintings.

On Thursday I will write about Van Gogh’s use of color in these paintings.

And Friday I will leave open, either for some more writing about this exhibition, or for something pulled out of a hat.

Placebo Adam

Human beings try lots of different things (duh!). Take me for example: I have a disease called Charcot-Marie-Tooth, which over time depletes the myelin coating in the body’s peripheral nervous system. Fortunately, I do not have an extreme case; in some people it is quite debilitating, and researchers are doing a variety of experiments to see if anything will help or fix this disease (I think most of us are placing our hope in gene therapy). One of the possibilities is to take a fairly high daily dose of something called Coenzyme Q-10, which does lots of good things for lots of other people. I have noticed, however, that if I am taking Q-10 outside of a study, I have no way myself of knowing whether it is beneficial to me if it is not immediately making me feel better, especially because the disease is progressive in nature but in fits and starts, and very often it plateaus; I have no way of knowing if I am at a plateau or if the Q-10 is working. And the reason that I have no way of knowing is that I have no “placebo Adam” who is not taking Q-10 and to whom I can compare myself.

Since the term “placebo effect” is already taken to describe something else, I am looking for a general term that will describe the following reality: whenever we do something that we think is good, we have no way of knowing at present whether it will have a beneficial effect. I would like the term to have the word “placebo” in it.

Here’s another example, perhaps the best one: considering the crappy state of the world, it’s very easy to say that philosophy, or religion, or poetry, or science, or loving another person seem to have no beneficial effect; after all, we do these things, and then the world continues to in many ways suck despite our efforts (or perhaps even because of our efforts). But we really have no way of knowing what the world would have been like had Plato never written, had Augustine never converted, or had the Hubble telescope never been built. Because really, we have no “placebo world” against which we can measure whether our “successes” were good or bad.

Is this then the purpose of history?

Proselytism: A Last Entry

I am at the point where this subject has ceased to be of interest for me. This is mostly due to the fact, I think, that I fall in the camp whose members do not believe that someone is going to hell because her own spirituality places her outside of a narrow “law”, which we must admit is mysterious if it exists at all. After all, to proselytize is really to try to convert someone so that she believes what I believe; and what I believe, I have already said, is mysterious even to me; and what I believe, since I have written a lot about happiness, I must admit does not always make me happy, and I am not in the business of leading someone to be certain about something about which I myself am not certain.

So I gladly transition to life, setting aside this question of evangelism. I am not a salesman. St. Francis of Assisi reputedly said, “Preach the Gospel always, and if necessary, use words”; St. Augustine said, “Love, and do what you will.” I am happy to spend the rest of my life exploring God, fully aware that Jesus warned us to be wary and to watch out for false messiahs and false prophets; and I hope to do this in the company of friends who, like me, have questions more than they have answers.

Proselytism: Exemplification or Discussion?

After having yesterday completely obliterated my own previous assumptions about proselytism, it seems only fair to upend myself by returning to some of the questions that I asked on Saturday; and I will focus on the following one: Is it good enough simply to be an exemplar of your faith/happiness, or is the discussion necessary? After all, the three points that I made in yesterday’s blog entry would be to a certain extent moot if exemplifying your happiness were the point and matter that would necessitate another person’s also being happy. (I will for now stay on the idea of happiness rather than return my focus to faith, since mature discussions of faith are really born of transcending the idea of happiness once we have exhausted its utility, really a focus on a more complex truth.)

To see ourselves merely as exemplars is probably to ignore our nature as social creatures; in fact, it would be an extremely rare and perhaps suspect person whose happiness was circumscribed by the Self. Happiness is more directly than inversely proportional to our engagement with others, which, if it is to be true engagement, must include the opening of the heart, must include vulnerability in regards to happiness and unhappiness. Thus, happiness as mere example is impossible, and could even be the result of discussing the topic with the exemplar.

How to Proselytize?

I ended yesterday’s exploration of proselytizing by saying the following: if you find that your faith brings you happiness, and if you are not so much concerned about salvation versus damnation, then proselytism is for you your ongoing conversation with others about happiness.

In some ways this is not really proselytism at all; or rather, it is a fresh way of looking at proselytism, a suggestion that we are probably already doing this in the course of our normal lives, without any burden of obligation, but with joy and intellectual hunger. So the question of how to proselytize becomes far more broad: how to talk about happiness?

This seems like a ridiculous question to ask, but I think that the question has some things to say to us. First, it forces us to know ourselves as creatures of happiness or unhappiness.

Second, the question of how to have a conversation about happiness forces us to ask whether we know our fellow human beings intimately enough from our own sense of ourselves that we should be able to presume that our own procedures for happiness are requisite for the happiness of the other.

Third, any conversation about the happiness of the individual should necessitate further discussion about the happiness of all individuals, and whether the happiness of one can exist without the happiness of the many, or whether the happiness of one can exist without the happiness of all.

It is likely that these discussions will lead to discussions about belief, either immediately or after a period of some time; but we must also be open to the possibility that discussions about belief may not suggest insight about happiness for every person involved.

Who to Proselytize?

Today I would like to address the question, Who to proselytize? Not that I will answer the question completely – certainly I will not; just this simple question itself raises some other questions, most notably, Why proselytize?

So on to that second question. I think that there can only be two answers to this: the first is that you think you are right about a certain belief -- let’s say Christianity, just to be broad – and you believe that Christianity condemns nonbelievers to eternal damnation, but also that Christianity rewards believers with eternal salvation, and you want people to be saved rather than damned; the second is that you think you are right about Christianity, and Christianity makes you happy, and therefore you want to share Christianity with everyone.

If you fall under the first camp, you most certainly have an obligation to proselytize. Otherwise, your lack of effort is the damnation of others; and while you might be saved in the end, you want others to be happy, too, in the end; and besides, your indifference would be your own damnation. If you don’t fall under the first camp, if, for instance, you believe that God can still welcome nonbelievers into Paradise, then proselytism is not a requirement for you because your proselytism has no effect on another person’s salvation or damnation. But you might still fall into the second camp if you believe that God can save nonbelievers.

This brings us back to the first question, Who to proselytize? If you think that salvation and damnation depend on belief, well then, you’d better get to work; your target is everyone who doesn’t believe what you believe. If you don’t think that, however, but you do find that your faith brings you happiness, then for you proselytism is nothing more and nothing less than your ongoing conversation with others about happiness.

Proselytizing

I don’t proselytize, on principle. But I am sure that some people might consider this an anemic Christianity. After all, the Gospels do contain commands to evangelize. That said, here are some questions that might help us think about the issue.

If you were to proselytize, who would you target? Would you target atheists, or would you go after the agnostics first? Or, would you talk to believers of other religions – Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, pagan ritualism, etc.? Or (since I am Catholic), would you engage with denominations that share your own core religious beliefs but that differ markedly in ritual, hierarchy, etc.? What about other religious denominations that differ only slightly from your own?

How would you go about it?

Is it good enough simply to be an exemplar of your faith, or is the discussion necessary?

If you decide that the discussion is important, what do you have to know? How much do you have to know?

Can you reasonably expect your efforts to be effective? In other words, are human beings stubborn or are they willing to embrace change? And if they are stubborn, should they not be? And if they are willing to embrace change, should they be so quick?

Every day this week starting Monday, I will try to look at these questions a little bit more in-depth.

Shelley's A Defense of Poetry

Embarrassment comes in many forms, much to the delight of the rest of us. Today I admit to a rather boring and nerdy embarrassment: I profess to be a writer, perhaps even a poet, and I have never read anything by John Milton (I’m not even sure that John is his first name (off the top of my head)); and not only do I consider myself a writer, I am actually in all truth in possession of a BA and an MA in English literature, and I still have never read anything by Milton. This is not entirely my fault: I tried to take a class on Milton my first semester of graduate school, but the class was full, and I ended up taking a much better class in its place; but it is partially my fault, as I was supposed to read Paradise Lost, at least parts of it, as an undergrad, and I didn’t. It probably seemed too long. I was also supposed to read “Lycidas”, but I really just skimmed it.

This only comes up because we are approaching Milton’s 400th birthday; because there is a new edition of Paradise Lost out, a facing-page “translation” of the poem into a more modern English prose, by Dennis Danielson; and because I was reading Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, in which he can’t stop talking about Milton. So: to celebrate my knowledge of Milton, I throw my hat in the ring with a few quotes from Shelley that have nothing to do with him; and I vow to read Paradise Lost in the coming months (in verse, mind you), and perhaps “Lycidas”.

All quotes are from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, printed selectively in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. You can see the full text at http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html.

“Although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order.”

“[ The poet ] not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.”

“The story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

“The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.”

“The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.”

“The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is Poetry.”

Even though Shelley is wrong when he says, “all spirits on which [ poetry ] falls, open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight,” perhaps it wouldn’t hurt these days to read a little Milton, or Shelley, or Zaremberg (pending publication – no, no: pending submission; first up, a translation of Shelley into reasonable English).

Jdimytai Damour

We have forgotten about Thanksgiving. How else can we explain the stampeding to death of Jdimytai Damour?

I don’t know anything about Mr. Damour; I don’t know if he was kind or unkind; and I don’t know anything about the people who trampled him; I don’t know if they lapsed or if I should be unsurprised. I don’t really care about blaming anyone for Mr. Damour’s death, although it would be easy to blame the people who trampled him and to not be wrong.

I am more interested in the question, How did these human hearts become hearts of stone? It is one thing to be malicious, to capture people, to blow them up, to shoot them, to decide that one person is worth less than another; but it is something subtly different to be, perhaps, not malicious, but indifferent without margin. At least in our malice we choose to be hurtful. Indifference, however, we gather to ourselves the way a tree gathers fruit to its branches: there is a system in place in the world of which we find ourselves a part – indifference seems to work in us without our knowing.

Unless we fight it. And Christmas, unfortunately, has prepared itself against us. A holiday that, for Christians, should excuse us from “the anxieties of daily life,”* has instead cloaked selfishness in the wool of love; and we are no longer rejoicing with our families if this seeming-love is a burden to us.

There were many factors involved in the tragedy of Mr. Damour’s death and I don’t want to make a simple thing of it. But we can probably sum up the causes into an obvious truth: for a small group of people, for a small amount of time, there was an absence of care -- self-care (not Mr. Damour’s, but the self-care that is absent in the presence of guilt), and care of the fellow. And I cannot shake the feeling that, in some way, if I was ever selfish, or if I ever placated the selfishness of another, I contributed to the culture that led to this man’s death. It is time, therefore, to move forward in simplicity, and to better give of myself with joy.

* “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.” Luke 21:34.