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

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.

Art, Andy Weeks

Visual art uniquely challenges the reader’s willingness to confront immediate beauty in an intellectual space. This is to suggest that, while to hear music is to confront immediate beauty; and while to read or to hear literature spoken aloud is to constantly analyze, all the while expecting that the finished poem or story will satisfy our desire to know beauty that is a culmination fought for; art challenges us to analyze its elements but does not withhold from us some kind of coherent impact in the very moment we glimpse it. Or, at least, so as not to seem pedantic, I think that my favorite art does this.

I am very impressed with an artist currently living, a youngish man named Andy Weeks. Now, there is a bit of disclosure necessary if I am going to talk about him: he is a friend of mine. He happens, however, to be one of my more talented friends, and you can judge for yourself whether I write wrongly or rightly that he is maturing into a remarkable painter: www.andyweeks.net. I recently saw his painting Brooklyn 1 at a show. It would be in an inaccessibly relative comment to say that it was the standout piece; so I will add to that by saying that the painting is realistic, charming, atmospheric, and elegant. Andy is deft with line and, while he is dealing with a place that actually exists (the view is of a building from the Brooklyn Bridge), he is not afraid to give precedence to the formal composition of line and color, allowing composition to impinge ever so slightly on realism. One of the loveliest aspects of the painting is the strip of shiny wet road that bends towards the painting’s dominant point, a massive brown building. In person, I could see that the extremely realistic shininess of the road was accomplished with a few simple blotches of white-gray paint that were offset by some sharp lines of shadow. And Mr. Weeks has subtly favored an angle in place of a presumably straight foundation for this building. The angle points us back to the road and to a tree that almost billows up.

Many of the great masters of painting that we admire today used simple tools; only they used them with care – one might say that they dignified the medium by being precise enough with it that it would give their vision its full power.