Christianity & the Arts, Summer 2000

1

Christianity & the Arts, Summer 2000

April 21 Starry Night

by Robyn Ravlich

"There are some wonderful nights here, I must paint a starry night....."

So wrote Vincent Van Gogh during his incarceration at the asylum at St. Remy in 1889.

Until now. Van Gogh's masterwork Starry Night has been regarded as a wild if not deranged renditions of the view from his room in the aslyum. In this 'reading' of the now iconic painting, American art historian. Dr. Albert Boime, presents startling evidence of Van Gogh's familiarity with contemporary astronomy and Utopian geography.

The Griffith Observatory in California recreated the night sky as it would have appeared to Van Gogh on the night he painted it - 19th June, 1889 - and amazingly it was the same. Ideas of Utopian other worlds, reincarnation and interplanetary travel inform the work - from science fiction to the astronomy of Camille Flammarion.

A speculative sound study, featuring versions of Don Mcleans, sound tribute, Vincent.

The Magazine

Christianity and the Arts

Summer 2000

Starry Night: Van Gogh's Spiritual Autobiography

Kathleen Erickson

While The Pieta and TTie Good Samaritan express van Gogh's suffering as well ashis hope for rebirth. Starry Night represents the culmination of van Gogh's totalspiritual pilgrimage, the mystic's desire for union with the Infinite God.

While the many interpretations of van Gogh's most renowned work. Starry Night, have focused on its symbolic imagery, none of its critics have understood the fundamental importance of the painting as an autobiographical work. It tells, in oil, of van Gogh's spiritual journey from the darkness and hypocrisy of his experience in the Dutch church to the triumph of his encounter with God in nature. It is both a celebration of life and an acquiescence to impending death — with the hope that in death, he would find release and union with the Infinite God.

Starry Night, with its three elements of village, cypress, and star-filled sky, describes van Gogh's whole spiritual pilgrimage, its defeat and ultimate triumph, its past and future. Starry Night is the most visionary and mystical of all of van Gogh's works.

Interpretations that focus on the literary sources for Starry Night, particularly thepoetry of Walt Whitman, underscore the whole spirit of van Gogh's radiantmasterpiece.

In Starry Night, van Gogh created an image of divine love and of theglory and immensity of the cosmos. In the painting, man's temporal andterrestrial existence is contrasted with the immutable and eternal natureof cosmic time. Van Gogh found hope and comfort in the stars; theimmutable cycling of the stars in their courses and the phases of themoon intimated immortality. (1)

Both van Gogh and Whitman saw "the glory of God" in the stars as they evokedthoughts of death and immortality. On the death of Thomas Carlyle, another of van Gogh's literary heroes. Whitman wrote:

Carlyle, and his approaching — perhaps even the actual — death, filledme with thoughts eluding statement, and curiously blending with thescene. The planet Venus, an hour high in the west, with all her volumeand lustre recover'd.... While through the whole of its silentindescribable show, enclosing and bathing my own receptivity, ran thethought of Carlyle dying. (To soothe and spiritualize, and as far as maybe, solve the mysteries of death and genius, consider them under thestars at midnight).

And now that he has gone hence ... he yet exists, a definite, vital being,a spirit, and individual — perhaps now wafted in space among thosestellar systems.

... I have no doubt of it. In silence of a fine night, such questions areanswered to the soul, the best answers that can be given. With me too,when depress'd by some specially sad event, or tearing problem, I waittill I go out under the stars for the last voiceless satisfaction^)

Compare the preceding passage from Whitman to the following passage from vanGogh's letters, which also reveals his preoccupation with thoughts of an afterlife andimmortality of the artists and poets.

It certainly is a strange phenomenon that all artists, poets, musicians,painters, are unfortunate in material things — the happy ones as well.What you said lately about Guy de Maupassant is fresh proof of it. Thatbrings up again the eternal question: Is the whole of life visible to us, orisn't it rather that this side of death we see only one hemisphere?Painters — to take them alone dead and buried speak to the nextgeneration or to several succeeding generations through their work.

Is that all, or is there more to come? Perhaps death is not the hardest thing in a

painter's life.

... looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dreamover the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, Iask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as theblack dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get toTarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thingundoubtedly true in this reasoning is that we cannot get to a star whilewe are alive, any more than we can take the train while we are dead.

So to me it seems possible that cholera, gravel, tuberculosis, and cancerare the celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, buses andrailways are terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age would be to-gothere on foot. (3)

Van Gogh urged his sister, Wilhelmein, to read Whitman's poetry.

Have you read the American poems by Whitman? I am sure Theo hasthem, because to begin with they are really fine, and the English speakabout them a good deal. He sees in the future, and even in the present, aworld of healthy, camal love, strong and frank — of friendship — ofwork — under the great starlit vault of heaven, a something which afterall one can only call God — and eternity in its place above this world.(4)

That van Gogh also associated the stars, as well as his idea of the painting StarryNight, with the immortality of the soul is apparent in the following quote from aletter to Theo:

But don't let's forget that this earth is a planet too, and consequently astar, or celestial orb. And if all the other stars were the same!!! Thatwould not be much fun; nothing for it but to begin all over again. But inart, for which one needs time, it would not be so bad to live more thanone life. And it is rather attractive to think of the Greeks, the old Dutchmasters, and the Japanese continuing their glorious schools on otherorbs.(5)

Van Gogh shared his belief in a "life beyond the grave" in a letter to his friend EmileBernard, suggesting that life may possibly continue after earthly death in anotherrealm or even on another planet.

Yet our real and true lives are rather humble, these lives of us painters,who drag out our existence under the stupefying yoke of the difficultiesof a profession which can hardly be practiced on this thankless planet onwhose surface the "love of art makes us lose the true love."

But seeing that nothing opposes it — supposing that there are also linesand forms as well as colors on the other innumerable planets and suns —it would remain praiseworthy of us to maintain a certain serenity withregard to the possibilities of painting under superior and changedconditions of existence, an existence changed by a phenomenon noqueerer and no more surprising than the transformation of the caterpillarinto a butterfly, or of the white grub into a cockchafer.

The existence of painter-butterfly would have for its field of action oneof the innumerable heavenly bodies, which would perhaps be no moreinaccessible to us, after death, than the black dots which symbolizetowns and villages on geographical maps are in our terrestrial existence.(6)

Van Gogh's invocation of the metaphor of the butterfly in this context is a clearallusion to the afterlife, since the butterfly, because of its metamorphosis from thecaterpillar, has conventionally been a symbol of resurrection in Western religiousartistic traditions.(7)

His "painter-butterfly" is his symbolic representation of his belief in the possibilityof his own resurrection and rebirth. The preceding words indicate van Gogh's beliefin one of the most fundamental of supernatural religious beliefs, the transmigrationof the soul, further evidence that van Gogh continued to embrace some of the basictenets of the Christianity of his youth. In Starry Night, van Gogh simply chose amodem expression of these traditional ideas,

If it were possible to choose one painting of van Gogh's that would sum up all of hisreligious longing, the totality of his religious journey, it would most certainly beStarry Night, a painting that he had always dreamed of doing.

But when then, shall I do the starry sky, that painting which preoccupiesme? Alas! Alas! It is like the excellent friend. Cyprien says, in EnMenage, by J. K. Huysmans, the most beautiful paintings are those onedreams about when smoking a pipe in bed, but which one does not do.The matter is, nevertheless, to attack them, as incompetent as one mayfeel in the face of the ineffable perfections of the glorious splendors ofnature. "(8)

Starry Night is a visionary masterpiece, recounting the story of van Gogh's ultimatetriumph over suffering, and exalting his desire for a mystical union with the Divine.Starry Night, as the sum total of van Gogh's religious experience, is anautobiographical landscape, which we can divide into three separate areas,illustrating three of the most significant ideas in van Gogh's art and life. The villagescene, the cypress tree, and the sky are all representative of specific religious beliefsvan Gogh held.

The church provides both a focal point as well as a vertical accent in the village

scene. Art historians point out that van Gogh's rendition of this church is imaginary,since the steeple is typical of the Dutch landscape, but not the landscapes ofProvence.(9)

In addition to being a Dutch church in style, van Gogh's rendition of the church iscurious in another way. While every house glows with yellow light under thebrilliance of the starry sky, the church remains completely dark. This is also true ofhis painting of his Church atAuvers (1890), in which the foreground is brightly litby the sun, but the church neither reflects nor emanates any light of its own. Thedarkness of the "inside of a church" is van Gogh's symbol of the empty andunenlightened preaching of the clergy that left him embittered and alone when hewas forced to leave the ministry in 1880.

In Starry Night, van Gogh shows, however, that he did not close the door onreligion, just the church. Starry Night shows van Gogh's journey from the darknessof the inside of a church, with its reference to his Dutch past, to the triumph of themystic's communion with God through nature. While many have argued that thisindicates van Gogh's rejection of Christianity and the supernatural, the followingquote, often used in conjunction with essays on Starry Night, comes from the heartof his "evangelical period," 1877, "When all sounds cease. God's voice is heardunder the stars."(10)

The next compositional element of the painting, the cypress, which shoots up intothe firmament like a giant flame, represents van Gogh's own, as well as theuniversal, striving for ultimate release from the sufferings of this world and ultimateunion of the soul with the Infinite. Particularly during his St. Remy period, van Goghpainted a number of works featuring the cypress as the dominant pictorial image.

In Road with Cypress and Star (1890), as in many of these works, the cypress loomsso large it actually bursts out of the picture plane and is cut off by the frame. Heexplained his fascination with the cypress to Theo:

You need a certain dose of inspiration, a ray from above which is notours, to do the beautiful things. When I had done these sunflowers, Ilooked for the contrary and yet the equivalent, and I said this is thecypress.... It is as beautiful as the Egyptian obelisk.(l 1)

The sunflower appeared with increasing regularity in the landscapes of van Gogh'sSt. Remy period as symbols of devotional piety and love of God. Here the cypress,which van Gogh had formerly described as "funereal," in a darker sense, representsthe longing for the soul to embrace God through death.(12)

It is the sky, however, full of radiant light and pulsating rhythms that dominates thepainting. In the aesthetics of the transcendental Romantic writers, with whom vanGogh was very familiar, as well as the tradition of Northern Romantic landscapepainting, which had a profound impact on van Gogh's work, the sky is oftensymbolic of infinity or the Infinite Being. In his "Nine Letters on LandscapePainting" (1815-1824), Cams wrote, "The clear quintessence of air and light is thetrue image of infinity, and since our feeling has a tendency toward the Infinite, theimage of the sky strongly characterizes the mood of any landscape under its loftyvault."(13)

This hungering for the Infinite, Shelley's "the moth's desire for a star," is one of vanGogh's most persistent personal qualities. The sky, particularly the star-filled sky,often evoked, for van Gogh, this ecstatic and mystical mood. Van Gogh furtheremphasized his concern for expressing the Infinite with his use of a deep azure blueas a backdrop for the pulsating, spiraling stars. In a portrait he had painted earlier ofhis friend the poet Eugene Boch, he explained his symbolic use of color and hisintent to evoke the notion of infinity with his background of deep blue.

In describing his Portrait of Eugene Boch (1888), he wrote:

I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend, a man who dreamsgreat dreams.... I paint him as he is, as faithfully as I can to begin with.

But the picture is not yet finished. To finish it, I am now going to be thearbitrary colorist. I exaggerate the fairness of the hair, I even get toorange tones and pale citron yellow. Behind the head, instead ofpainting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I paint infinity, a plainbackground of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive, and by thissimple combination of the bright head against the rich blue background,I get a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky.(14)

Behind the head of the poet, van Gogh also painted small white dots resemblingtwinkling stars in a distant sky. In Starry Night, he translated the color symbolisminto radiant stars against the indigo sky to evoke the same mysterious, mysticalmood.

Another important symbolic element in Starry Night is van Gogh's unusualconfiguration of the moon, which is entirely different than other renditions of themoon in his oeuvre. Van Gogh once wrote to Theo of his association of theconstellations of the night sky with eternity and the divine love of God, and it wasperhaps to this memory that Starry Night speaks:

The moon is still shining, and the sun and the evening star, which is agood thing - and they also speak of the love of God, and make onethink of the words: "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of theworld. "(15)

Notice that van Gogh speaks of the sun and the moon and the evening stars, allshining together, and how deeply he felt God's presence under this heavenly canopy.Since Starry Night was the first of van Gogh's "memories of the North," itrepresents, in part, van Gogh's recollections of the past, when he prepared for theChristian ministry. Just as he had felt God's presence in the night sky in Amsterdam,he still felt the presence of the Divine when he beheld the magical "vault of heaven"'at St. Remy.

Perhaps the reason van Gogh painted the moon and sun together in one image, as acrescent within an orb, was to suggest the time of day, the passage of day into night.Van Gogh referred to this natural phenomenon as "blessed twilight," because it wasin the mystical hours when the day turns into the night and the world is bathed in amagical somber light that he seemed most aware of the Divine.

Twilight is falling - "blessed twilight," Dickens called it, and indeed hewas right. Blessed twilight, especially when two or three are together inharmony of mind and like scribes, bring forth old and new things fromtheir treasure. Blessed twilight, when two or three are gathered in Hisname and He is in the midst of them, and blessed is he who knows thesethings and follows them too.

Rembrandt knew that, for from the rich treasure of his heart heproduced, among other things, that drawing in sepia, charcoal, ink, etc.,which is in the BritishMuseum, representing the house in Bethany. Inthat room twilight has fallen; the figure of our Lord, noble andimpressive, stands out serious and dark against the window, which theevening twilight is filtering through. At Jesus' feet sits Mary, who haschosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her; Martha isin the room busy with something or other -ifl remember correctly, sheis stirring the fire,... I hope I forget neither that drawing, nor whatitseems to say to me, "I am the light of the world, he that followeth me,shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life."

... the light of the Gospel preached unto the poor in the Kingdom of my