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VAN GOGH AND THE “RELIGION” OF NATURE
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
ConnecticutCollege
New London, CT06320
(This essay was written in the early 1990s and was revised for musical ideas in 2007.)
Three interrelated issues are important for Van Gogh's landscapes: the collapse of history painting, the rise of landscape as a substitute, and the increasingly willingness of artists to work from the imagination at a time when the traditional idea of art as representation began to seem worn out. We have already noted the collapse of history painting in the eighteenth century and the rise of landscape as a possible alternative in Friedrich and other Romantic painters. In the Romantics, such as Turner, history continues only as a foil for the overpowering forces of nature which dwarf the greatest human achievements.
Although history painting continued in academic art and, to a lesser extent, in the new category of historical genre, it vanished in the modern art movements of Realism and Impressionism. By the late 1880's, history painting had become thoroughly discredited in the avant-garde, with the sole exception of Puvis de Chavannes who was admired by Post-Impressionists for his abstraction.
Except for a few copies after Delacroix and Rembrandt made out of admiration for his favorite artists, Van Gogh refused to paint religious, mythological, or historical subjects. Following the Realist example of artists such as Millet and novelists such as Zola, he focused on the visible world. But even this seemed increasingly inadequate, mundane, and superficial in the wake of academic genre painting, photography, and Impressionism. In 1888, Van Gogh pronounced religious art dead, arguing that God could only be painted using natural and imaginary artistic forms. Starry Night should be seen in this context, as an example of landscape painting trying to do some of the things done by traditional religious art.
In early 1888, Van Gogh’s break with Impressionism coincided with his departure from Paris for the south of France where he hoped to start an art colony. In late 1888, encouraged by Gauguin, Van Gogh began to work less from the model and more from imagination. "Now I work from memory. Gauguin gives me the courage to use my imagination, and it's true enough that paintings of this kind have something mysterious about them". Deliberate distortions of reality now took on a new value. As he observed, "Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily, in order to express myself forcibly".
Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1890 [1]
Four Issues
Sublime Nature from Late Enlightenment and Romanticism through Symbolism (renewed by latest popular astronomy and science fiction) / oceanic mountains and heavens / starry night as quasi-religious wonder, transcendence, infinity, therapeutic retreat from modern problems
Japonisme / flat, decorative, swirling arabesques derived from Japanese prints and Art Nouveau
Color Tone Painting / Whistler’s Nocturnes and Symphonies / art pursues higher “musical” abstraction, poetry, feeling
Symbolist Landscape as Self – nature’s truth defined now by solitary artistic vision as we enter a private world constructed by each artist
Celestial imagery and the planets and stars were familiar subjects in Western art since antiquity. Renaissance and Baroque artists such as Tintoretto and Rubens painted the Origins of the Milky Waywhere the infant Hercules suckled Juno with such force that her milk sprayed across the heavens, creating the Milky Way. Here was a typical image of Renaissance nature as a grand cosmic system, ordered, explainable yet grand, timeless, and mythic.
Since the stars themselves imaged great figures, creatures, and events from classical mythology, courtly rhetoric from classical antiquity through the eighteenth century frequently used stars to signal the celestial immortality given to all great heroes whose fame was “written in the stars”. Burgher poets and artists also lay claim to this stellar rhetoric in claiming their own immortality of the mind.
It was only in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centurieswhen people began to perceive nature as permanently corrupted by modern commerce and industry that writers and artists began to yearn religiously for the nocturnal sky. It was German writers of the late Enlightenment and Romantic periods, in particular, who made much of the night and the night sky. Among these was the Enlightenment writer, Schiller, whose great poem the “Ode to Joy” (1785) became even more famous when Beethoven set it to choral music as the thundering climax to his Ninth Symphony (1817-23). Looking beyond traditional religious ideas to new Enlightenment and Romantic ideas of nature’s unifying, redeeming spirituality, Schiller’s poem sings of a day when “all mankind will be brothers” (alle Menschen werden Brüder). The last three stanzas anticipate later, nineteenth-century ideas of God in the natural world.
Gladly as His suns do fly
Through the heaven’s splendid plan,
Run now, brothers, your own course,
Joyful like a conquering hero.
Embrace each other now, you millions!
This kiss is for the whole wide world!
Brothers – above the starry firmament
A beloved Father must surely dwell.
Do you come crashing down, you millions?
Do you sense the Creator’s presence, world?
Seek Him above the starry firmament
For above the stars he surely dwells. [2]
My point is not that Schiller’s Ode to Joy had any importance for Van Gogh’s Starry Night.I cite that poem only as an example of an ongoing shift, seen very clearly in the Enlightenment and even more in the Romantic period, to find God in nature and to move beyond sectarian piety, on the one hand, and all religious dogma and imagery, on the other.
“Romantic” Writers in the Later Nineteenth Century
To find parallels to Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we don’t need to go back to Schiller or to the Romantics of the early nineteenth century. Since 1800, Western culture has been awash in Romantic ideas, which is one reason Van Gogh’s painting is still so popular today. Two kinds of literature contemporary with Van Gogh, make for closer parallels with Starry Night. One is the later nineteenth-century poetry of “Romantics” all over Northern Europe and the United States, poets such as Walt Whitman. Fluent in French and English, Van Gogh was a voracious reader and was particularly struck by the poems of Whitman. In one of his letters, Van Gogh wrote,
"Have you read the American poems by Whitman? I am sure Theo has them and I strongly advise you to read them, because to begin with they are really fine and the English speak about them a great deal. He sees in the future, and even in the present, a world of health, carnal love, strong and frank, of friendship - of work - under the great starlit vault of heaven a something which after all one can only call God - and eternity in its place above the world."
Whitman wrote many poems on the night with strong parallels to Van Gogh’s painting including one poem with the following lines.
I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,
I call to the earth and the sea half-held by the night.
Press close bare-bosom'd night-
press close magnetic nourishing night!
Night of south winds - night of the large few stars!
Still nodding night - mad naked summer night.
A number of other letters contain passages which might help us understand Starry Night.In one, Van Gogh speaks about death and the possibility that an artist's work might have a larger impact on later generations.
"For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it, but looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is that we cannot get to a star while we are alive, any more than we can take the train when we are dead." [3]
Nine months before Starry Night, Van Gogh wrote another letter described the difficulty of painting ugly things like night cafes and ordinary town streets, invoking Zola and Flaubert's descriptions of similar streets and buildings.
"And it does me good to do difficult things. That does not prevent me from having a terrible need of - shall I say the word? - of religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars, and I am always dreaming of a picture like this with a group of living figures of our comrades".
Note here Van Gogh's hesitation in using phrases like "religion" and his preference to find the sacred in natural forms such as the heavens.Here we see how this failed, would-be minister turned artist rejected religious art in 1888 and hoped to replace history painting with an increasingly imaginary landscape art.
While the Romantic vastness and drama of the night sky was well suited to literature, it was difficult to formulate in powerful visual terms. Images were more suited to capturing a nocturnal silence, stillness, and inwardness, as seen in Western art from the religious Nativity scenes of Northern Renaissance and Baroque art to the dusk and night scenes of the Realist, Millet, to the Symbolist Nocturnes of Whistler. When the Millet painted his Starry Night (1850-65), he had to include shooting stars to dramatize a subject which had little visual drama.
Van Gogh painted two scenes of the starry night sky. In his Starry Night over the Rhone (September 1888), Van Gogh went far beyond a scientific depiction by expanding the size and luminosity of the stars, combining different viewpoints, and adding a pair of strolling lovers and reflected lights below. The result was a Symbolist nocturne with a hint of romance, set in a picturesque harbor. This painting also shows why Van Gogh abandoned the Impressionist aestheticwhich was indifferent to any deeper understanding of nature and to a human emotional-spiritual response. Here is how Van Gogh put it in a letter written just a few months before painting the second Starry Night.
I have gradually come to believe more than ever in the eternal youth of the school of Delacroix, Millet, Rousseau, Dupré, and Daubigny . . . I hardly think that impressionism will ever do more than the romantics . . . This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big. Daubigny and Rousseau have done just that, expressing all that it has of intimacy, all that vast peace and majesty, but at the same time adding a feeling so individual, so heartbreaking. I have no aversion to that sort of emotion.[4]
Popular Astronomy and Science Fiction
The other literary parallel to Van Gogh’s Starry Night comes in the rise of popular astronomy and science fiction in late nineteenth-century Europe and especially in France. No writer on the stars was more important or more widely known in this regard than the popular astronomer, Camille Flammarion. Writing in French but quickly translated into most of the major European languages, Flammarion’s writings shared some of the spiritual desires and fears of science fiction, then just beginning in France with authors like Jules Verne. For Flammarion, there was no disjunction between scientific inquiry and romantic rhapsodies on celestial nature. Thus Flammarion cried,
"We, have, then, at last arrived at a scientific era long wished for by the friends of progress ... it is a sign of the times, because it marks the fundamental character of our epoch"
Elsewhere, Flammarion sounds more like a romantic poet than a scientist.
"the phases of the moon, and the apparent motion of the starry sky accomplished silently above our heads, the movements of the beautiful planets through the constellations, the shooting star that seems to fall from heaven, eclipses of the sun and moon ... curious comets which appear with disheveled hair in the heights of heaven"
"The aerial atmosphere which envelopes our globe and bathes its whole surface in its azure fluid is intimately connected with life".
"in external night ... the depths of the heavens; it is life-like, immense, universal, eternal, unfolding itself in waves of harmony out to the inaccessible horizon of an eternal infinite".
Like Flammarion’s writings, Van Gogh's Starry Night fused a traditional nineteenth-century commitment to painting contemporary reality with the romantic desire to endow that reality with transcendental values. If aspects of the latest science could buttress the artistic search for a heightened spirituality, then scientific advances were gladly enlisted to support an artistic enterprise remote from genuine scientific thinking, empiricism, and quantitative reason. One thinks of how the Symbolist, Redon, drew on contemporary scientific themes in his profoundly unscientific art or the way Expressionists like Kandinsky and Marc later welcomed modern physics with the splitting of the atom and search for the fourth dimension as a parallel to the abstracting, universalizing forms of their own art. [5]Franz Marc’s interest in the stars offers a striking parallel to Van Gogh’s apparent use of popular astronomy. Writing home from the battlefields of World War I, Marc noted,
“We can read our destiny … in the stars … Naturally one can find the same in thediurnal, read it in human faces, or hear it in the wind, – in the starry heavens it appears to me less confused, … more abstract and clearer … as an inexhaustible source of inspiration. . . . I often go about with constellations in my head”. [6]
Painted only nine months after Starry Night over the Rhone, Van Gogh’s second and more famous Starry Night shows his new willingness to paint from the imagination following the example of Gauguin. On the one hand, the painting was still loosely based on the actual constellations and moon which Van Gogh saw the night before he painted this scene (as documented by modern astronomers who used a planetarium to recreate thesky). Even the most visionary aspect of the painting – the double whorl of stars in the center - recalls the spiral nebula which had appeared to the human eye only in 1844 after the invention of new telescopes and which was widely reproduced in popular magazines and in the writings of Flammarion.
Despite its empirical grounding, the second Starry Nightreplaced the "scientific" observation of familiar constellations, "mundane" lovers, and picturesque riverscape with a more abstract, dramatic and visionary composition. By eliminating the foreground, Van Gogh set the night scene at a mysterious distance. The perspective detaches viewers from the earth and uses the rising, flame-like forms of the cypress tress to pull us up into the heavens. This giant cypress dwarfs the little church steeple, as if natural forms had replaced traditional religious settings as the locus for an intensely spiritual yearning.
Whereas the earlier painting developed a charming shimmer of light uniting earth and heaven, the second version contrasted the two by setting the dark cypress against a radiant sky whose overpowering light renders insignificant the earthly twinkle below.
The heavens are organized into large, abstract waves which surge with an oceanic quality carried into the landscape below where the dawning light and the hills appear as a series of flowing, watery forms and breaking “waves”. At once organic and abstract, the wave patterns of the sky contains the potential violence of color and feeling and give it a grand, “symphonic” structure. At the same time, the limited color scheme of blue and blue-silver enlivened with small bursts of complimentary yellow also work to unify what could have been a wild and disorganized image.
By departing from Impressionist naturalism, Starry Nightimaged nature’s traditional infinity, eternity, majesty and power, its transcendence of all things earthly, its complete freedom from history, from modernity, from any signs of industry, commerce, and urban existence. Here was the Romantic dream of a nature which could reclaim its sanctity and higher visionary power while using forms which were still familiar and even universal in their appeal and which took on even greater meaning in an age of popular astronomy and science fiction.
Starry Night and the Crisis of Landscape Painting
The grand drama developed in Starry Night was also typical of Van Gogh’s late landscape painting as a whole and can be found in his portraits and still-life paintings, for example his famous Sun Flowers. Thus we can speak of a clear and deliberate strategy by the artist to move toward a new, emotionally-charged art of the imagination.
While the innovations of Starry Night might invite us to see Van Gogh’s later work as opening up new possibilities for a rejuvenated landscape painting, the heavens were not a promising new theme in the same way that the ocean and the mountain were to an earlier generation of Romantic artists and writers. Only a few night paintings followed in the wake of Van Gogh'sStarry Night, most notably in Scandinavia.