Devoting an exhibition to Vincent van Gogh, among the world’s most beloved artists, may not seem like much of a reach for the Museum of Modern Art. On paper, at least, “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night” reads like an obvious play for big box office and increased membership.
But this exhibition largely dodges such charges. Small and quirky, it is an anti-blockbuster. Instead of the usual are-we-done-yet marathon followed with ordeal by gift shop, it quietly displays 23 paintings, 9 drawings and several letters by van Gogh in six intimate galleries. The final gallery features a dense display of books that he read, most open to poems about the night.
Organized with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, this show has been overseen by Joachim Pissarro, adjunct curator in the Modern’s department of painting and sculpture and a professor of art history at Hunter College; Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections at the Van Gogh Museum; and Jennifer Field, curatorial assistant in painting and sculpture at the Modern.
Van Gogh discovered new colors everywhere, especially at night. Peripatetically, briefly yet fulsomely, this show explores his special relationship with darkness. It provides a view of the tenderness, urgency and brilliance at the core of his art, as well as the openness to nature that set it aflame.
Van Gogh accepted the night as a distorting condition, almost the way later modernists like Marcel Duchamp and Jean Arp would use chance to experiment and to break habits. Unable to see clearly, he painted what he saw, ultimately pitting his colors against one another as if they were antagonists in a visual drama. He egged on their clashes with exaggerated daubs of paint, bringing backgrounds forward and giving each inch of canvas its own sense of life. In Western art before him, only the semi-Western mosaics of Ravenna achieved such complete articulation.
Also decidedly unblockbusterish is the show’s almost complete inattention to van Gogh’s mental instability, his disastrous friendship with Paul Gauguin or his shorn ear. What we see here is an artist with no time to lose, who gained crucial inspiration and information from the dusk, the twilight hours and the night with their constantly changing moons and relatively stable stars followed by the dawn’s first glimmers. They challenged his visual perception, stirred his imagination, expanded his palette and kept him close to nature’s cycles and mysteries. The night also brought relief to the daily labors of peasants, whom van Gogh admired for their closeness to the earth and often painted. And it harbored some of his other subjects: urban dwellers relaxing in dance halls and lost souls drinking and drowsing in cafes.
While van Gogh’s journey through the night could have been traced with many other paintings, the collaborating museums have an advantage. His trajectory begins, in terms of masterpieces, with the dark interior of the Van Gogh Museum’s “Potato Eaters,” which is being shown in New York for the first time in 50 years. It is the culmination of van Gogh’s early work, which began in 1880, when, at 27, he committed to being a painter after working in an uncle’s art gallery in London and then trying to make it as a missionary. It ends with the Modern’s even more famous “Starry Night” (1889), under the spinning skies of Southern France, where van Gogh’s love of painting and his exultant religiosity fused. The southern sun ignited his sense of color, but he found just as much chromatic life after it set, outdoors or in.
In the opening gallery he is still in the Netherlands painting country life in the southern Brabant region, where he was born. The first works, from 1883-85, are conventional if competent landscapes that have the feeling of someone who has finally found his natural place. They imbue the humble farmhouses of the Dutch masters with the atmospherics of the French Barbizon School and George Inness.
Their surfaces are smooth, their shapes tentative. Light is scarce, but already van Gogh grasps the power of undiluted pigment in the dark. In the most prescient pieces, touches of lurid orange signal the sun’s last rays among shadowy greens and blacks.
With the raw-faced peasant family in the many shades of gray and grime of “The Potato Eaters,” van Gogh makes his sympathy with the harshness of rural life and his awareness of a fully articulated painting surface equally clear. Both sharpen in the following gallery, where van Gogh is working in the South of France; three of five works are based on Jean-François Millet’s “Sower.” The fourth is “Night (After Millet),” his 1889 copy of one of Millet’s wood engravings from the series “The Four Hours of the Day.” It depicts a couple in their cottage bathed in a bleached-out excess of heavenly light. These works have always seemed strained, like a belated, unnecessary apprenticeship. The fifth painting, “Landscape With Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon,” has van Gogh on his own with a work whose shifting colors and textures telegraph nature’s underlying rhythms more than the actual landscape. A sign of van Gogh’s indifference to specificity: in a nearly identical painting that is not in the exhibition (it is at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands), of the same scene with a similar yellow orb, the time is identified as sunrise.
Next, the show turns to urban subjects. In the 1888 “Stevedores in Arles” — one of its least-known paintings, and one of its best — the orange-green-black palette of his early landscapes achieves an incandescent flare: that town’s lights illuminate black silhouettes of workers like a giant bonfire.
“The Dance Hall in Arles” is a sea of heads illuminated by sunlike lanterns; its artificial light turns demonic in the adjacent “Night Cafe,” the haunting interior that is the show’s third masterpiece. Its jaundiced reds and greens center on a coffinlike pool table and man in a startling white suit who seems to await some terrible event, whether as witness, ringmaster or sacrificial victim.
Van Gogh painted “Night Cafe” over three sleepless nights. He was conscious both that it had the “ambience of a hellish furnace,” as he wrote to his brother, Theo, and that it used “six or seven reds from blood-red to delicate pink, contrasting with the same number of pale or dark greens,” as he wrote to his sister Wil, both on Sept. 9, 1888. In “The Starry Night Over the Rhône” the stars bunch up in the sky like a chorus line in rehearsal while the lights of the town below extend their celestial glow into watery reflections. This work was made toward the beginning of the 12-night stretch of painting outdoors that culminated in the hallucinatory fireworks of “Starry Night,” wheeling freely, splintering the velvety blue.
It is joined in the final gallery by three very different paintings. Van Gogh’s portrait “Eugène Boch (the Poet)” shows a thoughtful young man, rendered mostly in yellow ochres, seen against a more restrained, but deeply blue night sky. “The Garden of Saint Paul’s Hospital” depicts dusk turning the shade of trees into darker ochres.
Finally, with the powerful personality that is “Gauguin’s Chair,” van Gogh is back where he began in “The Potato Eaters,” indoors, at close quarters, painting by candlelight. But the world he creates here is a rich assortment of browns, greens and blues, pierced by light. One candle rests on the chair’s caned seat and is identified in the wall label as a stand-in for van Gogh’s absent friend. Does this mean that the second candle, keeping a safe distance in a sconce on the wall, is Vincent?
“Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night” continues through Jan. 5 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Except for members and their guests, timed entry is required, with tickets available at the entrance at no extra charge.)