“Landscape at Twilight” (1890)Roberta Smith writes: On paper, at least, “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night” at the Museum of Modern Art reads like an obvious play for big box office and increased membership. But this exhibition largely dodges such charges and instead quietly displays 23 paintings, 9 drawings and several letters by van Gogh in six intimate galleries.
Photo: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
“Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon” (1889)
Van Gogh discovered new colors everywhere, and especially at night. Peripatetically, briefly yet fulsomely, this little 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.
Photo: Kroler-Muller Museum, The Netherlands
“The Starry Night” (1889)
Unable to see clearly, he painted what he saw, ultimately pitting his colors against each other 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.
Photo: Museum of Modern Art
“Lane of Poplars at Sunset” (1884)
In the opening gallery, we see van Gogh in the Netherlands painting the farmlands and farmers of the southern Brabant region, where he was born. Here, van Gogh is starting to grasp the power of undiluted pigment in the dark. In the most prescient, touches of lurid orange signal the sun’s last rays among shadowy greens and blacks.
Photo: Kroler-Muller Museum, The Neterlands
Van Gogh often painted peasants, whom he admired for their closeness to the earth. In “The Potato Eaters,” the artist makes his sympathy with the harshness of rural life clear.
Photo: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
“The Dance Hall in Arles” (1888) The night harbored some of his other subjects: urban dwellers relaxing in dance halls and lost souls drinking and drowsing in cafes.
Photo: Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Van Gogh painted “Night Cafe” over three sleepless nights. He was conscious that it both 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.
Photo: Yale University Art Gallery
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 conspire to extend their celestial glow into watery reflections. This work was made toward the beginning of the 12-day, or 12-night, stint of painting outdoors after dark that culminated in the hallucinatory fireworks of “Starry Night,” wheeling freely, splintering the velvety blue.
Photo: Musée d'Orsay, Paris
It is joined in the final gallery by three very different paintings. Van Gogh’s portrait of “Eugène Boch (the Poet),” at left, shows a thoughtful young man, depicted mostly in yellow, 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.
Photo: Musée d'Orsay, Paris, Reunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource
related
Finally, with “Gauguin’s Chair,” Van Gogh is back indoors painting by candlelight. The world he creates here is a rich assortment of browns, greens and blues, pierced by the 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?
Photo: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
沒有留言:
張貼留言