Thank you. I would also like to thank the conference organizers, Professor Picken and Dr. Haldane for inviting me to this incredible conference and this incomparable country. It is my first time in Japan and I have been overwhelmed by the richness of the culture and the kindness of the people.
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For over a century, Japan and Vincent, as he preferred to be called, his last name so difficult to pronounce in his native Dutch, have enjoyed a mutual admiration; a fascination that sometimes borders on fixation.
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Vincent adored Japan. He envisioned the country as an artist's utopia, replicating numerous Japanese prints. Upon arrival in the south of France he exclaimed, “Everywhere I see Japan!”
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During his time in Provence - the pinnacle of his artistic prowess – he developed his own vein of Japonism. The Japanese have been long intrigued by his tragic story and dazzling artwork …
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… including eccentric tycoon, Ryoei Saito's record-setting purchase of The Portrait of Dr. Gachet.
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After researching in Amsterdam, Dr. Tsukasa Kodera, Professor, Art History, Osaka University, began the modern paradigm shift in understanding how Vincent‘s Christology transformed itself in his later life and work. I am deeply indebted to his research.
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Vincent and Japan share a storied history. I hope this presentation adds to it. Vincent's allegorical road to contemporary Japan is a long and winding one, where we'll discover three mysteries yet to be solved: a missing letter, a missing book and a missing painting. Today, we will also consider several, new interpretations of his work and culminate with a surprise ending. But we begin both Classically and Dantean, in medias res.
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At the age of 32, Vincent moved to Paris. He was suddenly immersed in the Impressionism of Claude Monet...
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir...
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Edgar Degas...
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... and Camille Pissarro; enjoying, if not recognition, at least encouragement, on the fringes of their circle.
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But he arrived late to that scene and a new movement, the Pointillism of Georges Seurat was breaking creative ground.
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While Vincent studied in both genres…
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… it was his love of Japanese woodcut prints that ultimately inspired some of his most beloved and recognizable works.
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Vincent and his younger brother, the successful art dealer Theo, all but inseparable in the annals of art history, were even more so for the two years they lived together in Paris.
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They collected hundreds of ukiyo-e prints, still in their estate today. Vincent praised The Great Wave off Kanagawa: “Hokusai makes you cry out — these waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.” Vincent took credit for introducing Japanese prints to two of his artist comrades…
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Emile Bernard and Louis Anquetin. The three of them would pour over thousands of Japanese prints in the Parisian attic of Bing's Gallery. Also seeking flight from Impressionism, Bernard and Anquetin, inspired by these prints, jointly, or arguably separately, developed Cloisonnism.
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Almost a knee-jerk reaction to Pointillism, which they considered a “reduction of pictorial intensity,” they developed this “compartmental” style, taking a cue from the Japanese prints, by outlining bold, flat color fields with dark contours.
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Anquetin's most recognizable work, Avenue de Clichy, Five o’clock in the Evening, was likely inspired by Hiroshige's View of the Theater Street by night. In addition to the left-to-right, warm-to-cold rainbow tonality in the Anquetin, what I find fascinating, is the transformative curvature [INSERT ARROW] of the city skyline that resembles a half-moon, further alluding to Hiroshige’s luminous moon. These images likely inspired Vincent’s first starry night, Café Terrace which we’ll examine in more detail shortly.
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I've mentioned, very briefly, a number of painting styles and there is one more to add, Symbolism. With a myriad of definitions, here’s a rough sketch of how Vincent perceived, worked and tried to inspire his comrades within the movement. In Quay with Sand Barges, Vincent pays homage to Eugene Delacroix’s Christ Asleep during the Tempest by replicating the color of the sea, the likeness of the boat, and by transforming Arles’ cityscape, in the background, into a mountain.
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Here is the earlier, far more detailed sketch with the city in the background.
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And here is the Delacroix, with a luminous, citron-yellow haloing Christ. Vincent adored this painting. Why? Because we could show this image to an as-yet, uncontacted South American tribe and they would be able to tell us what it means. “The men fear for their lives, except one. He must know something the others don’t. He knows, they will be okay.” That is the power of art.
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Which brings us to our theme. One of history’s greatest power coups went largely unnoticed in 494 of the common era, when Pope Gelasius wrote a now-famous letter to Emperor Anastasius. He explained, two powers govern the world: the 'potestas' of kings and the 'autoritas' of priests. 'Potestas' means power, sheer power, the iron fist, police-state, kind of power. 'Autoritas' has a very different meaning, giving us words like authority, dignity, legitimacy. The pope mandated if the two were ever in conflict, 'autoritas' shall take precedence as priests shepherd immortal souls, whereas kings?... merely these mortal coils. Having witnessed history's four thousand year power-grab and abuse by kings and priests alike, I, and I’m sure Vincent would have agreed, consider both to be pretenders of the true power.
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The single power that supersedes all others, the gravitas behind Starry Night, perhaps best defined by poet Dylan Thomas as “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower;” radiates as a Joycean epiphany. The universal consciousness that has so brilliantly organized the nature, rules and dynamics of our strictest disciplines: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology; is also the incomparable purpose within the Qur'an. The sublime breath that awakened the Buddha; the electricity of the yogi's Kundalini; The weaver of Chief Seattle's web; the wisdom of daodejing's ancient way; The Shinto essence of kami; or what Goethe styled as the “open secret – open to all, seen by almost none!” The power that animates the sun and all other the stars; that eternal enemy and progenitor of entropy, unfortunately anthropomorphized in the West, for lack of a better word, is God.
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God is a good place to begin when it comes to understanding Vincent. The son, grandson and nephew of doctors of theology and pastors of the Dutch Reformed Church, he was raised in a devoutly Christian home, this parsonage in Groot-Zundert, The Netherlands. But they were not, strictly speaking, Calvinist. Adhering to the Groningen school, they held several syncretic beliefs. They did not prescribe to predestination, every soul can find its way to God. They did not believe in limited atonement; the repentant sinner can earn salvation. And most blasphemously, they did not believe Christ came to save by his death on the cross but to teach his perfection and lead us into union with God.
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Raised in a predominantly Catholic village, Vincent’s father aided, consoled and ministered to many Catholics. This is important to understand. Vincent’s Protestantism did not preclude him from embracing religious iconography, but rather, necessitated that he find a way to transfigure it for his modern audience.
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Many scholars believe that when Vincent explained La Berceuse should be exhibited flanked by two Sunflowers in triptych, he intended it to be a Symbolist Madonna and Child. Briefly, the altarpiece-type presentation, Sunflowers suggestive of torches or candelabras, floral wallpaper, red and green color fields, and “lullaby” title are all highly evocative of Flemish Renaissance Madonnas.
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… as in this Jan van Eyck…
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But where is the infant Christ? The rope looped around the woman’s finger rocks the cradle of her newborn child, and several have argued it’s symbolic of an umbilicus connecting the viewer to the painting. In other words, Vincent has suggested that whomever views the painting head-on is the Christ child. Talk about breaking the fourth wall.
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In my first IAFOR presentation, I demonstrated Vincent likely intended Café Terrace to be a Symbolist Last Supper. Very briefly, we have a curiously-garbed, central figure serving twelve diners…
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… drenched in Delacroix’s citron-yellow halo of light…
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purposely framed in the lower, left-hand quadrant of window mullions that form a cross, or crucifix, as though he were bearing it.
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Which brings us to our first mystery: the missing letter. While painting Café Terrace, Vincent wrote his comrades…
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Bernard and…
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Paul Gauguin, decrying they must paint portraits of one another, in exchange for studies Vincent would dedicate to each. Beyond our full-scope, there are many reasons that I believe Vincent, in this missing letter, outlined Café Terrace’s Symbolist underpinnings, preaching his vision for a “Southern Renaissance” of twelve “artist-apostles,” challenging Gauguin to lead them… … primarily, because Gauguin’s next painting was not Vincent’s requested portrait, but rather, his original foray into religious and Symbolist, art…
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Vision after the Sermon, depicting the Biblical Jacob wrestling an angel, perhaps underlining Gauguin’s struggle with fulfilling Vincent’s call-to-arms.
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During this research, I discovered art historian Lauren Soth’s paper, Van Gogh’s Agony, which argues Starry Night arose as a sublimated Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Don’t worry, we’ll unpack that a little later. Believing my research could bolster his, I reached out to him. He found my work intriguing and asked, “What about the third painting? What about…
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Starry Night over the Rhone? Does it fit into the overall scheme?” I didn’t know, so I returned to my research. One name kept coming up: Dante Alighieri, Italian poet of the epic La Divina Commedia.
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Vincent was a voracious reader of newspapers, magazines, poetry, novels. Once he found an author he loved, he’d often consume the oeuvre, including: Dickens, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Longfellow, Balzac, Tolstoy, Eliot, Flaubert, Whitman, Dostoevsky, Zola, Hugo, Verne, Voltaire. We do not, however, definitively know whether Vincent read Dante, but his existing letters include ten references to the medieval poet, revealing a more than cursory familiarity. Two telling examples:
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About Ernst Jospehson’s Water Sprite, Vincent wrote, “you say: the figure is Dantean — yet — it’s the symbol of an evil spirit that lures people into the abyss. Surely the two can hardly go together, since the sober, austere figure of Dante […] is certainly one of the most upright, most honest, most noble that are conceivable.” If he hadn’t read Dante, where did Vincent earn this erudition? There are two definite sources: French novelist Victor Hugo and Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle.
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William Shakespeare, a work of literary criticism by Hugo, examines the bard of Stratford and other titans, including Dante. Hugo wrote, “Shakespeare is a brother of Dante: the one completes the other. Dante incarnates all supernaturalism, Shakespeare all Nature […] there is something of the human in Alighieri, something of the specter in Shakespeare.” Noted van Gogh scholar, Roland Dorn opined, “There is hardly a book in van Gogh’s correspondence that has left a clearer or more profound mark – probably on his thinking as well.”
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Vincent studied Carlyle’s lengthy essay that argues the two greatest poets of all time were William Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri. With the illustrious opinions of Hugo and Carlyle, how could he have restrained himself from reading The Commedia? And this is but the tip of the historically-contextual iceberg. Vincent asked Theo to send Shakespeare’s complete works on June 18th, 1889, the same day he reported painting, quote, “a new study of a starry sky.” Had he just been reading Dante?
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One month prior, suffering from psychotic seizures, Vincent had checked himself into St. Paul’s, a Catholic asylum in the foothills of the Alpilles…
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… its landscape famous for inspiring Inferno’s Gates of Hell.
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Vincent had just moved from Arles, where, for a millennia, sarcophagi had been stacked three-deep at an ancient Roman necropolis. The site inspired Dante to pen, “even as at Arles, where stagnant grows the Rhone,” the introduction to his sixth circle of hell, the realm of heretics…
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… with its unforgettable scene of Farinata rising up from his tomb to confront the pilgrim. “O Tosco che per la citta del fosco…”
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Vincent had painted…
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… and reflected here often.
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Which bring us to the second mystery: the missing book. I believe the library at St. Paul’s contained a copy of The Commedia. I am hopeful to research there this summer, perhaps determining if The Commedia was even used to treat select patients.
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In the second example of Dantean fluency, a midsummer missive to Bernard, amid their nascent Symbolist discussions, Vincent placed the portraits of Frans Hals at the summit of artistic achievement including, quote:
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“… Dante’s Paradise…
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… the Michealangelos…
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… and Raphaels…
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… and even the Greeks.”
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High praise and free from irony as Vincent revered his fellow Dutchman, Hals. I could go on at length explicating the rich, Dantean context within which Vincent was immersed. I might even convince you that he had studied The Commedia. It still wouldn’t prove that he was painting scenes from Dante’s masterpiece, but there is ample evidence to provide a compelling case that he held a deep proclivity to do so.
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Painting scenes inspired by literature was well within Vincent’s purview, especially when it intersected with theological thought. His Still-life with Bible is steeped in symbolism at the cross-roads of literature, art and theology.
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Next, we will consider existing academic theories about Starry Night’s inspiration, which funnel into two schools: the literal and the literary. I’ll be covering ninety pages of dense art criticism over the next ten minutes. My apologies this will lack the robust examination these theories deserve.
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Among literal interpretations, art historian Albert Boime’s “social history” theory is the most widely accepted. Based in no small amount of scientific research, he had three colleagues at UCLA’s Griffith Park Observatory, wind-back time and recreate the pre-dawn cosmos outside of Vincent’s asylum window the morning he reported painting Starry Night.
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They determined the two brightest orbs were analogous to the placements of the morning star, Venus, near the skyline of the Alpilles, and the moon, in the upper, right-hand corner. Boime and his own lead astronomer, however, disagreed about the placement of the remaining stars, one determining the Aries constellation, the other, Cygnus. Vincent’s imagination, though grounded in reality, therefore, created most everything else.
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Boime posits Vincent may have read Camille Flammarion’s Popular Astronomy which includes this depiction of a spiral nebula, perhaps inspiring Vincent’s turbulent sky. While Vincent may have seen this image, it is nowhere near to-scale in his Starry Night, suggesting more relevance than a mere scientific phenomenon.
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While the hamlet is reminiscent of the nearby town of St. Remy…
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… it was not viewable from his vantage point… as evidenced by dozens of other canvasses he painted from inside his room…
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Note how he exaggerates the mountain range, depicting a steep climb, all the way to the top-edge of the canvas.
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This is not their actual state, as they plateau to the right. More on that in a moment.
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As Boime pointed out, the moon, that early morning was not in its crescent, but gibbous phase. Boime noted Vincent’s artistic struggles with creating this heavenly body, attempting to dispel the belief that it is somehow a sun-moon combination, perhaps in eclipse.
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Vincent added a number of other elements including: the Protestant church’s spired steeple barely piercing the roiling firmament, dwarfed by the towering, flaming Cypress, a symbol of death in the Mediterranean. For all these reasons, the painting cannot be accepted as a merely, literal depiction.
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Regarding Biblical inspiration, we’ll examine three theories, each couched with the opinion that Vincent’s subconscious was responsible for any possible allegory. This is largely due to one of his only existing descriptions of Starry Night: “When you’ve seen [Starry Night], I’ll perhaps be able to give you, better than in words, an idea of the things Gauguin, Bernard and I sometimes chatted about and that preoccupied us.” It seems to me, Vincent, here, overtly suggests Starry Night is not a literal, but a Symbolist venture. He continued: “It’s not a return to romantic or religious ideas, no.” Without going into too much personal history or exegesis of this text, Vincent’s claim it wasn’t a return to “religious ideas” can be explained by his desire to assuage his brother’s fears that this type of painting would again trigger a psychotic episode. In a letter Vincent had received just two days prior, Theo had warned him, “to be wary of surrendering himself to mystical speculations, exhorting him to paint what he sees and to keep to still-lifes and flowers.”
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Art historian Meyer Schapiro was the first to posit the sun/moon, perhaps in eclipse combination, advancing the view that the painting may have been inspired by an apocalyptic vision from the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelations. The passage describes “a woman in the pain of birth, girded with the sun and moon and crowned with the stars, whose newborn child is threatened by a dragon.” An interesting theory but no longer accepted as Vincent’s Christology abhorred such catastrophic prophecies and one would have to try pretty hard to find a dragon in this painting that is more consolatory than sinister.
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The second theory arose from noting the differences between the painting and the pen-and-ink drawing. The drawing contains ten stars, whereas the painting, eleven. This prompted the interpretation that the additional star held symbolic value. The combination of sun, moon and eleven stars may allude to the Bible story of Joseph. This theory better adheres to Vincent’s view about “the sufferings and glorification of the servants of the Lord, as evidenced in his Still-life with Bible,” but this interpretation, came at a time when it was thought the drawing pre-dated the painting. We now know Vincent executed the painting first. So the eleventh star was not added to the painting, but subtracted from the drawing.
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The third Biblical interpretation arose from Soth’s aforementioned theory that it is a sublimated Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, the garden where Christ prayed after his Last Supper and before his Passion. The “sublimation” denotes it was again Vincent’s subconscious making any Biblical allegory. Soth points out that a year earlier Vincent had twice attempted to paint Christ in the Garden but reported scraping both canvasses due to the lack of an adequate model.
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Soth noted that Vincent’s use of citron-yellow, borrowed from Delacroix’s palette, as in Christ Asleep during the Tempest, should be considered symbolic. This is widely accepted. Vincent’s use of color was often symbolic and citron-yellow denoted the light of God and his love. I agree with Soth that the painting represents a grandeur of spiritual or mystical release, an idyllic image, more serene and pure than reality. His sublimated Agony in the Garden supposition, derived from his belief it was the only religious painting (a few copies not-withstanding) Vincent ever attempted. I believe Vincent attempted many religious paintings during his Symbolist phase.
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Art historian Hope Werness pointed out that Walt Whitman, like Vincent, linked the stars, death and immortality. She found many commonalities between the men, between Whitman’s poetry and Starry Night. Werness did not attempt to over-interpret or define the elements within Starry Night, stating: “van Gogh created an image of divine love and of the glory and immensity of the cosmos. In the painting, man's temporal and terrestrial existence is contrasted with the immutable and eternal nature of cosmic time.” I cannot disagree with this and will fully-admit that I may be guilty of over-interpretation. But I am always reminded of Vincent’s admonition to “look closely,” for there are wonders and mysteries hidden within the greatest masterpieces.
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The penultimate theory we’ll consider is that Starry Night was inspired by Hugo, perhaps his novel Les Miserables. Schapiro, in another attempt to define the sun-moon in eclipse, supposed Vincent may have been inspired by the quote “God is a lighthouse in eclipse.” Vincent mistakenly attributed this to Hugo. It was in fact, Jules Michelet. Art historian William Havlicek took Schapiro’s theory a step further by positing the following passage to Theo, from 1883, laid the groundwork for Starry Night’s landscape:
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“From the window I looked out on a broad, dark foreground […] Running obliquely across that is the little road of yellowish sand with green edges of grass and the thin, spindly poplars.” Vincent wrote the scene was just like a page out of Hugo. I do not find the prose representative of Starry Night’s landscape. In fact, this was Vincent’s view from that window. But Havlicek did inspire me to closely and examine other paintings Vincent described; which brings us to our final mystery, the missing painting.
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Thirteen years before painting Starry Night, during his religious zealot days, Vincent delivered his first sermon at a Methodist church in London. The theme was taken from John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress. The sermon was impassioned with Vincent’s belief that we are all pilgrims on earth, on a long, uphill quest to reconnect with God. He preached: “I once saw a very beautiful picture, it was a landscape at evening. In the distance on the right hand side a row of hills appearing blue in the evening mist. Above those hills the splendor of the sunset, the grey clouds with their linings of silver and gold and purple [... leading] to a high mountain far, far away, on the top of that mountain, a city whereon the setting sun casts a glory.” And the pilgrim asked an angel: “Does the road go uphill then all the way? ‘Yes to the very end’ And will the journey take all day long? ‘From morn till night, my friend.’” We know Vincent was describing a G.H. Boughton canvas. For years it was assumed to be his Pilgrim’s Progress. Since it looks nothing like Vincent’s description, there is a growing opinion the painting Vincent described is unknown and missing. I am hopeful to research its whereabouts this summer in London.
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Vincent’s description, however, is precisely Starry Night’s landscape; with its “right hand side row of hills appearing blue, whereon the setting sun casts a glory; above those hills, the grey clouds with their linings of silver and gold and purple…” Which leads us to our final theory; an interpretation I believe renders the previous, Ptolemaic. I believe the landscape was certainly inspired by what he saw out his window, but enhanced by this missing Boughton; an image that resonated with Vincent his entire adult life. Vincent was always the pilgrim, making his way, from morn till night, to the top of the mountain, until he rejoined with God the Father, among the heavens. I believe Vincent’s cosmos was inspired by Dante’s description of the Empyrean, his tenth and final sphere of heaven where God, the sun-moon combination, reflects upon Christ, the morning star, and the Holy Spirit aflame, breathing equally between them. I find the citron-yellow, sun-moon combination to be a brilliant metaphor for the conundrum that is God’s mystery; an enigma that may have been necessitated by The Commedia’s final line: “My yearning aligned in the Holy Spirit as it moves the sun and all the other stars.” You can’t paint a sky full of stars with the sun in it, yet, Vincent seems to have found an ingenious way of doing so. Just as ingenious was his ability to give form to the Holy Spirit with this celestial, pulsating, helix; which should be considered more an example of Vincent’s haloing technique, than swirling clouds or nebulae. The remaining ten stars, more like living, breathing flowers? They may represent Dante’s ten heavenly spheres.
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Vincent and Gauguin’s “Southern Renaissance” experiment ended in fabled fiasco, as one severed earlobe attests. Gauguin later wrote that Vincent, with his Bible, was accosting Arles’ citizens, barking scriptures at them. Vincent’s Symbolist forays rekindled his religious zeal. Gauguin also wrote that, at a time when they were both quite mad, Vincent graffitied the wall inside their home: “Je suis sain d’esprit. Je suis Saint Esprit.” “I am whole in spirit. I am the Holy Spirit.” He had a very unique complex. He didn’t have a God-complex. He didn’t have a Christ-complex. He believed he was the Holy Spirit, or at least, some boundless incarnation. These were the precise “mystical speculations” Theo had to constantly warn his brother about, lest he surrender his sanity, yet again. Note how, in the drawing, the swirling Spirit interacts with the town; a stark contrast to the painting, the thick layer of clouds crawling up the Alpilles rendering such contact impossible. And here is our surprise ending. Starry Night, may well be a self-portrait; the whirling, loving spirit, too often incapable of connecting with modern humanity, representative of Vincent, himself. In conclusion, I would like to leave you with a few excerpts from Dante, the pilgrim, on his journey to the Empyrean. Descriptions, I believe, that define the power behind Starry Night.
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So, with your intellect swept bare, I will inform you with light so alive That it will shimmer as you look on it. Deep in the heaven of divine peace There whirls a body in whose power rests The being of all things that it contains. The heaven after it, with brilliant stars, Distributes this being to different essences Distinct from it and yet contained within it. The other circles by various degrees Dispose the separate powers in themselves To their own proper ends and propagation. These organs of the universe proceed As you now see, from grade to grade, obtaining Their power from above and acting downward. Within that loving light on which I looked And which is always what it was before By the sight that gathered strength in me As I gazed on, what was One in appearance Was altering for me as I was changing. In the profound and shining-clear Existence Of the deep Light appeared to me three circles Of one dimension and three different colors: God reflected upon Christ and conversely Rainbow upon rainbow, the Holy Spirit Aflame, breathed equally between them. Like a wheel turning in perfect balance My yearning aligned in the Holy Spirit As it moves the sun and all the other stars. Many thanks to Petros Vrellis for providing me with this video, and to all of your for your attention here today.
