Like the Magic of the Nocturn - Reflections on the work of Van Goghe

Like the Magic of the Nocturne
Reflections on the work of Van Gogh

Dr. Zvika Israel

September 2008, the MoMA, New York, balls of fire flickering in a colorful mosaic cast their magic on the observer, drawing his attention from the exterior to the interior, to the innermost heart of Van Gogh's creative work and yet enigmatically these paintings in the hues of night remain mysterious, unsolved, a lyrical melody without words, like the 'Magic of the Nocturne'.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)
In 1888 Vincent Van Gogh went to live and create in Arles in Southern France. He lived in poverty and suffered from nervous attacks and delusions. It was there that he developed the rather unrealistic concept, to create an association of artists in the town and to turn the town into a center for creative artists. The only artist who joined him was Paul Gaugin. As a result of an argument that developed between the two of them, Van Gogh went into a deep depression and cut off his right ear. Van Gogh immortalized the incident in a painting entitled 'Self-portrait with a bandaged Ear' (1889). As a result of this event he was hospitalized in the Saint Remy mental hospital, in France. During his stay there he painted approximately 150 paintings over the period of one year. Van Gogh's depression became more serious. On 27th July 1890, he shot himself and died two days later.

What has not been written, debated or filmed about Van Gogh? Nevertheless many people find themselves returning again and again to stand opposite his works in the museums and galleries of the world. What remains to be said concerning the essence of his work, whose vitality has not been lost over the past hundred and twenty years, since he was laid to rest? This space is too short to include a full review of his life that has served as a platform for researchers of art and psychology, who have attempted again and again to remove the outer cloaking from his works and to reveal the full extent of their naked truth, but without success. There is the impression that they remain concealed, although still reverberating the radiance of the Van Gogh applications of intense color, applied 'impasto' (applied rapidly in thick layers, straight from the tube) so that it still seems as if they had been painted yesterday.

The article in this issue, devotes itself to Van Gogh's paintings in nocturnal colors, and focuses on the last two years of the life of this post-Impressionist artist. Van Gogh was gifted with the ability for philosophical expression, and constituted the very embodiment of emotional spontaneity, as expressed in more than 700 letters that he wrote to his brother Theo. In one of these letters he describes his creative excitement:
'The emotions are sometimes so strong, that you work without sensing that you work … and the strokes of the brush come in sequence and coherence like the words in a speech or a letter' (Letter 504).

The collection of these letters (read as a continuous diary), was published in 1911 and constitutes a documentary record of his life, opening another small window on the cravings and deliberations of the artist concerning art and life, but nevertheless leaving much unexplained.

The Night Café (interior) (Oil on canvas, 1888)
'… Today I am probably going to begin on the interior of the café where I have a room, in the gaslight, in the evening' wrote the artist to his brother. It is what is call a "café de nuit". There are very many of them here, and they stay open all night. "Night prowlers" can find shelter here, when they have no money to pay for a place to sleep, or if they are too drunk to be taken in at a hotel. All these things – family and homeland – since I lack a homeland and family, its possible that they are more wonderful in our imagination than they are in reality …'. (Letter 533)
These passing thoughts of Van Gogh reveal the communicative ability of his expression, which was absorbed within the scene of the picture. The artist does not fall into the trap of emotional and decorative realism; yet standing facing the picture there is a sense of his loneliness, yearning so much for companionship and somewhere here beside the billiard table, there is a longing for family and homeland. Van Gogh cleverly harnesses the anonymous and alienated atmosphere to emphasize his yearnings and to stage an intimate and personal experience. In this context he wrote:
'In my picture of the "Night Café" I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime.' (Letter 533).
Van Gogh does not offer a heartwarming impressionist description; the painting of the café reflects the innermost heart of the artist, his reservations and his negative opinion regarding the quality of this venue while on the other hand he constitutes the early swallow initiating social criticism.
'In this picture' adds the writer 'I have tried to express, as it were, the terrible passions of humanity, by means of red and green; so I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace, of pale sulphur' (Letter 534).
'The room is blood-red and dark yellow, with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is clashing and contrast of the most alien greens and reds, and of the purple and blue in the images of the little nomads, dozing in the empty and dreary room … the white coat of the place's owner, standing watchful in a corner of this furnace, becomes lemon-yellow or light green. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. This is not the correct local color according to the natural rules of the "trompe d'oeil" realist, but this is a color that evokes an emotion of some sort of ardent temperament' (Letter 533).
The complementary red and green became prominent in the work as part of a colorful dissonance, creating an atmosphere of conflict. The use of expressive and symbolic hues transformed the café at Arles into a receptacle for Van Gogh's feelings.

The Artist as an Emotional Receptacle
'…I had a new idea in my head and here is the sketch of it …This time it's just simply my bedroom, only here color is to do everything, and because of its simplification it will give a grander style to things, it will suggest a sense of rest or of sleep to the observer. In a word, looking at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather the imagination … I shall work on it again all day, but you see how simple the conception is. The shadows and the cast shadows are suppressed; it is painted in free flat tints like the Japanese prints.' (Letter 554).
Van Gogh used color and form, refraining from 'copying nature', in order to express his covert emotions and in order to stimulate these sensations in the hearts of his viewers.

Van Gogh had a tendency to individualism and division, his personality did not develop in the direction of social values, these feelings grew throughout his tragic life and later in his chosen isolation into self-hatred (Herbert Reid, 1971). Ironically, the result was that he relied on his own internal world and his subjective perception as a source for the subject and as his inspiration to develop his own unique style. What drove Van Gogh in his development of this style? Was it the fact that he was chained to the same pattern in his exceptional experimentations at that period, that stemmed from his intense feelings and the clever use of color, that enable us to identify with him till today, after so many years have passed, or was it his occupation with subjects from daily life that touches us so intimately.
As Picasso said:
'The artist is a receptacle The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. We must choose what is right for us wherever we can find it. It must be wonderful to invent a new subject. Like Van Gogh, for instance, something mundane such as his potatoes.'

In his painting 'The Potato-Eaters' Van Gogh (in his words) tried:

'… to convey the idea that the people eating potatoes by the light of an oil lamp have dug the earth with the self-same hands they are now putting into the dish and it thus suggests manual labor — that they have earned their food by honest means.' (Letter 404).

The family of miners represents the social ethos that was then prevalent in these regions, presented in an atmosphere of paucity, transforming them into a sort of visual symbol of the affliction of man.

A Dialogue with Reality

'… instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily to express myself more forcibly' (Letter 520).

Looking again today at these expressive colorful works of Van Gogh, in present times when society and politics intensify the social debate, do they again evoke pleasure for the observer because of the artistic expression or do they renew the observer's connection with the social issues of the past.

The connection between the artist and his audience, the 'communicativeness' as Shoham (1987) puts it of Mozart, Checkov, Van Gogh, Hogarth is beyond the boundaries of time and place and this is evidence of the greatness of their creativity and authenticity and their innovativeness that allowed them to see things in a different way. The artist presents things in a different way, he engenders a revolution. Often his deviation from the central stream is accompanied by a certain detachment, even to the extent of some alienation from society, or from the artistic object, in order to acquire the correct perspective for the work of art. As an authentic creator, Van Gogh tried to impart his uniqueness to the audience, to 'uplift' his audience to him without 'descending' to the audience.

Along the timeline, additional wonderment arises concerning Van Gogh's works in relation to the 'here and now', such as whether his symbolic discussions of naturalism, touching upon the substance of the experience as a form of criticism, in the very infancy of modern art, are still relevant today (in light of the ecological conflict), can they help to understand nature and to promote consideration of the need to preserve and care for the environment? To continue this line of thought: by exploiting wild raw materials from nature, and interweaving melodramatic elements and psychological drugs for self examination (Storr, The Dynamics of Creation, 1985), does the trend of his work (that retained the joy of discovery, dynamism and surprise for him and as such took on a life of its own), still capture the observer and grant him inspiration, or does his measured imagery and authentic realism assume a sort of legitimization to educate man to values, or perhaps, to arouse in man an aesthetic pleasure and sense of emotional release (as experienced by the artist, in his encounter with the expressive volatility of nature).

Painting as a Release for Impulses
'Oh my dear boy, wrote the artist to his brother who supported him in his years at Arles 'sometimes I am so good at knowing what I want. I can do so well without God, both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, despite my illness, manage without that entity which is greater than I which for me is my whole life – the creative power' (letter 531).

Van Gogh loved life and saw art as the sole purpose of his life, everything connected with this work caused him pure pleasure and on the other hand the Sisyphic process of production involved conflicts for him. Ernest Jones (London, 1957) argued that oil painting constituted a release for his impulses, the opportunity to enjoy the multiple hues, the strong scents, the obsession to touch, to get dirty etc. These tendencies were the special talents of Vincent, who used his hands in order to create special effects, in order to create a deep aesthetic impression (Humberto Najarra, London, 1967).

To answer questions regarding the psychoanalytical aspect of Van Gogh's work and the issue of his motivation to create, involves complex metaphysical speculation. For Van Gogh the incessant conflict that lay at the core of his creative work, was the conflict between the need for harmony in color and texture of the subject held in concrete reality and his internal emotions as a sort of identity. Is it possible in this context, to discern a certain extent of dissatisfaction with his work and bitterness concerning his situation? Or does his well-tuned work (that integrated shreds of color with applications that blend before the observer into a product with an internal logic, as part of the process of disintegrating the experience and reconstructing the fragments into an art work) aspire to bring the observer closer to his internal truth and simultaneously to the reality.

Conflict between Creative Artists, in his work 'Gaugin's Chair'
During the years when Van Gogh lived in Southern France (1888-1890), he came closer to Paul Gaugin and began, in his footsteps, to develop a new style, with a subjective and sensitive character, while distancing himself from the intellectual foundations of Impressionism. He therefore made extensive use of a striking palette of colors as a means to express the images in his pictures of fields, trees and villages as in his paintings: 'The Night Guard' (1988) and 'Skies sown with Stars' (1889), which were painted in the rural area of Arles in France.
Van Gogh was especially interested in color and light and tried to create new textures in his work that would express things in the same way that the observer perceived the object itself, as in his painting 'Gaugin's Chair' (1888). His relationship with Paul Gaugin was one of the central axes of his life during those years and not only from the artistic point of view.

'Gaugin's Chair', positioned in the magical atmosphere of its surroundings, covertly depicts a portrait of his friend and enemy, Paul Gaugin with his characteristics in contrast to those of Van Gogh himself (while on the other hand the picture presents his disappointment following the collapse of his dreams for an improved reality and loss of his hope for status and a position in society). Gaugin's chair is constructed from high quality wood and luxurious upholstery, it appears dominant and callous (in comparison to the rickety wicker chair, that in another of his works, represents the personal self of Van Gogh with its simplicity of manner and it has a sense of instability regarding its situation). When further details are distinguished, it is possible to discern that Gaugin's chair carries books and a candle, symbolizing Gaugin's intellect. The surrounding atmosphere is described as a two-dimensional symbolic illusion, represented by a warm and dark palette of colors, evoking luxury and an artist who is self-assured with an established status in society, all this in contrast to Van Gogh's self-perception as a failed artist and man.

Into the Darkness of Night

In his thoughts Van Gogh collected his impressions from the surroundings and mixed them with his yearnings, the result being something else, an artistic creation that was something novel for him. The critics were not encouraging and the establishment of the time did not embrace Van Gogh (he succeeded in selling just one painting during his lifetime, 'Red Vines in Arles', 1899), a situation that caused the artist to enter deep depressions although the outburst of his creativity was not arrested (during the creative period at Arles, he completed 200 pictures). Van Gogh did not try to shock the nonchalant critics; in fact he actually despaired of the hope that someone would provide a positive opinion of his work. He painted because he felt that he had to paint.

Van Gogh was an introvert by nature and was subject to pressures from extremely strong needs and drives (but lacked the means to satisfy them). He hid in the dark of night, tried to turn his interests to realizing his desires in a sort of imaginary dream world, 'directed' by 'an internal guide', and he devoted himself unconsciously to this journey, both emotionally and intellectually. Full of power and creativity, he lived and created in an unbounded space, time and place, in the innermost dark and turbulent recesses. Thrilled by the expansive nocturnal space around him, the results did not take long to arrive, creations of the visions of the night appeared (such as 'Skies sown with Stars', oil on canvas, 1889). In the gloomy and shimmering lights of the night he filled the canvas with descriptions of the night and stars, at night when the moon was at its fullest and its light was clear, as in the words of the song: 'On a moonlit night, when the black of the earth is sown with light (Bialik, On an Autumn Day).

'The Nocturnes' of Vincent Van Gogh, deal with the sights of night, their melody resembles a soft dreamy lyrical serenade without words, like the 'Nocturnes' of Chopin.

Van Gogh's night colored paintings (exhibited at MoMA, New York, 2008) have the mystical distance of the art of the Orient (which greatly influenced the Impressionists including Gaugin and Van Gogh). Perhaps in the deep expanses of night, Van Gogh lost his contact with reality in return for the dreams that he wove for himself in the moonlight, and they in turn cast their charms on the observer today, as the 'Magic of the Nocturne'.