Vincent Van Gogh

“The Starry Night”, mesmerizing work of art

It’s one of the legendary paintings by Van Gogh. In September 1888 the artist, who was living in Arles at the time, painted the town by night in deep blue shades, the curve of the Rhône and the stars shining in the skies in dialogue with the newly installed gas lamps. “The Starry Night” is a mesmerizing work of art. Five paintings featuring a spirited sky would be produced by Vincent.

Huge exploration

Lucio Fontana

One of these has been loaned by the Musée d’Orsay to the Van Gogh Foundation in Arles, only a few metres from the site that inspired it. De retour au bercail, as they say here (returning to the fold), the painting’s presence is a pretext for a huge exploration featuring 75 artists, guided at once by a scientific and artistic verve, looking at Vincent’s predecessors but also the vast cohort of artists we can consider in one way of another to be inspired by him.

Jean de Loisy

“Van Gogh et les étoiles” (Van Gogh and the Stars), whose co-curator is the former head of the Palais de Tokyo, Jean de Loisy, is both fascinating and disturbing in that it allows us to see, in an encyclopaedic spirit, the major events in the history of art but also others that are more anecdotal, making this one labyrinthine show. Depicting the planets that surround us was a passion in the late 19^th century.

Popularizing the observation of the sky

Near the Observatory in Paris

Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) is the astronomer who popularized the subject with his “Astronomie Populaire” from 1880, a work that enjoyed global success. He used photography to reproduce the heavens. Léopold Trouvelot (1827-1895), who left for the Americas, had the virtue of being an artist but also an astronomer. Thanks to his access to the Harvard telescope, he used pastel techniques to reproduce the bursts of starlight with sensitivity.

Van Gogh, Seurat and the gas lights

Vincent Van Gogh

And then there was Vincent who, like other post-impressionist artists such as Seurat, observed with fascination, in the cities, a new kind of light which could transfigure forms; the glow emitted by the gas lights. This nocturnal contemplation led inevitably to metaphysical contemplations.

“I have  a terrible need of religion”

Djabril Boukhenaïssi

In 1888 the painter wrote to his brother: “I have a terrible need of, shall I say the word – religion, so I go out at night to paint the stars.” In Arles, this sense of the beyond that artists seek to give form to, takes shape before our very eyes, from a sublime and pared-back landscape on the shores of a lake by American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) to the recent mystical visions of British painter Thomas Houseago (born in 1972) via the very delicate portraits of moths by the young Djabril Boukhenaïssi (1).

Georgia O’Keeffe

We take death to go to a star

Van Gogh concludes: “Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star.”

Kasimir Malevich

Until 8 September www.fondation-vincentvangogh-arles.org/

(1) He is the subject of an exhibition in the setting of the Lee Ufan foundation in collaboration with Guerlain from 3 July to 1 September. www.leeufan-arles.org/