Interesting Art Stories: 7. The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, ACJ Art Academy

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On every Thursday, I am introducing the stories about various artists and their paintings with the title “Interesting Art Stories”.

The 7th story for this week is "The Starry Night" by a Dutch post-impressionist painter, Vincent van Gogh.

“The Starry Night” is an oil painting on canvas by Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it describes the real view through the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an ideal village. It is now owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Self Portrait (1887)

After an incident that he mutilated his left ear on December 23, 1888, Van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole lunatic asylum on 8 May 1889. The asylum, a former monastery, was accommodating the wealthy, and when Van Gogh was hospitalized, it was less than half full, so he could use not only a second-floor bedroom but also a ground-floor room for use as his painting studio.

The Monastery of Saint-Paul de Mausole

During his stay at the asylum, Van Gogh painted some of his most famous works, including the “Irises” now in the J. Paul Getty Museum and the “self-portrait” in the Musée d'Orsay. The Starry Night was painted around June 18, the date he wrote to his brother Theo that he had a new painting of a starry sky. This work was painted in the studio on the ground floor used by Van Gogh during the day, but the claim that he drew this picture from memory is not an exact expression. This is because Van Gogh painted more than 21 times what he saw in his bedroom window, one of which was identified as “The Starry Night”.

Irises (May 1889)

Self portrait without beard (September 1889)

The hospital did not allow Van Gogh to paint in his bedroom, but allowed sketching in ink or charcoal on paper, and in this situation he continued to create new versions based on previous versions. “The Starry Night” is the only nocturne work in the series of views what he saw in his bedroom window. In early June, Van Gogh wrote a letter to Theo: "This morning I saw the countryside from my window for a long time before sunrise with only the morning star remaining, which looked very big”. The brightest star in this picture, just to the viewer's right of the cypress tree, is “Venus” that Van Gogh thought it was the 'morning star' and it was indeed visible at dawn in Provence at the time. At the time of 1889, it was confirmed by scholars that Venus was so close to Earth that it could be actually seen at dawn and was the brightest.

According to astronomical records, the moon was its waning crescent when Van Gogh painted this work, therefore the moon he drew in this painting is not astronomically correct and stylized. Also, the only thing in the picture that is not visible from his bedroom window is the village, which is known to be based on sketches drawn from a hillside above the village of Saint-Rémy. Also, the cypress tree depicted in the painting is a plant related to death, suggesting that only death can take us to the star.

Van Gogh has written a lot of letters, but he rarely mentioned this painting. After mentioning it in a letter saying that he drew a starry sky in June, Van Gogh included the painting in a list of paintings sending to his brother Theo in Paris, writing "the only things I consider a little good in the list are the Wheatfield, the Mountain, the Orchard, the Olive trees with the blue hills and the Portrait and the Entrance to the quarry, and the rest says nothing to me”. Among them, “The Starry Night” was included in “the rest”. In addition, Van Gogh first excluded three paintings from the list to save the postage, and The Starry Night was one of them he didn't send. As another example, in a letter to a painter and his friend Émile Bernard, Van Gogh referred to the painting as "failure." In other words, it can be interpreted as Van Gogh did not satisfy with the painting.

In addition, Van Gogh preferred working in series. He had painted his series of sunflowers in Arles, and he painted the series of cypresses and wheat fields at Saint-Rémy. The Starry Night belongs to the latter series, as well as to a small series of nocturnes he initiated in Arles. The first painting in the series depicting the night is the “Café Terrace at Night” in Arles in early September 1888, and the next one is the “Starry Night Over the Rhône” in the same month.

Café Terrace at Night (1888)

Starry Night Over the Rhône (1888)

After Van Gogh and Theo died, Theo’s widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger became the legacy manager of Van Gogh. She sold the painting to poet Julien Leclercq in Paris in 1900, and he sold it back to Gauguin's old friend Émile Schuffenecker in 1901, and then Johanna bought it again from Schuffenecker in 1906. 

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger

It was later owned by Georgette P. van Stolk in Rotterdam from 1906 to 1938. Then, he sold it to Paul Rosenberg, and finally the Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased it from Rosenberg in 1941, and the museum possesses this painting since then.

Museum of Modern Art, New York City, USA

The scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Museum of Modern Art in New York performed a pigment analysis of this painting. According to the results of the analysis, the sky was painted with ultramarine and cobalt blue, and the stars and the moon used the rare pigment indian yellow together with zinc yellow.

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Interesting Art Stories: 6. Guernica, Pablo Picasso, ACJ Art Academy

How are you?

On every Thursday, I am introducing the stories about various artists and their paintings with the title “Interesting Art Stories”.

The 6th story for this week is "Guernica" by Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso.

Pablo Picasso is one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, and his cubist-style works have inspired the art world.

Pablo Picasso

The “Guernica (1937)” introduced today is regarded as one of the best and most famous works of Picasso, and one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history by many art critics.

This large piece, which is 3.49 meters tall and 7.76 meters wide, painted in gray, black and white, makes this work more depressing and blue, and depicts the pain and impact of people and animals from the war. The painting was drawn by Picasso at his home in Paris, in response to the bombing to Guernica, a Basque Country town in northern Spain, by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy on April 26, 1937.

In January 1937, Picasso, who lived in Paris, France, was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to create a large painting for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. Picasso, who last visited Spain in 1934, was the Honorary Director-in-Exile of the Prado Museum.

The poster of the Paris International Exposition in 1937

Picasso did the basic sketching for this work from January to late April, but he wasn't so passionate about it. Meanwhile, he heard the news of the Guernica bombing on April 26, and shortly thereafter poet Juan Larrea visited Picasso's house and urged him to draw a painting regarding the bombing.

On May 1, a few days later, Picasso gave up the initial theme he was trying to draw when he read George Steer's eyewitness account of the attack originally published in both the Times and the New York Times on April 28, and then in consideration of the proposal by Larrea, he started a series of preliminary sketches of the Guernica bombing.

Considering the historical background for the bombing of the Guernica, during the Spanish Civil War, the Republican forces consisted of assorted factions such as communists, socialists, and anarchist. However, they united together, opposing the Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco, who sought to return to pre-Republican Spain based on law, order, and traditional Catholic values.

The town Guernica, the center of Basque culture in the province of Biscay in Basque Country, is located between the front lines, which is about 10 km away, and Bilbao, the capital of Bizkaia (Biscay). Since this town was known as the northern bastion of the Republican resistance movement, and it was an important place where they had to pass through when the Republican retreat towards Bilbao, or the Nationalist advance towards Bilbao, it was selected as the target for the bombing.

On Monday, April 26, 1937, around 4:30 PM, the warplanes of the Nazi German Condor Legion, commanded by Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, bombed Guernica for about two hours. At the time of the bombing, since the majority of the men who lived here were out of town for fighting for the Republican forces, the majority of the remaining people were women and children. Also, since the day was Guernica’s market day, the most of the remaining people were gathered in the center of the city, and after being bombed, the city burned for three days. Picasso made Guernica the image of innocent, defenseless humanity victimized through this painting.

Guernica in ruins, 1937

The work "Guernica" was drawn using a matte house paint specially formulated at Picasso's request to have the least possible gloss, and photographer Dora Maar, who worked with Picasso since mid-1936, documented its creation process. 

Dora Maar

Picasso, who rarely allowed people to see what he was doing in his studio, believed that it would help attract people's interest in anti-fascism and allowed visitors to watch his process for the work Guernica. Picasso drew Guernica for 35 days and finally completed it on June 4, 1937.

For the composition of this work, on the left, a wide-eyed bull is standing over a woman in grief, holding her dead child in her arms. In the center of the picture, there is a horse that seems to be stabbed by a spear and have a large wound on its side and struggle with extreme pain, and the horse appears to be wearing chain mail armor, decorated with vertical hash marks arranged in rows.

A dead and dismembered soldier is lying beneath the horse. The hand of the soldier's severed right arm holds a shattered sword, from which a flower is growing. In addition, the open palm of the soldier's left hand has a stigma, a symbol of Christ's martyrdom, and an eye-shaped light bulb without a shade shines above the head of the suffering horse.

At the upper right of the horse, a frightened woman is floating through the window into the room, witnessing the scene and holding a candle-lit lamp near the eye-shaped bulb.

On the right, a woman under the floating woman staggers toward the center, staring at the glowing light bulb with her blank eyes. Daggers suggesting screams replace the tongues of the horse, the bull and the grieving woman, and a dove is scribed on the wall behind the bull, part of its body comprising a crack in the wall. On the far right, another woman, with her arms up, is trapped in the fire above and below, and her right hand suggests the shape of the plane.

The work also includes two "hidden" images formed by horses.

The first image, the human skull, is overlaid with the horse's body. The second image, a bull, is formed by the entire front leg of a horse kneeling on the ground, and the knee cap on the horse leg forms the bull's nose.

Picasso lived in Paris during the Second World War, when Germany occupied France. 

According to the claim by Picasso, when a German officer, who saw the Guernica in his apartment, asked him, "Did you draw this?", and then, he answered, "No, you did."

After being exhibited at the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, Guernica was exhibited in many places around the world, and the incomes from the exhibitions were used as funds for Spanish war relief, which helped bring worldwide attention to the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso loaned the painting to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on condition that once the democracy is recovered, it would return to Spain, his home country. The work was then returned to Spain in 1981, six years after Franco's death in 1975 and is now exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

Museum of Modern Art, New York City, USA Moma

Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid

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