“I like to urge this: when you next go to a museum of art, locally or abroad,” Mendillo tells BU Today, “seek out a medieval, golden-sky painting. Then take it in your memory to the different floors where the Renaissance, Impressionist, and Surrealist images are for connections. It becomes personal.”
Contemporary Artists Are Tapping into the Age-Old Allure of Nocturnal Scenes
Installation view of “The Moon and I” at GRIMM New York, 2023. Photo by Lance Brewer. Courtesy of GRIMM.
The occult, the uncanny, the mysterious, the sensual: Nighttime conjures a myriad of connotations in art. American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler was the first to turn such works portraying the night into their own genre in the 1870s; a so-called “nocturne” painting takes its cue from the musical term in emphasizing the harmonious quality of a scene over a narrative. Whistler hoped to capture a moment’s symbolism and formal properties, rather than its story. Since then, Impressionist artists created works that emphasize the invention of electricity—its artificial glow a beacon in the dark skies of train yards—while others simply celebrated the natural illumination of the moon or the stars. In depictions of the night, everyday life can be revealed plainly, like in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942), or made into an enigma, like in Vincent van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night (1888).
While nocturnal depictions certainly have not ceased since the mid-century, more recent en plein air painting has focused on the waking hours. However, in the last few years, an increasing number of contemporary painters are turning again to the genre, inspired to embrace its subject’s unknown. Gallerists and their art collectors have noticed. Earlier this year, group shows of contemporary works like “Night, Light.” at London gallery Cob, “The Moon and I” at GRIMM’s New York space, and “The Blue Hour” at London’s WORKPLACE evidenced the breadth of artists currently exploring the significance of the night. The Hole also showed a variety of nighttime paintings in “The Midnight Hour” at the beginning of the year.
Sarah Lee, Luna Moths, 2023. Photo by Thomas Müller. Courtesy of the artist and Albertz Benda, New York | Los Angeles.
Sarah Lee, Among Trees, 2023. Photo by Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist and Albertz Benda, New York | Los Angeles.
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On September 7th, New York gallery Albertz Benda opened its fall season with a solo show of new works by Korean-born, New York–based artist Sarah Lee, whose sublime yet foreboding paintings of moonlit nature draw on the slick oil techniques of Old Masters with brushstrokes that appear, from afar, almost too perfect to be handmade. Lee said she doesn’t track celestial bodies, but she does browse NASA’s website to view the “unreal” telescopic images of galaxies. Her work has changed since the pandemic: “When every day in New York felt almost like perpetual night, I began using darker palettes more frequently,” said the artist, who paints only at night in her East Village studio where photos of the Northern Lights, French illustrations, and a reproduction of John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52) hang on the wall.
“The nighttime has a silence and inherent loneliness,” she continued. “It reminds me of my vulnerability as a human, and acknowledging it oddly consoles me.” Her dusk landscapes are unpopulated, aside from occasional illuminated insects, and rendered in colors as saturated as computer images or dreamscapes. She cited Surrealists Giorgio de Chirico and Yves Tanguy as inspirations.
Eric White, Play It As It Lays, Mr Silva, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM New York.
Today, the contexts and meanings of nighttime symbols have shifted, though history is never too far out of mind. Styles have shifted, too. Like in Lee’s work, many new nocturnes are playing with the distinction between digital and analogue techniques. “I think there has been an increased interest in painters that explore noir or neo-noir aesthetics, and with that often comes a sense of ambiguity or mystery among the composition,” said Michael Plunkett, senior director of GRIMM gallery, whose recent show focused specifically on the film-inspired look that can also be found in video games, and included artists like Michael Ho, Wanda Koop, and Eric White.
Elsewhere, works like Cece Phillips’s tbt (2023) or Adriel Visoto’s Augusta (2022), both featured in Cob’s “Night, Light.” exhibition, use darkness lit by streetlights or fluorescent bulbs to enhance this feeling in their city scene subject matter, while Alice Miller’s Knowing (2023) explores the unique light provided by new technology—an iPhone flash in the dark. In this work, the artist paints a digitally induced portrait by hand, showing the subject at a bar turning shades of neon pink, reflections dancing in their eyeglasses.
Alice Miller, Knowing, 2023. © Alice Miller. Courtesy of the artist and Cob Gallery.
Sung Hwa Kim, Silent Night, unspoken feelings, The moon is still beautiful tonight, 2022. © Sung Hwa Kim. Courtesy of the artist and Cob Gallery.
Simultaneously, however, Cob curator Cassie Beadle has seen “a rejection of the industrialization of light” in contemporary nocturne paintings. “People are looking at the moon and lunar cycles, which I feel is maybe a product of lockdown and a bit more soul-searching,” she said. “There are smatterings of that across a lot of artists’ work, a kind of resurgence of the spiritual side of things.”
In the urban scenes painted by Brooklyn-based artist Sung Hwa Kim, insects, figures, and plants glow often more brightly than the moon overhead. A frequent nighttime bicyclist, he also finds comfort in the cover of darkness where “the moon, the stars, and the streetlights became my guides, beacons of hope, compassion, and goodwill toward humanity,” Kim explained. Fragments of memories of things he sees on rides are the origins of artworks he makes at night, when he finds “a moment of pause to think and feel clearer,” he said of his studio process. Some of his emotion-driven images toe the line of still life, like in the poetically titled 2022 work When The Evening Song Begins, Everything Turns Into Nothing. From Nothing, You Find Everything (which was included in The Hole show), in which a vase in front of a window appears to become a vessel for the moon and a meadow.
Jeronimo Elespe
Talante Crítico, 2023
Van Doren Waxter
US$10,000
Wanda Koop
Super Pink Moon, 2023
GRIMM
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The nebulous nature of the nighttime is a connotation familiar from art historical references, and a thread that also runs through current nocturne painting. “I think of the night both as an in-between period of stillness (the time after everything has happened and before it all begins again at dawn) but also an active hidden time when future events start brewing,” said Madrid-based artist Jeronimo Elespe, who works in painting, printmaking, and woodcut. “This double quality is a fertile ground for potential narratives.” His dappled works verge on abstraction: Large clouds, haze, and shadows obscure his scenes’ figures, like the laptop-wielding man in Talante Crítico (2023) or an anthropomorphic/vegetal object inside a window in the 2016 etching Slow Rays (1).
Across these contemporary works, artists are continuing the genre’s historical focus on intimacy. It’s what is so appealing to buyers as well, said Cob’s Beadle. “Collectors told me they’d fallen in love with the work,” said the curator. “They just felt like it touched on a universal feeling in these overlooked moments of the nighttime.”
That aura is holistic, including the comfort, the magic, and the simultaneous uncertainty of nocturnal hours. “There is a timelessness to the subject of the night, especially through the canon of landscape painting; there is a romance and a melancholy that resonates with anyone that has a deep appreciation for art,” explained Plunkett. There is also, however, “an underlying sense of unease, or perhaps a looming threat…I found this was surprising to collectors who came in expecting a straightforward summer show about the moon.” Instead, they encountered a new generation of painters celebrating its complexities.
Enchanting Nighttime Sky Canvas Print – Celestial Cloud, Moon, and Stars
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Q & A
With Michael Mendillo
BU Today: As a scientist, what interested you in religious art that depicts the cosmos?
Mendillo: I, and all other observational astronomers, are deeply interested in the visualization of nature. How do you portray celestial features in ways that help us understand their fundamental place in the natural world? Artists address the same issue in their works. In medieval times, nature was often portrayed in “representational” ways. For example, a religious scene, such as the Nativity, with the sky painted gold, in order to show that the domain above Earth is a far better place than the Earth, air, fire, and water we experience. When the famous 14th-century artist Giotto painted the Nativity, he painted the sky blue and used a comet in place of the Star of Bethlehem to guide the three kings. A careful analysis of the celestial events that occurred during the early 1300s reveals that it was Halley’s Comet that appeared during the time Giotto was painting his masterpiece, and he must have been inspired by it.
At the end of Jesus’ life, there was another astronomical event—a solar eclipse—and artistic portrayals of that scene appear in drawings, paintings, mosaics, and tapestries.
The title of the book describes a remarkable initiative to replace the names and images of the 12 signs of the Zodiac—pagan “sinners”—with images of Jesus’ 12 apostles—Christian “saints.” This attempt to “Christianize the heavens” by Julius Schiller, a 17th-century German lawyer and astronomy enthusiast, contains some of the most beautiful portrayals of celestial images within the contexts of religious themes in all of Western culture. First-ever Latin translations of 17th-century texts are used to explain the choices of images, themes, and connections between astronomy, art forms, and religious doctrine.
Moving beyond religious connections, the book explores secular attempts to use artistic media to portray constellations and other celestial scenes. Most famous, of course, is The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh. I move beyond that iconic example and treat works by John Singer Sargent—his celestial sphere at the Museum of Fine Arts—constellations by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, and imaginative works with astronomical objects by Edvard Munch, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Salvador Dali.
BU Today: Could you briefly summarize the key players and points vis-a-vis artistic renderings of the heavens, both secular and religious?
Mendillo: The first examples of artistic renderings of constellations appear in cave paintings dating to 20,000 or more years ago. When the printing press became available, star atlases started to appear, including a beautiful set of prints by Albrecht Dürer. During the “Golden Era” of celestial cartography in 16th- and 17th-century Amsterdam, the most famous and beautiful of all celestial maps are those of Andreas Cellarius. He summarized the earlier approaches of Johann Bayer and then displayed the remarkable attempt of Julius Schiller to change all of Bayer’s classical constellations with biblical figures. This “Christianizing of the Heavens” is one of the major stories told in the book, using first-ever Latin translations of original texts.
BU Today: Most modern readers probably see religious depictions of the heavens as faith intruding in what should be science’s realm. Your book suggests you see value in such depictions?
The anthropologist Steven Jay Gould introduced the concept of science and religion being “non-overlapping magisteria,” a notion opposed by both religious and secular scientists. The concept of “origin of the universe” necessarily brings up creation scenarios that range from Genesis to the Big Bang hypothesis described in all Astronomy 101-102 textbooks and courses. It is good for society to think about origin issues, and Saints and Sinners in the Sky offers many images useful in that dialogue.
BU Today: Is there a lesson or takeaway to be drawn from competing illustrations of space by science and religion?
I had not considered multiple views of the universe in science, and different religious descriptions of nature, as a competition for the best view of our place in the physical universe. Yet we need, of course, multiple pathways of seeing and understanding. The new Webb Space Telescope provides views of new and familiar objects using a portion of the spectrum of light—infrared, i.e., heat—that we do not “see” in the traditional use of that word. The resulting images are portrayed using colors assigned to the amount of heat they emit. We also now have an image of a black hole, something we do not see with our biological eyes.
BU Today: I wonder if readers will be surprised that many pioneering astronomers and other scientists were people of faith?
Fortunately, when a paper is submitted to a scientific journal, the editor does not ask the authors to divulge their religious affiliations, or lack of them. We know that Galileo and Newton were scientists of faith, as were and are many others today. Atheists are also well represented in the inventory of scientific disciplines. I did not address this issue in the book. I had no hidden agenda and hope that author neutrality comes across.
