Van Gogh’s room- by Saint Rémy de Provence Tourisme- Wikimedia Commons
What did we find out when a cosmologist looked at Van Gogh’s The Starry Night?
In The Way I See It leading creative thinkers choose an artwork from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and talk about how it inspires or provokes, thrills or surprises them. It’s presented by art critic Alastair Sooke. In the first episode scientist Janna Levin looks at Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, painted in 1889 while he was at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in southern France.
Listen to Starry Night and Janna Levin
Image Credit: Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, June 1889. Oil on canvas, 29 x 36 1/4″ (73.7 x 92.1 cm). Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 472.1941
That’s Venus
Among the celestial beings in the picture one of them is, according to cosmologist and astrophysicist Janna Levin, undoubtedly Venus. How can she be so certain? “It’s low in the sky and it’s big and white. It’s actually not that big a planet but because of its proximity to the earth it looks pretty big in the sky. There’s no star, besides our sun, close enough to look like anything but a twinkle.”
Van Gogh was a fearless pioneer in this massive shift in Western art from looking out to looking in.
Art critic Alastair Sooke
And what is it that makes stars twinkle? “The only reason it twinkles is because of the turbulent air. The turbulent air is usually so invisible to us except for that it makes the stars twinkle. We don’t usually see the wind, the wind is invisible to us, we only see it if there’s some tracer, if something is caught in the wind like leaves or the light from a star.”
There seem to be references to death in Starry Night
Vangogh Starry by Museum of Modern Art from Wikimedia Commons
By the time he painted Starry Night, Vincent Van Gogh was obviously out of control of his life. Not only did he lose trust in religion during this time, but he also sent some amazing letters to his brother.
He states in one letter to his brother:
“I need a starry night with cypresses or—perhaps above a field of ripe wheat; there are some really beautiful nights here.”
Most often, cemeteries and death are connected with cypress trees. In a different letter, he stated:
“Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.”
The stars may allude to the afterlife
At the same time, Van Gogh mentions his belief in an afterlife in some remarkable ways. He stated in a letter:
“It would be so simple and would account so much for the terrible things in life, which now amaze and wound us so, if life had yet another hemisphere, invisible it is true, but where one lands when one dies. Hope is in the stars.”
The moon is not a precise illustration
Another finding of the investigation was that the moon wasn’t in the crescent phase when Van Gogh created Starry Night. The moon was actually half-moon at the time, which means it was roughly three-quarters full.
According to a suggestion put out by Albert Boime, Van Gogh had originally planned to paint the gibbous moon but changed his mind and gave it a more conventional and familiar appearance.
