Popular culture Essay

Popular culture may remember Vincent van Gogh best as the maddened artist who, in a fit of insanity, cut off his own ear to present to a local prostitute. This anecdote of van Gogh’s most scandalous moments has endured as well as his paintings. Nonetheless, this chronicle reveals part of the mental schema of the man who is commonly regarded one of history’s most famous artists. When van Gogh first arrived in Paris from Antwerp in late 1885, the most popular painters in the art scene were already the Impressionists; they had already found their way into mainstream galleries and exhibition. In the French metropolis, van Gogh was able to learn and analyze Impressionist techniques as well as artistic philosophy. To the Impressionists, painting was understood as a method to explore new approaches to painting. Fresh modes of representation were especially crucial as the burgeoning popularity of the camera offered technical opposition that man was hard pressed to eclipse. As the camera flattened the image before it with immense technical proficiency, the Impressionists sought to explore emotion, color, and paint application, aspects that the camera had yet to replicate. In turn, they altered the trajectory of Western art from exact representation towards more expressionistic and individualistic interpretations. All these attributes can be found Starry Night, painted by the mentally perturbed van Gogh in 1889. The painting is a vibrant clash of subdued calmness and overt, dazzling calamity. However, the lore behind Starry Night and its origins have generated much of the popularity behind the piece. Because of this, there have been numerous readings and interpretations of the work, all of which hold argumentative merit, yet the universal remains that Starry Night is a testament to Impressionist painting because of the evocative rendering of the paint into semi-abstract forms, elements which became synonymous Antwerp with the Impressionists and symbolists later years. Stylistically, Starry Night is not unlike many of the other works that van Gogh worked on while he painted in his self proclaimed â€Å"Studio of the South. † Van Gogh was a worldly art scholar who was familiar with the trends of the Impressionist scene in Paris. However, he arrived in the city towards the end the group’s series of exhibitions. Nevertheless, he held a somewhat cynical view of his colleagues. He thought painting could explore new methods of visual communication, to convey feels and emotions in which words were not sufficient. Van Gogh briefly united with his friend and fellow painter, Paul Gauguin, in northern French town of Brittany. However, van Gogh longed for the warmth and sun, so he fled to Arles in the Provencal area of south France on the Mediterranean Sea. There he set up the â€Å"Studio of the South† in his own household, using it and his local surroundings as visual inspiration for his tenure in the city. While in Arles, van Gogh fought a brief bout with madness, possibly from his self-imposed exile from a fostering art community. On the urgency of van Gogh’s brother, Theo, Gauguin joined his friend in Arles and the two were briefly content with their rejuvenated methods of representation. However, Gauguin left the â€Å"Studio of the South† after only a few months, again throwing van Gogh into a depressive turmoil. A year after Gauguin’s departure, â€Å"in May 1889, van Gogh, who had suffered two attacks of what we today would probably call manic depression, was sent to the sanatorium of St. Remy, near Arles, by his devoted brother Theo. It was there that work for Starry Night may have been preconceived. Unlike many of the impressionists’ paintings of the era, it is believed that van Gogh planned out this particular painting, instead of creating it autonomously. Instead, the artist aggrandized and melded together a variety of seen motifs to create an ecstatic vision. The scene was, by his own account, an â€Å"exaggeration,† its â€Å"lines as warped as old wood. † By these accounts, van Gogh intended Starry Night to be a proliferation of his own psyche into the painting that would appear both a natural embellishment of gnarled deformality. Additionally, other sources cite van Gogh as stating â€Å"Now I have a portrait of Dr. Gachet with the broken hearted feature of our times,† in reference to Starry Night. Dr. Gachet was van Gogh’s psychiatrist while he stayed in St. Remy, it is also believed that he suffered severe mental illness as well as his patient; further suggesting van Gogh intended the painting to be a portrait of madness itself. The technique van Gogh employed while removed from bustling French capitol includes an intense smothering of paint (impasto), almost as if it were poured directly from paint tube unto painting. Once applied, the paint is liberally built up upon itself, as if sculpted out s against the flat plain of the canvas. This same type of painting can be found in Starry Night. The rich yellow of the vivid moon and sporadic stars appear to radiate against the sky in thick radiations of slashed lines. Conditionally, the sleepy town below appears calmly and quite lethargically rendered, as if to replicate the peaceful tranquility found below. To the center-left emerges a cascading, spiraling figure, brown in color and looming menacingly over the city below. Together, the three elements, the night sky, the town, and the foreground element (referred to by many as cypress tree ), make up the entirety of Starry Night, and it is from these three elements one can hope to conclude any meaning behind the painting. The center of the painting depicts the rolling hills of the village of St. Remy, which cascade into the horizon line. The houses and hillsides are depicted in cool, dark, gentle tones of blues and greens. The tranquil color and brushstrokes are evocative of a sleepy, serene village town that has long gone to sleep. At the center of village, like so many similar places in Europe, stands the tall steeple of the church looming over the surrounding, smaller buildings. Dispersed among the houses appear a few bushes or trees, nothing spectacularly large or looming. Instead, this was saved for the escalating, immense, dark arrangement that envelopes nearly a third of the foreground, the cypress tree. The tree appears to be rendered in a way that implies movement or vitality. The brushstrokes that make up the trunk thrust towards the heavens, seemingly rotating around each other while twisting upwards. This mimics the steeple, the symbol of united faith and assurance, found below in the town. While not immediately recognizable, the tree’s shape and curvature mimic the style found in the paintings most notable element, the starry sky. The night is filled with coiling, swirling cloud patterns illuminated by the brilliances of surrounding stars and a bright, crescent moon in the upper-right corner. The sky physically dominates the painting and landscape, making up nearly two thirds of the surface area. Clearly emphasizing some sort of importance to the night sky, van Gogh rendered it completely opposite of the village below. Instead of calm, repetitive brushstrokes and colors, the sky is a violent explosion of blacks and deep blues, vivid whites that gleam against the intense darkness of town and cypress tree. At the center of the painting is the nebulous that is most associated with Starry Night. The rotating marks of the paintbrush thickly push the sky unto itself in a cyclone of fury and aggravated passion. The mysterious clouds may also represent some other elements of van Gogh’s psyche, especially considering how the Church is represented in the painting compared to immense spectacles of darkened masses. The â€Å"extraterrestrial existence promised by the night sky, the darkened townscape at the lower edge of The Starry Night suggests the limits of earthly life and its relative marginality in the larger scope of existence. The prominent church alludes to traditional religious practice and faith . . . while at the left a cypress . . . introduces a note of death. † Because it is known that van Gogh planned â€Å"Starry Night† before hand, the explanation for its origin has become prominently interesting to art historians. Consequently, the interpretations of such a confusing, evocative and unexplainable swirl in the sky remains muddled. Through examining van Gogh’s letters, many scholars have come to the interpretation that the artist used the painting to explore some theological territory of his mind. In reviewing the mental instability attributed to the artist, claims that â€Å"In September, 1888, Van Gogh confessed to ‘having a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars. ’ The exalted, consoling image of the Starry Night was the result of that process of sublimation. † However, I think that it would be a mistake to assume that van Gogh attempts to reconstruct some personal connection to Christianity, even with the prominent inclusion of the church steeple. Rather, he may have sought to unite the prevalent faith found in Christianity with that of his impressionist techniques. The mysticism that surrounds any sort of spiritualism, including Christianity, helps unite the two portions of the physical and metaphysical worlds of the painting together. The vague subject matter in the sky, along with the impasto paint application, and confusing perspectives looking downward at the city while also facing the sky, are all staples of Impressionist techniques. These three characteristics are antithetical to the types of linear perspective that had been the cornerstone of Western art since the Renaissances. Van Gogh and his fellow Impressionists were not interested in painting narratives or didactic scenes; these merely obstruct the painter from clearly communicating his emotions to the spectator. Thus, when van Gogh claims that he has a need for religion, which leads him to the skies; this could be interpreted as a turn towards the natural surrounding world rather than the religion of man, transcribed in bibles and built into monasteries. Since â€Å"Starry Night† was not an authentic rendition of the night sky at any particular moment, one cannot assume that there was a literal cluster of violently tumbling clouds revealed by the evening’s gleaming stars. Nevertheless, even the whirling star form of Starry Night may have its astronomical counterpart, for it closely resembles the then-current depiction of the Whirlpool Nebula, a distant spiral galaxy. † If this were so, then van Gogh did not happen to stumble upon the Nebula on the night of the painting, but purposefully imposed it over the town for this particular rendering. Reasons because of this fall in line with many of the arguments scholars have made behind the painting’s meaning. Through, the meaning has been malleably conformed to various arguments, the motive behind its prominence within the painting are not as important was the effects of what it, with the symbols of the cypress tree and the town below say in conjunction with each other. As a painting onto itself, Starry Night can inspire many interpretations, which it has done so for over a century. Since it has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the painting has been a representation of the museum and of Impressionism, and to that extent, modern art. Yet, as the painting was completed in a time when avant-garde artists were breaking off from traditional forms of literal representations and deep seeded symbols and signs associated with Renaissance painting. Instead of painting in a language of icons, van Gogh and the Impressionists hope to paint in a language of emotion. This meant that the application of paint in Starry Night, and van Gogh’s other works, are delegates of the artist’s mental facilities at the instant of painting. In retracing each brushstroke with the eye, following every kick and bump of paint as if it was being painted anew, one becomes briefly united with the artist and the moment of creation.