The Van Gogh Museum is staging the exhibition “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night” through June 7. This is the first show to be devoted exclusively to the evening and nighttime scenes by Vincent van Gogh (1853‱890), with the Van Gogh Museum being the only European venue.
Van Gogh imbued his twilight and nocturnal scenes with a wealth of associations, heartfelt emotions and a poetic sense of ambience. The works on show are both magnificent and intimate, and the presentation as a whole aims to convey these two facets as well. Many of the “night works” included in the exhibition have long acquired iconic status †such as the famous canvas “The Starry Night” from New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which is on view in the Van Gogh Museum for the first time since 1990. The painting represents one of van Gogh’s most radical stylistic experiments and has a strong expressive force of almost romantic and religious import.
Altogether, the exhibit comprises 32 paintings, 19 works on paper and five sketches from van Gogh’s letters.
Twilight and the night is a prominent theme throughout van Gogh’s oeuvre. Van Gogh viewed the evening and the night as a time for reflection and creativity, a time particularly suitable for mulling over the day’s events. For this reason, he liked to work during the dark hours, for they gave him energy and inspiration.
Arranged around the themes Landscapes at Twilight, Peasant Life at Evening †”Les Paysans chez eux” †The Voice of the Wheat and Poetry of the Night, the exhibition shows how van Gogh immortalized the twilight and the night on paper and on canvas.
In addition, in Van Gogh and the Pictorial Tradition, visitors can view works by masters of the Barbizon School (Daubigny, Corot, Millet). Several masterpieces by avant-garde contemporaries of van Gogh, such as Seurat and Anquetin, demonstrate that van Gogh was not alone in his love for the effects of the twilight and night.
With his landscapes at twilight van Gogh was linking up with a longstanding pictorial tradition of evening and nighttime scenes that was well-known to him. The crepuscular landscape was well-represented within the Barbizon School by painters such as Charles Daubigny and Jules Dupré, whom van Gogh admired greatly. The exhibition shows how van Gogh initially sought to connect with this tradition, but later contributed his own modern interpretation of the genre.
The Van Gogh Museum is on Museumplein, between the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum. The museum entrance is at Paulus Potterstraat 7. For information, www.vangoghmuseum.com or +31 20 570 52 92.
