The Starry Night

The Starry Night, by Vincent van Gogh. It hangs on the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the number on its label is 472.1941.

Before you look at the sky, look at where he was standing. He painted this from a room in an asylum. In May of eighteen eighty nine van Gogh committed himself to Saint Paul de Mausole, a monastery turned hospital in Saint Remy, in the south of France. He had a bedroom and a second room to work in, and a barred window facing east. He wrote to his brother Theo that he could see the countryside from it, and the morning star, very large.

So the view is real. The hills are the Alpilles, and they are that shape. The star low and bright on the right is Venus, which was in exactly that position before dawn that spring. What is not real is the village. There is no church with a steeple like that in Saint Remy. He put a Dutch village in a French valley, from memory, from home. And the cypress in the foreground is enormous and close, when from that window it would have been small and far. He moved it, because he needed it.

Now the sky. People call it a dream, and it is not. It is worked. Look at how the paint sits: thick, wet into wet, laid on in curved strokes that follow each other like current in water. He is not describing light, he is describing motion. Nobody had painted a night sky that moved before.

And here is the part worth carrying away. He did not think it was any good. He called it a failure. He wrote to Theo that the painting was exaggerated, that studies from nature were what mattered, and that this was not one. He sold almost nothing in his lifetime. He died fourteen months after painting this. The picture that now cannot travel, that is insured for a sum nobody will print, that hangs behind a rope with a guard beside it, was to the man who made it a thing that had not worked.

One practical thing. It is almost always crowded. The crowd stands about eight feet back and takes photographs, which means the space directly in front of the picture, within arm's reach, is often empty. Step into it. From there the paint stops being a picture and becomes what it actually is, which is ridges of material a man pushed around with a brush almost a hundred and forty years ago. You can see the direction of every stroke. You can see where he loaded the brush again.

Then step back to the wall behind you and look once more, from as far away as the room allows. It moves. That is not a trick of your eyes being tired. It is what he built.