Excelsior

Issue date: 11/3/08 Section: Entertainment

EUEGENE BOCH (THE POET): One of his first portraits.

Word spreads sometime around late May. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is finally letting loose, and New York is finally going to experience one of the most influential individuals in modern art. The big day arrives, September 21st. MoMa gathers a large melting pot of artists, critics, students, and admirers to view "Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night."

The exhibition is intimate, its organizers utilizing the small gallery most efficiently to divide the works according to Van Gogh's unfolding career as a painter. The earliest landscapes, beginning in the late 1800s, and the starting point for the hungry viewers, are subtle in their use of color, and humble in the use of compositional rules. "Lane of Poplars at Sunset" (1884), a classic example, uses varying tones of greens, browns and a burning setting sun to convey the eerie vibrancy of the Dutch landscape.

Following are the works inspired by van Gogh's obsession with peasants and their apparent closeness to the earth, as observed in their work. Perhaps one of the most notable pieces, "The Potato Eaters" (1885), is noteworthy for its use of gaslight in the artist's career, a technique he would adapt in later works. Haunted by rural life, van Gogh depicted the subjects closely huddled around a small table, submissive tones of dark green and brown with only the gas lamp at the very top, illuminating the worn features of the laborers. The exhibition presented a letter the painter had written to his younger brother, Theo van Gogh, in which he wrote, "… the color they are now is somewhat the color of a really dusty potato, unpeeled of course."

Moving to the southern tip of France, van Gogh was deeply moved by the progression of light on the town of Arles, and soon began painting its wheatfields and sowers. In "The Sower" (1888), we see the emergence of bright, surrealist colors (yellows, pinks) paired with matte browns, cold blues, and the use of the short, rigid brush stroke, iconic in post-impressionism.

The fascination with darkness carries well into van Gogh's depiction of urban nightlife. Once again we see use of the gas lamp light, but not to highlight the dense, melancholy faces of weary laborers. Instead, as in the case of "The Night Cafe" (1888), the subjects are murky, drunken bar regulars, statuesque but comfortably, naturally lit in their environment. The smooth cream brown floor and furniture accents the driving red and green walls of the café, and is reminiscent of van Gogh's work in the wheatfields. This time the mood is that of anxiousness, of anticipation, contrasting the cool, calm mood in the early landscapes.

Continued...

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