‘Starry Night over the Rhône’, the legendary 1888 canvas about the mystery of the cosmos, will be seen in the place where it was composed after 136 years of waiting
In 1888 the artist Vincent van Gogh He wrote a letter to his sister in which he said the following: «Right now I want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that the night is even richer and more colorful than the day, with more intense shades of violets, blues and greens. If you pay attention, you can see that some stars are yellow, others pink, green… It is evident that To paint a starry sky you don’t have to put white dots on a blue sky».
This epistolary declaration of intentions was reflected shortly after in one of the artist’s most emblematic nocturnal pieces and a masterpiece in art history: Starry Night over the Rhône. The canvas represents the night of Arlesa city in the south of France where the painter lived at that time.
This oil painting was exhibited a year later in Paris, along with another painting by Van Gogh and since then it has lived in Paris, in the D’Orsay Museum for years. She never returned to Arles again until now, for the first time in 136 years.
He “cosmic poem» is exhibited at the Vincent Van Gogh Foundation from June 21 to August 25, just a few meters from the place where he painted it. The repatriation of the canvas is produced within the framework of the exhibition Van Gogh and the starswhich brings together 160 works by 75 artists who were in some way influenced by the painter and astronomy.
The cosmos and astronomy were two themes that always fascinated the artist, who created several very emblematic nocturnal works. Starry Night over the Rhône It is the axis of the exhibition in which the context, scientific and literary atmosphere of the time is explored. This theme also appears in the works of Jules Verne or Victor Hugo and in other artists such as Augusto Giacometti. “The idea of the exhibition is to show the intellectual climate, the cultural sociology of the time, at a time when astronomy was a very present topic,” explains one of the two curators of the exhibition, Jean de Loisy. “We didn’t want it to be a typical exhibition, but rather precise, reflecting that specific idea,” he explains.
According to De Loisy, “Van Gogh did complex things in an extremely difficult context” with his experimentations, “and paved the way for other artists», of the time but also contemporary.
His knowledge of heaven was profound. He did not shape the stars randomly, but He brought his reflections to the canvas and accurately arranged the constellations. In Starry Night over the Rhône, for example, shows that of the Big Dipper, which illuminates the sky. As the curator explains, Van Gogh managed to make the stars “correspond with musicality, in their precise place, and that we have the illusion that they shine, due to the reflection it created.
Before there was light in public spaces “what you saw were the stars” illustrates the police station as well Bice Curiger. That was the spirit of the time. In the painting, he explains, you can see Arles, the sky and the stars: “Everything is in the painting, there is a couple, which represents humanity, there are the boats, which represent work…”.
In the exhibition there are illustrations of the work of astronomer Camille Flammarion, the constellation study of Paul Klee, the cosmos of Maurice Chabas, images of Gustave Doré, Yves Klein, Munch, Kandinsky, Georgia O’Keeffe, Anish Kapoor and Paul Mignard. There are pieces that “are conceived as if Van Gogh’s adventure were to reach the cosmos,” explains Jean de Loisy. «There are artists who believed that there is a relationship between our destiny and the stars».
Among them, Van Gogh. “He was a loner who advanced in a world that he invented in each painting.” This is stated by the sculptor Jean-Marie Appriou, who has been inspired by the artist for his work. Juliette Agnel He tells of the influence it also had on his own, a set of night photographs taken in Sudan. Both artists are present in the Arles exhibition.
Commissioner Curiger tells how the idea arose, not at all easy, to remove Starry Night over the Rhône from the D’Orsay Museum to take it to Arles. In his case, the request had to be made three years in advance. «Being in this room, with this icon of art history, which has been reproduced so many times and which has been a source of inspiration for so many artists it’s a dream».
It is now 10 years since the inauguration of the Vincent Van Gogh Foundation in Arles. Also from the beginning of the works of the main building of Luma Arlés, the Torre del Arquitecto Frank Gehrywhich opened in June 2021. At the center of these two projects is Vincent Van Gogh, who also inspires two of the multidisciplinary artist exhibitions at the Luma starting this week.
