Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, Oil on canvas
Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, Oil on canvas, France. A post-impressionist painting in 1889 during Van Gogh’s stay at the asylum of Saint Paul de Mausole. He began to suffer from hallucinations and have thoughts of suicide as he plunged into depression. The painting is divided into three parts. Blue dominates the picture, blending hills into the sky. The sky is the divine, dreamlike part of the art. The little village lays at the base in painting in browns, greys, and blues. The straight lines and the sharp angles divide it from the rest of the picture. Lastly, the cypress tree, the hills, and the trees on the ground bend and swirl to match the swirls in the sky. Even though each building is clearly outlined in black, the yellow and white of the stars and the moon are the most conspicuous. The sky swirls, each dab of color rolling with the clouds around the stars and moon. On the cypress tree, they bend with the curve of the branches. In contrast, the town is straight up and down, painted with rigid color lines that interrupt the flow of the brushstrokes.
The Starry Night is based on Van Gogh’s observation as well as his observations. Van Gogh experimented with the depiction of various weather conditions and changing colors. He broke from the impressionists’ studies of minutely contrasted hues because he believed color should be expressive. He uses thick brush strokes with color that appear flat and dissolving into abstract patterns. Symbolically, the cypress tree is regarded as the tree of the graveyard and mourning. It was linked to death and Van Gogh’s eventual suicide.
Conversely, the second painting is by Paul Cezanne, called Mont Saint Victoire, 1902-1904, Oil on canvas, France. Cezanne incorporated both flatness and depth in his paintings. The landscape is both within the viewer’s reach and far away. Whereas the Impressionists painted with thick brush short brush strokes, shimmering colors, and no outline, Cezanne used blocks of intense colors, prominently outlining forms such as the tree trunk. His interest in form and line is emphasized in the shape of the branches and how they echo the outline of the mountain in the background. Additionally, while the renaissance artists concealed their underdrawings, leaving a highly finished surface that seemed to suggest that the painting was real, Cezanne leaves many areas roughly painted. His sketchy outlines show in the background.
Cezanne believed that blue created the atmosphere, while yellow and red reflected the play of light. He used those colors to suggest the warm, sunny climate of the painting. Without abandoning the optical realism of impressionism, he tried to bring out a different color order and clarity to nature by using simplified shapes. Cezanne uses horizontal lines to create breath and vertical lines to suggest depth.
Cezanne’s simplification of landscape could be interpreted as a leap towards modernism. The structured parallel brushstrokes that fragment the structure of the compositions, as well as his use of bold colors which paves the way towards abstraction. His painting seems unfinished such as the mountain, which appears to be in the process of forming. Cezanne began to break contours, whereas Picasso broke form completely.
In comparison to the later artist, both are in the post-impressionist era. The artists were unified by their interest in expressing the emotional and psychological responses to the world through bold colors and symbolic images.