User:Jaredbaxter114/sandbox
Interpretations
Perhaps no other painting in Western Art has enjoyed such a wide array of possible interpretations. Academic theories tend towards two schools: the literal and the literary. The literal includes both he painted what he saw and the hallucinatory genius arguments (as an individual's hallucination is as real to him as death or taxes) while the literary suggest that inspiration blossomed from some written source; most often cited for van Gogh's Starry Night are The Bible, Walt Whitman and Victor Hugo.
Legendary 20th century art historian Albert Boime is generally credited[1] with the best literal theory by proving, in conjunction with three Astronomer colleagues at UCLA[2] the position of the stars from van Gogh's window in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence at 4 a.m. on June 19, 1889, the day van Gogh wrote his brother that he had completed the painting.[3] In a 1985 lecture to the American Astronomical Society, Boime compared the positions of the moon and Venus that night and showed that they corresponded to the positions of the celestial objects in the painting, noting that the scene "tallies with astronomical facts at the time the painting was executed."[1] Boime further argues that van Gogh had likely seen an image of a spiral galaxy from Camille Flammarion's Astronomie populaire, in an attempt to explain the existence of van Gogh's celestial spiral jetty. In his 800-plus existing letters, however, van Gogh makes no mention of ever reading Flammarion.[4]
As to the leading literary theories: those about The Bible range from van Gogh painting a passage out of Genesis 37 describing a dream of Joseph[5] to an apocalyptic depiction out of the twelfth book of Revelations[6] to a sublimated Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane;[7] while those from Whitman attempt to correlate the painting's poetic vision to van Gogh's reading of Song of Myself[8]; and (what has been mistakenly attributed to Hugo's Les Miserables)[9] as the poetic depiction of a lighthouse in eclipse.[10]
This bevy of interpretations has helped keep van Gogh's Starry Night firmly within the discussions and lively debates of both public and academic art history.
References
- ^ a b Rourke, Mary. "Albert Boime dies at 75; leading art historian taught at UCLA for 30 years", Los Angeles Times, October 23, 2008. Accessed November 2, 2008.
- ^ Boime, Albert, Starry Nights: A History of Matter and a Matter of History, from ?
- ^ See vangoghletters.org, Letter 782
- ^ See vangoghletters.org, Advanced Search "Flammarion"
- ^ Loevgren, Sven, The Genesis of Modernism: Seurat, Gauguin, van Gogh, & French Symbolism in the 1880s, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1971
- ^ Schapiro, Meyer, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, George Braziller, New York, 1978
- ^ Soth, Lauren, Van Gogh's Agony, from The Art Bulletin, June, 1986, number 2
- ^ Layman, Lewis. Echoes of Walt Whitman's 'Bare-Bosom'd Night' in Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night, American Notes and Queries, 22 (March/April 1984), p. 105-109
- ^ See vangoghletters.org, Letter 300, note 10
- ^ Schapiro, Meyer, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, George Braziller, New York, 1978