Oil Paintings - Art Reproductions

“I always tell my students that great art is art that never gets exhausted,” said Joachim Pissarro, a great-grandson of the artist Camille Pissarro who is an adjunct curator at the museum as well as an art history professor and gallery director at Hunter College. So when he and John Elderfield, the Modern’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, were brainstorming about small shows that might focus on a work from the permanent collection, Mr. Pissarro said, Mr. Elderfield suggested that he “take ‘Starry Night’ and see where you go with it.” That was four years ago. Now, after studying some 45 works by Van Gogh that are linked to the painting and scores of letters and drawings from the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Mr. Pissarro has ended up with something far bigger than he had envisioned: a sweeping show charting the artist’s obsession with the nocturnal world. “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night,” jointly organized with Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections at the Van Gogh Museum, will open at the Modern on Sept. 21 and remain on view till Jan. 5 before traveling to Amsterdam. “We discovered a lot of new, unpublished research,” Mr. Pissarro said. Van Gogh’s preoccupation with the night, both real and imagined, lasted from around the age of 20 until his death at 37, he said. (He painted “The Starry Night” 13 months before he died, when he was living in an asylum in St. Rémy, France.) Mr. Pissarro said that Van Gogh’s fascination with the night surfaces repeatedly in letters to his brother, Theo, his mother and friends. In a letter dated Sept. 8, 1888, to Theo, for example, he wrote, “It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day.” Mr. Pissarro discovered that Van Gogh would often hand-copy pages from novels he was reading that referred to both the physical and mystical aspects of the night. “As an imaginative force the night was a very big catalyst in his mind,” Mr. Pissarro said. “He lived his life by the night.” The show includes about 40 works — paintings, drawings, books, letters— including some that have never been on view in the United States. In addition to “The Starry Night” there will be other seminal paintings like the Van Gogh Museum’s “Potato Eaters (1885) and “Gauguin’s Chair  or Paul Gauguin's Armchair” and “The Sower” both 1888); “The Starry Night over the Rhône” (1888) from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris; and “The Night Cafe” (1888) from the Yale University Art Gallery. There will also be lesser-known works like “Landscape With Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon” (1889) from the Kröller Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. The exhibition will include letters to Theo and friends like Gauguin and Émile Bernard, on which van Gogh also scribbled drawings. And there will be books with nocturnal references that the artist owned, like Hans Christian Andersen’s “What the Moon Saw: And Other Tales” from 1866. By CAROL VOGEL – New York Times