第1个回答 推荐于2017-11-25
没办法编辑文本,只能都给你这样直接放上了
【星夜】
The Starry Night
1889
Oil on canvas
29 x 36 1/4 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
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'The Starry Night' was not Van Gogh's first depiction of a night sky. In Arles, he had been proud of his painting of the stars and the reflection of the lights of the town in the River Rhône, one of the first results of a plan intimated to Emile Bernard in April 1888. He wanted to paint a starry night as an example of working from the imagination, which could add to the value of a painting: 'we may succeed in creating a more exciting and comforting nature than we can discern with a single glimpse of reality', he wrote. In a letter to Theo of the same date, Vincent was more explicit about the motif: 'a starry night with cypresses or possibly above a field of ripe wheat'. With his 'Starry Night', painted in Saint-Rémy, he fulfilled that promise and did so at a time when he was more determined than ever to prove himself the equal of his fellow artists.
Van Gogh also mentioned as a joint aim 'a kind of painting giving greater consolation'. This supremely religious aspiration was no longer related to the Christian ethic for Van Gogh. His insistence that the canvases were not a return 'to romanticism or to religious ideas', though somewhat puzzling at first, was intended only to show that the works had nothing in common with earlier mystic paintings. He had once admired religious subjects from ancient art, but he now considered that the feeling of solace should primarily be evoked by the colour and design of representations of nature. [...]'The Starry Night' should be seen as [...] based on religious ideas only in this specific sense.
The artistic solution chosen by Van Gogh for these canvases lay in a compelling form of stylisation. The landscape with hills - in which he had attempted 'to render the time of day when you see the green beetles and cicadas fly up in the heat' and 'The Starry Night' were, he wrote later, 'exaggerations in terms of composition' with lines 'warped as in old woodcuts'. Van Gogh was referring to the somewhat primitive, coarse illustrations in the household edition of the works of Dickens rather than to the carefully executed wood engravings in contemporary magazines. in the drawings which he also made after these paintings, this abstraction has been taken a step further.
'The Starry Night' in particular was an attempt by Van Gogh to create a masterpiece on a par with the very stylised work of Gauguin and Bernard. The graphic style adopted by Van Gogh was not an obvious choice to achieve a nocturnal effect in which surfaces and silhouettes would normally play a greater role than lines. The style is in this sense rather artificial, and the same can be said of the scene itself, put together as it is from different studies from nature.
Van Gogh may have had doubts about the painting, but subsequent commentators have elevated 'The Starry Night' to a place among his most exceptional and important works. The combination of style and religious overtones has fuelled endless critical debate. Several authors have investigated the extent to which Van Gogh's night sky is true to life, but the science of astronomy has failed to produce an unambiguous answer. In the light of Van Gogh's opinions this is hardly surprising: he was permitting himself the artistic freedom which Bernard and Gauguin also exploited.
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【夜间的露天咖啡座】
Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum
September 1888
Oil on canvas
81 x 65.5 cm
Rijksmuseum Kroller-Mueller, Otterlo
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Vincent van Gogh's The Cafe Terrace stands as one of the painter's most remarkable works. It is also, without question, one of the most famous produced in Van Gogh's brief but prolific career.
This work is the first in a trilogy1 of paintings which feature starlit skies. Starry Night Over the Rhone came within a month, followed by the popular Starry Night painted the next year in Saint-Rémy. An interesting companion to these three can be found in the Portrait of Eugene Boch (painted in the same month as Cafe Terrace and Starry Night Over the Rhone)--note the starry motif in the work's background.
Vincent was enthusiastic about The Cafe Terrace and wrote to his sister Wil:
In point of fact I was interrupted these days by my toiling on a new picture representing the outside of a night cafe. On the terrace there are tiny figures of people drinking. An enormous yellow lantern sheds its light on the terrace, the house and the sidewalk, and even causes a certain brightness on the pavement of the street, which takes a pinkish violet tone. The gable-topped fronts of the houses in a street stretching away under a blue sky spangled with stars are dark blue or violet and there is a green tree. Here you have a night picture without any black in it, done with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green, and in these surroundings the lighted square acquires a pale sulphur and greenish citron-yellow colour. It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot. They used to draw and paint the picture in the daytime after the rough sketch. But I find satisfaction in painting things immediately.
(W7: 9 and 16 September 1888)
Vincent goes on to tell Wil that there is a description of a similar cafe in the book Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant: " . . . a starlit night in Paris with the brightly lighted cafes of the Boulevard, and this is approximately the same subject I just painted.".2
Van Gogh's works are often inspired by literary references or by the works of other painters (see his copies after Jean-François Millet). Cafe Terrace has a similar style and compositional structure to Avenue de Clichy in the Evening by Anquetin. Regardless of whether Van Gogh was directly inspired by Anquetin's work, the composition of Cafe Terrace is unique among all of Van Gogh's oeuvre. Note how the lines of composition all point directly to the centre of the work where a horse and carriage are found. Everything seems to be drawn inward, like a vortex, and yet the overall tone suggests tranquillity and not turmoil. The overall scheme is dark, but without the slightest trace of black.
More than one hundred years after Vincent painted it, the Cafe Terrace is still in Arles serving drinks to its thirsty patrons. It's now called the Cafe Van Gogh, appropriately enough, and has been remodelled to appear as it did more than a century ago--yellow-lit awning and all. I stopped and had a cognac when I visited Arles in 1995 (you won't find absinthe on the menu any more) and thought of Vincent, so close by in spirit, working feverishly (but contentedly) under the stars.
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1. The idea of a "trilogy" of starlit paintings is a constructed one. Vincent himself never envisioned such a trilogy.
2. Vincent is mistaken--in fact, the Maupassant reference he is thinking of is found in the novel Yvette.本回答被提问者采纳
第2个回答 2008-04-30
Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum
Oil on canvas
81.0 x 65.5 cm.
Arles: September, 1888
F 467, JH 1580
Vincent van Gogh's The Cafe Terrace stands as one of the painter's most remarkable works. It is also, without question, one of the most famous produced in Van Gogh's brief but prolific career.
This work is the first in a trilogy1 of paintings which feature starlit skies. Starry Night Over the Rhone came within a month, followed by the popular Starry Night painted the next year in Saint-Rémy. An interesting companion to these three can be found in the Portrait of Eugene Boch (painted in the same month as Cafe Terrace and Starry Night Over the Rhone)--note the starry motif in the work's background.
Vincent was enthusiastic about The Cafe Terrace and wrote to his sister Wil:
In point of fact I was interrupted these days by my toiling on a new picture representing the outside of a night cafe. On the terrace there are tiny figures of people drinking. An enormous yellow lantern sheds its light on the terrace, the house and the sidewalk, and even causes a certain brightness on the pavement of the street, which takes a pinkish violet tone. The gable-topped fronts of the houses in a street stretching away under a blue sky spangled with stars are dark blue or violet and there is a green tree. Here you have a night picture without any black in it, done with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green, and in these surroundings the lighted square acquires a pale sulphur and greenish citron-yellow colour. It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot. They used to draw and paint the picture in the daytime after the rough sketch. But I find satisfaction in painting things immediately.
(W7: 9 and 16 September 1888)
Vincent goes on to tell Wil that there is a description of a similar cafe in the book Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant: " . . . a starlit night in Paris with the brightly lighted cafes of the Boulevard, and this is approximately the same subject I just painted.".2
Van Gogh's works are often inspired by literary references or by the works of other painters (see his copies after Jean-François Millet). Cafe Terrace has a similar style and compositional structure to Avenue de Clichy in the Evening by Anquetin. Regardless of whether Van Gogh was directly inspired by Anquetin's work, the composition of Cafe Terrace is unique among all of Van Gogh's oeuvre. Note how the lines of composition all point directly to the centre of the work where a horse and carriage are found. Everything seems to be drawn inward, like a vortex, and yet the overall tone suggests tranquillity and not turmoil. The overall scheme is dark, but without the slightest trace of black.
More than one hundred years after Vincent painted it, the Cafe Terrace is still in Arles serving drinks to its thirsty patrons. It's now called the Cafe Van Gogh, appropriately enough, and has been remodelled to appear as it did more than a century ago--yellow-lit awning and all. I stopped and had a cognac when I visited Arles in 1995 (you won't find absinthe on the menu any more) and thought of Vincent, so close by in spirit, working feverishly (but contentedly) under the stars.