Sunday, June 2, 2013

Musée d'Orsay

The class spent the afternoon of May 30 at the Musée d'Orsay, a museum that hosts hundreds of paintings and dozens of statues in an enormous converted train station. We began with the Impressionists, particularly Renoir, Degas, and Monet, and then were free to roam the museum as we chose. Our only instruction was to find some piece that really struck us and reflect on it through a blog post. The museum is filled with incredible artwork, and many paintings from the day still stand out in my mind, including Degas' Dans un Café, Cézanne's La Tentation de St. Antoine, and Monet's La rue Montorgueil à Paris. Fête du 30 juin 1878. Though the subjects' expressions, style of shading, and mixture of colors in these paintings greatly impressed me, Van Gogh's Nuit Étoilée (1888)  was the singular work that most strongly gripped me today.

Nuit Étoilée (Starry Night), Vincent Van Gogh (1888)
Source: 
http://escalbibli.blogspot.fr/2011/03/les-nuits-etoilees.html
It may be unsurprising that I, an astrophysics major, was captivated by a painting that focuses on stars, but before I even noticed the Big Dipper in this painting, I was caught up in the deepness of the blue and the unique style of brushwork employed by Van Gogh. From his famous self-portrait to L'Église d'Anvers, blue is the main color of much of Van Gogh's work and it is ubiquitous in this work, permeating the ground and city, leaving only the stars and streetlights pristine. Blue has always been among my favorite colors, but the mixture employed by Van Gogh here and elsewhere has such great depth and variety that I am drawn into the painting. Though this photo may not clearly show it, the blue even mixes itself in stripes within the land at the bottom of the painting.

The reflection of light on water also drew me into this painting. As I observed at Monet's water garden yesterday, reflections in water can be beautiful, but they're also problematic to represent graphically. In this painting, the the triangle of light stretching down from each point of light on the river bank not only draws the eye into the terrestrial half of this painting, but also demonstrates the artist's capacity to give an impression of reality that the viewer perceives as realistic. The warm glow of these lights makes the village seem welcoming and adds humanity to a painting that is about the impersonal night's sky.

One article we read before leaving for Paris talked about how at the turn of the century, Paris was flush with painters, composers, writers, poets, and all other manner of artist - and that chance interactions between these individuals served to spark creative inspiration more rapidly than if the artists had been widely dispersed. (Article is here.) It is interesting, therefore, to note that the painting I found most entrancing of the whole of the Orsay was not painted by Renoir, Monet, or Bazille, who lived together, nor by any of the other artists who frequented Paris during their lifetimes. At the time Van Gogh painted this piece, he was living in artistic isolation in the French village of Arles, with limited contact with other artists. Obviously, his case does not disprove the article, but it is fascinating to note that I prefer not the collaborative paintings of the people centered in Paris, but the work of an artist in isolation working through his own thoughts. Perhaps it is because with their depictions of people or buildings, I need to work to find the message or emotion in a face, but with this starry sky, I know the message because there is none. The sky exists for itself, and Van Gogh is simply putting the simple clarity of the night on canvas.

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