At the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles, artists are reaching for the stars

In September 1888, Vincent Van Gogh painted Starry Night, a view of the Rhone River in Arles below a sky studded with radiant planets. The difficulty of the subject captivated him, and he returned to it a second time, in Arles, above the Place du Forum; then, in June 1889, he depicted spirals of comets above Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône), which he also called Starry Night. The first painting is preserved at the Musée d’Orsay, the second at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, and the third at New York’s MoMA. But Orsay has agreed to return its painting to Arles for a few months, and the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh has entrusted Bice Curiger and Jean de Loisy with the task of organizing an exhibition around it.

The theme was obvious: astronomical discoveries, from Van Gogh’s time to our own, and their effects on artistic creation over the same period – almost a century and a half. To address it, the work of just under 100 artists and scholars needed to be brought together: famous works signed by well-known names as well as little-known works by both illustrious authors and others whose authors are far less illustrious – or, in the case of a few, even unknown outside the realm of specialists. These works have been mostly grouped by theme – observation of the cosmos, comets, myths, religions, esotericism, etc. – and so they stand side by side on the same walls, provoking numerous discoveries and unexpected connections between works of quite varied dates, origins, and degrees of celebrity. The surprise effect is further accentuated by the irregular, tortuous layout of the rooms, with corridors and staircases.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Kandinsky

And so one suddenly finds oneself faced with a major Kasimir Malevich or Frantisek Kupka when one least expects it – presences justified as much by the geometries of their compositions as by their allusions to astronomy and physics. Or with a Georgia O’Keeffe, an Edvard Munch, or a Vassily Kandinsky that is rarely shown or reproduced. O’Keeffe’s Starlight Night, Lake George is a 1922 nightscape with a pure simplicity of straight lines and extreme chromatic density, elevating the contemplation of immensity to the point of hallucination.

The same words apply to Kandinsky’s Bleu, a composition of concentric circles and shades of ultramarine accented with a scarlet disk. It dates from 1927, five years after the O’Keeffe, which Kandinsky could not have known. It is not a direct relationship, then, but a blind convergence. While one would not usually think of bringing together the American and the Russian, here there is proof that their works can resonate together and that the ordinary distinction between abstraction and figuration is simplistic and inoperative.

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