When Kara’s family was out visiting us for Thanksgiving Kara and I went to Manhattan with her brother Nathanael and his wife Laura. We spent a good deal of our time at the Museum of Modern Art. It was packed with great exhibits, way too much to see in one day. But we got a very special surprise while we were there. The MoMA was having a huage Van Gogh exhibit – Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night. We saw a ton of Van Gogh’s work and saw his growing facination with painting night time scenes. My very favorite piece was the Starry Sky Over the Rhone.
Starry Sky Over the Rhone by Vincent Van Gogh
We also got to see Van Gogh’s Night Café for the second time in person. Kara and I have a print of this piece in our house so I was glad to get to read a little bit of the back story for it. In short it was inspired by a café that Van Gogh said brought out the absolute worst in people, the kind of place that would make you want to committ crimes. Yikes!
The Night Café by Vincent Van Gogh
Another painting that I can’t get out of my mind is a very dark piece by Jasper Johns called Diver.
Diver by Jasper Johns
At first it just seems dark and macbre (which it is) but there’s much more going on. This is the MoMA’s description…
The footprints at the top of Diver, the handprints at bottom and center, and the arrows, powerfully evoke the physical movement of a dive. But Diver also provides a metaphor for Johns’s artistic process: we are invited to immerse ourselves in the rich surface of his thoughts. A dive can be seen as a suspended moment between life and death (the two handprints can also be read as a skull)—and this work has been interpreted as, in part, an homage to the poet Hart Crane, who dived to his death from a ship in 1932.
