Interpretations
Which literary source may have inspired Van Gogh?
The Starry Night
Perhaps no other painting in Western Art has enjoyed such a varying array of intriguing interpretations. Academic theories tend towards two schools: "the literal" and "the literary." The "literal" includes both "he painted what he saw" and the "hallucinatory genius" arguments (as an individual's hallucinations are indistinguishable from real life) while the "literary" suggest that inspiration blossomed from some written source; most often cited for van Gogh's "Starry Night" are The Bible, Walt Whitman and Victor Hugo. Legendary 20th century art historian Albert Boime is generally credited with the best "literal" theory by proving, in conjunction with three Astronomer colleagues at UCLA the position of the stars from van Gogh's window in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence at 4 a.m. on June 19, 1889, the day van Gogh wrote his brother that he had completed the painting. In a 1985 lecture to the American Astronomical Society, Boime compared the positions of the moon and Venus that night and showed that they corresponded to the positions of the celestial objects in the painting. While Boime and his lead astronomer, Charles Whitney agreed the large star above the horizon is the Morning Star, they failed to agree on the arrangement of the other stars. Boime claimed they constituted the constellation of Aries, while Whitney argued it was Cygnus. Boime further attempted to make the argument that van Gogh had likely seen an image of a spiral galaxy from Camille Flammarion's "Astronomie populaire", in an attempt to explain the existence of van Gogh's celestial spiral jetty. In his 800-plus existing letters, however, van Gogh makes no mention of ever reading Flammarion. As to the leading "literary" theories: those about The Bible range from van Gogh painting a passage out of Genesis 37 describing a dream of Joseph to an apocalyptic depiction out of the twelfth book of Revelation to a "sublimated Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane"; while those from Whitman attempt to correlate the painting's poetic vision within Song of Myself; and (what has been mistakenly attributed to Hugo's Les Miserables) as an inspired depiction of God as "a lighthouse in eclipse. "This bevy of interpretations has helped keep van Gogh's "Starry Night" firmly within the discussions and lively debates of both public and academic art history.