Vincent Van Gogh | The Starry Night | Saint Rémy, June 1889 | MoMa

Vincent Van Gogh | The Starry Night | Saint Rémy, June 1889 | MoMa - Museum of Modern Art, New York

"The Starry Night" is probably Vincent van Gogh🎨's most famous painting. Instantly recognizable because of its unique style, this work has been the subject of poetry, fiction, CD-ROMs as well as the well known song "Vincent" or "Starry, Starry Night" by Don McLean.

While there's no denying the popularity of Starry Night, it's also interesting to note that there is very little known about Vincent's own feelings toward his work. This is mainly due to the fact that he only mentions it in his letters🎨 to Theo twice (Letters 595 and 607), and then only in passing.

In his correspondence with his brother, Vincent would often discuss specific works in great detail, but not so in the case of "Starry Night".

Why?

It's difficult to say.

Paul Gauguin | Washerwomen, 1888 | MoMA

Paul Gauguin | Washerwomen, 1888 | MoMA

In October 1888, Gauguin arrived in Arles where his friend Vincent Van Gogh had invited him to come and work.

The two artists had been writing to each other for several months, recording progress on their attempts to produce a non-naturalist landscape.

Pablo Picasso | Sleeping peasants, 1919

Medium: Gouache, watercolor, and pencil on paper

Dimensions: 12 1/4 x 19 1/4" (31.1 x 48.9 cm)

Credit: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund

Current location: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Sleeping peasants, is the most potent of the small erotic paintings that is brilliantly coloured.

The restless, irregular rhythms mapped out by the contours of the tumescene limbs and ruckled drapery amount to a graph of love-making which has just occured, while the woman's thrown-back head and uncovered breast confirm her maenadic ancestry.

The ripe bodies nestled in the ripe crops implying some archaic fertility rite.

Odilon Redon | Butterflies, 1910

Before 1900 Odilon Redon made drawings almost exclusively in black and white; afterward he began to focus on paintings and pastels in sensuous color.

Many of his late works in color took nature’s small beauties, such as butterflies, seashells and flowers, as objects of contemplation and presented them with a fantastic intensity.

Redon was a Symbolist; he believed that art could transcend the everyday and open onto a marvelous world of the mind.