Compacter/Contrast Van Gogh and Chloral For this essay, I chose to compare and contrast Vincent van Sago’s “Starry Night” with Marc Chloral’s “l and the Village”. The two pieces are lovely and most interesting to evaluate in relationship to one another. I personally love both artists and upon closely examining these famous pieces, I have noticed how similar yet different these works of art are. Vincent van Gogh was a deeply troubled, post-impressionist artist and his painting “Starry Night” is his most famous piece.
Working from memory, he painted the oil on canvas passing the time in Saint-Remy-De-Provence located in outworn France while undergoing treatment in an insane asylum. The piece is very energetic with eleven fireball yellow stars like connect-the-dots across the big swirls, rolling blue and grey clouds in the night sky. There is a large orange, yellow crescent moon in the upper right corner offset by a tall, spiraling, deep green cypress tree in the lower left area.
The pulsating sky contrasted against the little houses and the central figure of the church below, obliviously sleeping with their quiet muted colors, may be conveying that Vincent was feeling unheard and misunderstood by the tizzies of the village as well as the institution of the church; the thickly applied paint portrays this emotional intensity. The painting was done in 1898 inspired by the landscape of the asylum grounds outside his window. It is an oil on canvas and is located at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Marc Chloral’s and “l and the Village” is a highly imaginative, modern piece that illustrates his native Jewish village from his childhood in Russia. In the dreamy painting, there is a clearly conveyed interdependent community of peasants, animals and plants and is a imposition of beautifully blended circles and triangular shapes inspired by cubism. The colors are very vibrant and a considerable contrast exists between the reds, blues and greens. “l and the Village” integrates folk culture both Jewish and Russian and is very emotionally charged.
There is a dream-like representation of an upside down violinist that brings “Fiddler on the Roof” to my mind. There is also a farmer with a scythe, pastures and a goat being milked. The two central figures are a large goat gazing into the eyes of a big green man with a cap on his head and a cross round his neck and a triangular tree in his hand that I personally believe represents the tree of life from The Bible. The painting most definitely possesses a significant amount of symbolism.
The different sized circles are said to represent the earth’s revolution around the sun and the moon’s revolution around the earth. The circular structure in the lower left corner is widely interpreted to be a solar eclipse. The oil on canvas painting measures 75 inches by 59 inches, is his most famous work and is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Both paintings depict unit little villages beneath a night sky and convey a sense of harmony. They both contain celestial bodies and are both done in mostly green and blue.
Both are comprised of organic and geometric shapes and contain religious symbolism in the form of churches and Chloral’s green man has a cross around his neck, but the greatest similarity I see about the two paintings is a swirling playfulness from Van Sago’s exaggerated stars and clouds to Chloral’s up-side-down musician and houses. I like the free license of post impressionism and modernism that allows the artists to envoy their personal perspectives anyway that they would like. Both paintings are housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Marc Chloral and Vincent van Gogh are really quite different. They are from two different time periods, Chloral being a modernist and van Gogh a post-impressionist. They also have different cultural backgrounds. Marc Chloral was most emphatically a Jewish artist and he was Russian born. Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter who was called to be a Christian evangelist at one time. The two paintings differ in that Chloral’s forms are ore geometrical, giving the impression of precision while Van Sago’s figures are much more organic in nature containing lots of bright, swirls spirals. L and the Village” is composed of blue, green, white and red colors while Van Sago’s “Starry Night” contains blue, green, white and yellow. As this essay draws to a close, I can honestly say that it has been most educational. Now that I know a lot more about Vincent van Gogh and Marc Chloral, I am experiencing a heightened interest in studying their life histories and other works of art. I loved both pieces and feel a new relatedness to them.
