[MUSIC PLAYING]
MAGGIE ROGERS: Hey there.
My name is Maggie Rogers, and
you are looking at Vincent van
Gogh's "La Nuit étoilée."
That's "Starry Night"
for everybody else.
There seems to be this
romance around the idea
of the tortured artist, about
how someone's vulnerability
or angst could make them
create more vividly, this idea
that an artist's suffering
is essential to their art.
I don't buy it, but
everyone has seemed
to weigh in on van Gogh's
brain at this point.
He painted "La Nuit
étoilée" in 1889,
six months after
he cut his ear off,
and then voluntarily committed
himself to an asylum,
the Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
in the south of France,
not far from Avignon.
A year later in 1890, he
died mysteriously at 37
from a gunshot
wound to the chest.
So what you see in
this painting is
what he saw from his
window, his window
in the asylum, the
window of his mind.
I guess that psychedelic,
almost ominous spiral
in the middle of
this one reflects
a lot about where he was, his
maybe unstable mental state.
Although, if he's making
paintings like this,
he seems pretty stable to me.
The starry night isn't
like any other starry night
I've ever seen.
The moon lights up
the sky like a sun,
and the strictness of
the town counterbalances
the rippling cosmic waves.
The cypress tree on the
left hand of this painting,
its browns and greens, they
balance the whole thing.
It's crazy, too, that
you zoom in far enough
and you can see this little
space that he didn't pain,
and how he let the canvas be an
essential texture on the page.
And those rolling haystacks,
exploding fireballs,
nebulas, all with
their own reddish core.
Zoom in close enough, too,
and these stars almost
look like eyeballs.
They're watching Van
Gogh right on back.
Van Gogh wrote to his brother,
Theo, on almost a daily basis.
He said, shouldn't the
shining dots of the sky
be as accessible as the black
dots on the map of France?
Just as we take the train
to get to Tarascon or Rouen,
we take death to reach a star.
It's a kind of
apocalyptic vision,
like Judgment Day, or
something, which wouldn't
be completely surprising.
Van Gogh was a devout Christian.
This makes me think a lot,
actually, of David Bowie's
Blackstar, someone being
alive and creating a work that
says goodbye at the same time.
Surely, his nights are more
beautiful than our days.
And when I look
at the sky now, I
think about Van Gogh and the
way he showed me the night
through his eyes.
And if you want to
see what he saw,
there's just one place,
the New York City MoMA,
which bought it in 1941,
and guards it jealously.
