Dutch | The Worley Gig

Photo By Gail

Painted in June of 1889, The Starry Night is likely Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh’s most popular work on canvas. “This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, from France. Rooted in imagination and memory, The Starry Night embodies an inner, subjective expression of van Goghs response to nature. In thick, sweeping brushstrokes, a flamelike cypress unites the churning sky and the quiet village below. The village was partly invented, and the church spire evokes van Gogh’s native land, the Netherlands.

The Starry Night is part of the Permanent Collection at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art.

Photo By Gail

Although he painted in both realist and abstract styles during his career, Dutch painter Piet Mondrian is best known for his grid paintings of vertical and horizontal black lines with the three primary colors. Composition in Oval With Color Planes I (1914) follows a grid pattern but is somewhat unique in that Mondrian used a pastel color palette.

According to experts, “the geometry of this composition, made two years after Mondrian moved from Holland to Paris, is directly based on sketches of partially demolished buildings, with exposed floors, chimneys and patches of wallpaper. Mondrian believed that horizontal and vertical lines, such as those he used here, expressed an underlying, universal order.”

This piece was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art for its permanent collection in 1950.

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Tag Archives: Dutch

Modern Art Monday Presents: Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night

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Modern Art Monday Presents: Piet Mondrian’s Composition in Oval with Color Planes I

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