I'm John Walsh of the Class of 1961 of Yale College. I'm the former Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and I teach at Yale part time.
You and I are standing in front of Vincent van Gogh's painting \"The Night Cafe,\" and I'm going to stop talking now, and you please hit pause and give yourself as long as you like. A minute or two is fine; I'll be here. And then put me on play again, and I'll talk to you a little bit about the painting.
You see a cafe that has some people scattered around the edges, and a man in white looking out at you (a waiter, we assume), and a pool table, and very bright light (four light fixtures), and a yellow floor that seems to rush into the distance, into some back room that's even brighter lighted, and a clock on the wall that says ten after midnight. And it's not too tidy; in fact, it's not tidy at all. It's kind of helter-skelter. There are a couple of tables askew, and chairs every which way, and unfinished glasses of this and that on the tables. One guy's asleep, and two other guys at the right may be playing a game, or they may be asleep too.
So I'm curious what your feelings were about all this. Is this a pleasant place? Does it make you uncomfortable? I ask because Vincent van Gogh wrote about this to his brother. He wrote: \"Today, I'm going to begin on the interior of a cafe where I have a room. It's what they call here, a 'cafe de nuit.' They're pretty frequent, staying open all night. Night prowlers can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for lodging or are too drunk to be taken in.\"
And then he spent three nights running painting this picture all night, sleeping in the daytime. He then wrote his brother, \"I've tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green.\" Thinking about it the next day, he wrote to his brother, \"In my picture of the night cafe, I've had to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime. So I've tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house by soft Louis XV Green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue greens. And all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace of pale sulfur.\" Van Gogh wrote, \"This is one of the ugliest pictures I've done.\"
So that may surprise you. You may have been taken in by the gaiety or something else, the appeal of the welcome offered you by this inn. But van Gogh had a different idea. This wasn't just a place for hospitality; it was a place where you might let yourself go. You might get sucked into some terrible forms of addiction, absinthe being the most familiar one (a sort of wicked drink that not only made you very drunk but ate away at your brain eventually).
He'd obviously had some experience with places like this. In fact, he lived upstairs. And he's used all kinds of devices, not just those harsh, grating, complimentary colors that you heard him describe but the way that lamps are painted, a kind of emanation in little dashes, all concentric around the light in these gaslights—I mean, you don't see that in real life unless you have a hideous headache. And all of this has van Gogh's tremendous power and strength of brushwork. You can see the floor is one you'd hesitate to step on; it's so thickly painted.
So this is a picture full of life and energy, but it also offers a warning, and it comes from the heart of an artist who had his own afflictions.