Over the years, many art historians have had the task of figuring out the many superimposed influences in Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” (1889). “The Great Wave” (1830-1832) by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai and the works of American poet Walt Whitman, such as “From Noon to Starry Night” or “Song of Myself”, have been cited as possible references. Now, a researcher is proposing that celebrations for the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower in Paris could have inspired the painting.
In an upcoming April issue of the London fine art publication THE Burlington magazine, art historian James Hall compares the construction of “The Starry Night” to an impression of the Eiffel Tower’s opening night that included a light show. Hall said Hyperallergic that van Gogh sought to express his dissatisfaction with the monument and with a society more interested in the possibilities of science and engineering than in beauty and nature.
Van Gogh is said to have created this visual critique of the 1889 World’s Fair by replacing the Eiffel Tower with a towering cypress tree and replacing the light shows with the night sky.
“It’s a response saying, ‘look, we have our own natural Eiffel Tower,'” Hall explained.
Hall sets up the argument by exploring the Post-Impressionist artist’s obsession with ancient Egyptian obelisks as a symbol of a utopian society held together by brotherly affection akin to monastic life. When van Gogh expanded his interests to include cypresses, he called them “beautiful in line and proportion, like an Egyptian obelisk.”
These interests directly opposed the dominant ideologies on ancient Egyptian art and architecture among those of the Third Republic and Gustave Eiffel. According to Hall, after the Franco-Prussian War, France sought to restore its international glory and declared its scientists and engineers, who used steel and hired labor, better than those of ancient Egypt who designed and built pyramids with slave labor. (Obviously, there was no mention of France’s colonial possessions or their past history with the institution of slavery.) Gustave Eiffel’s monument, which he compared to an ancient egyptian pyramidhad to be the centerpiece of the 1889 World’s Fair. On February 14, 1887, a month after the start of construction of the Eiffel Tower, some forty writers and artists signed a letter published in The weather protesting the tower, calling it “a gigantic black factory chimney” and “an odious column of bolted metal”.
Although van Gogh did not sign the letter, Hall believes the artist would have agreed with the sentiment of the article and would have been suspicious of what the tower symbolized.
Van Gogh left Paris for the French countryside in 1888, preferring open nature to the modern city obsessed with mechanization and scientific progress. Therefore, in painting the scene outside his window at the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, van Gogh draws not only from his personal and emotional turmoil but, as Hall suggests, from his reactions to an engineer attempting to compete with ancient egyptian architecture. .
“Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ is nature and history’s answer to Eiffel’s shivering metal monster who sought to outwit the Egyptians and smear Paris,” Hall wrote in the article.
Hall sees parallels between van Gogh’s answer and the modern hindsight of software like ChatGPT or MidJourney. Proponents of new technologies see how MidJourney or steel production will improve lives, while opponents worry about what the change will mean for society and the earth.
