Vincent van Gogh, Night Café

In 1881, Van Gogh relocated to Arles in southern France, where he painted Night Café, one of his most important and innovative canvases. Although the subject is apparently benign, van Gogh invested it with a charged energy. As he stated in a letter to his brother Theo, he wanted the painting to convey an oppressive atmosphere – “a place where one can ruin one’s self, go mad, or commit a crime. . . . [I want] to express the power of darkness in a low drinking spot . . . in an atmosphere like a devil’s furnace.” The room is seen from above, and the floor takes up a large portion of the canvas, as in the paintings of Degas. The ghostlike proprietor stands at the edge of the café’s billiard table disengaged from his customers, as they are from each other. Van Gogh depicted the billiard table in such a steeply tilted perspective that it threatens to slide out of the painting into the viewer’s space. He communicated the “madness” of the place by selecting vivid hues whose juxtaposition augmented their intensity.

Van Gogh’s insistence on the expressive values of color led him to develop a corresponding expressiveness in his paint application. The thickness, shape and direction of his brushstrokes created a tactile counterpart to his intense color schemes. He moved the brush vehemently back and forth or at right angles, giving a textilelike effect, or squeezed dots or streaks onto the canvas directly from his paint tube. This bold, almost slapdash attack enhanced the intensity of his colors.^[1]