Van Gogh swirls. Secrets of famous paintings

Vincent Van Gogh. Starlight Night. 1889 Museum contemporary art, NY

Starlight Night. This is not just one of the most famous paintings Van Gogh. This is one of the most notable paintings in all Western painting. What is so unusual about it?

Why, once you see it, don’t you forget it? What kind of air vortices are depicted in the sky? Why are stars so big? And how did a painting that Van Gogh considered unsuccessful become an “icon” for all expressionists?

I have collected the most Interesting Facts and the mysteries of this picture. Which reveal the secret of her incredible attractiveness.

1. “Starry Night” was written in a mental hospital

The painting was painted during a difficult period in Van Gogh's life. Six months earlier, living together with Paul Gauguin ended badly. Van Gogh's dream of creating a southern workshop, a union of like-minded artists, did not come true.

Paul Gauguin left. He could no longer stay close to his unstable friend. Every day there are quarrels. And one day Van Gogh cut off his earlobe. And he handed it to a prostitute who preferred Gauguin.

Exactly what they did with a defeated bull at a bullfight. The cut off ear of the animal was given to the winning matador.

Van Gogh could not stand the loneliness and the collapse of his hopes for the workshop. His brother placed him in a shelter for the mentally ill in Saint-Rémy. This is where “Starry Night” was written.

All his mental strength was strained to the limit. That's why the picture turned out to be so expressive. Fascinating. Like a bundle of bright energy.

2. “Starry Night” is an imaginary, not a real landscape

This fact is very important. Because Van Gogh almost always worked from life. This was the issue over which they most often argued with Gauguin. He believed that you need to use your imagination. Van Gogh had a different opinion.

But in Saint-Rémy he had no choice. The sick were not allowed to go outside. It was forbidden to even work in one’s own room. Brother Theo agreed with the hospital authorities that the artist would be given a separate room for his workshop.

So it’s in vain that researchers try to find out the constellation or determine the name of the town. Van Gogh took all this from his imagination.

3. Van Gogh depicted turbulence and the planet Venus

The most mysterious element of the picture. In the cloudless sky we see vortex flows.

Researchers are confident that Van Gogh depicted the phenomenon of turbulence. Which can hardly be seen with the naked eye.

Exacerbated mental illness consciousness was like a bare wire. To such an extent that Van Gogh saw what an ordinary mortal could not.

400 years earlier, another person realized this phenomenon. A person with a very subtle perception of the world around him. . He created a series of drawings with vortex flows of water and air.

Another interesting element of the picture is the incredibly large stars. In May 1889, Venus could be observed in the south of France. She inspired the artist to create this image bright stars.

You can easily guess which of Van Gogh's stars is Venus.

4. Van Gogh thought Starry Night was a bad painting.

The painting was painted in a manner characteristic of Van Gogh. Thick long strokes. Which are neatly placed next to each other. Juicy blue and yellow colors make it very pleasing to the eye.

However, Van Gogh himself considered his work unsuccessful. When the painting came to the exhibition, he casually commented about it: “Maybe it will show others how to depict night effects better than I did.”

This attitude towards the picture is not surprising. After all, it was not written from life. As we already know, Van Gogh was ready to argue with others until he was blue in the face. Proving how important it is to see what you write.

This is such a paradox. His “unsuccessful” painting became an “icon” for the Expressionists. For whom imagination was much more important outside world.

5. Van Gogh created another painting with a starry night sky

This is not the only Van Gogh painting with night effects. The year before, he wrote “Starry Night over the Rhone.”

The Starry Night, which is in New York, is fantastic. Space landscape darkens the earth. We don’t even immediately see the town at the bottom of the picture.

Study of the mathematical model of the paintings of the great Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh ( van Gogh) (1853 - 1890) showed that some of his paintings depict real turbulent (vortex) flows invisible to the eye that arise during the rapid flow of a liquid or gas, for example, when gas flows out of a jet engine nozzle.

Physicist Jose Lois Aragon of Mexico's National Autonomous University of Mexico and his co-authors discovered a brightness distribution in Van Gogh's paintings that corresponds to the mathematical description of turbulent flow.

According to the researchers, many of Vincent van Gogh's paintings (such as Starry Night, painted in 1889) contain characteristic "statistical fingerprints" of turbulence. As scientists note, “turbulent” works were created by the artist in those moments when his psyche was unstable. Van Gogh suffered from hallucinations and depression. José Luis Aragon said: “We think that Van Gogh had a unique ability to see and capture turbulence, and this happened to him during periods mental disorder».

The artist has paintings where “traces of turbulence” are invisible. Among them is the famous “Self-Portrait with a Pipe and a Bandaged Ear” (1888). Van Gogh, having injured himself, was under the influence of sedatives (bromine) and, in his own words, was in a state of “complete rest.”

A comprehensive mathematical model of turbulence has not yet been created. The foundations of modern theory were laid by the great mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov in the 40s of the 20th century. His work, in particular, made it possible to obtain equations that describe the difference in velocities between any two points of a fluid in a turbulent flow.

The researchers digitized Van Gogh's works and calculated the probability that two pixels located at a certain distance would have the same brightness. In their opinion, the eye is most sensitive to brightness indicators and it contains the main information of the picture. Some of Van Gogh's works turned out to be clearly subject to the mathematical laws identified by Kolmogorov when describing turbulence, if instead of the velocities of points in the flow we consider the distribution of brightness.

José Luis Aragon notes that Van Gogh is the only artist who knew how to paint turbulence: “We studied other “chaotic” paintings by several artists and did not find any correspondence with Kolmogorov’s theory. For example, in Edvard Munch's (1863 - 1944) painting "The Scream", which looks very similar to Van Gogh's vortices, the brightness distribution does not correspond to the theory of turbulence."

Scientists note that the style of some other artists can be described by mathematical formalism. For example, in the “dripping” style of painting by Jackson Pollock (Pollock) (1912 - 1956), fractal structures are clearly visible.

Often the artist is able to penetrate deeply natural phenomena, relying on their special perception of the world, anticipating scientific minds. A prominent representative of post-impressionism, Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh in his painting “Starry Night” was able to depict the phenomenon of turbulence - amazing secret flow of liquid and light.

Essay from memory

The view of the starry sky over the village is Van Gogh's most emotional work. The artist painted it in 1889 during treatment in a psychiatric hospital: he suffered from hallucinations and fears.

The illness did not prevent Van Gogh from working: even being constantly indoors, he independently came up with new shapes and colors in order to give vent to strong emotions.

Spinning skies

Van Gogh did not like it when other artists created exact copy the surrounding world with photographic identity. To capture the essence of objects, he simplified the forms and curved the lines, much like in ancient woodcuts. In “Starry Night,” Vincent used circular strokes to create a picture of the sky at night, with swirls of clouds and star swirls. He, like other impressionists, depicted light differently than his predecessors, as if capturing it in motion, for example, through the glare of the sun on the water or the twinkling of stars in the milky curls of the blue sky.

The reason for this effect is the brightness and light intensity of the painting's palette. The primary visual cortex of our brain, which distinguishes contrast and movement of light, but not its color, connects two spots of different colors with the same brightness (yellow and white), and the central zone of the brain sees contrasting colors (yellow and blue) without mixing them. Because these processes occur simultaneously, the light in the painting pulsates and shines.

Science imitates art

Understanding the essence of turbulence is not easy, but we can describe it using visual arts. Half a century after Starry Night, the Soviet mathematician Kolmogorov advanced his understanding of turbulence by developing a mathematical model of the phenomenon.

Turbulent flow is a cascade of energy: large vortices transfer energy to small ones and further along the chain. Examples of such a stream are: the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, cloud formations and interstellar dust particles. The celestial whirlwinds on Vincent’s canvas set in motion the stars, the moon, some of the trees, and even the lower part of the composition.

In 2004, using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists saw swirling clouds of dust and gas around the star V838 in the constellation Monoceros, very reminiscent of Van Gogh's stars. This interested Mexican scientists so much that they began a detailed study of the light in the artist’s paintings. Scientists have discovered a clear model of turbulent flow, subject to Kolmogorov's mathematical laws, in several paintings by Van Gogh - “Starry Night”, “Road with Cypress Trees and a Star” and “Crows over a Wheat Field”.

The researchers digitized the images and calculated the fluctuations in luminosity within each pair of pixels. They concluded that there is a striking similarity between the lines on the artist’s canvases during mental disturbances and the dynamics of turbulent flows. The self-portrait with a pipe, painted during a calmer period of life, shows no signs of such coincidences. On the one hand, it is naive to believe that the artist’s genius inspired him to create turbulent subjects, but at the same time it is even more difficult to explain impressive fact that during a period of mental illness Van Gogh managed to understand and pass through the secret of hydrodynamics.

Like many geniuses, the great Van Gogh was, to put it mildly, strange. It is a known fact that in a moment of mental crisis he cut off his ear. However, all this was not the usual mind-blowing.
“A study of the mathematical model of the paintings of the great Dutch artist showed that some of his paintings depict turbulent vortex flows invisible to the eye that arise during the rapid flow of liquid or gas, for example, when gas flows out of a jet engine nozzle,” Victor Kozlov, a professor at the Moscow Aviation Institute, told us. - The artist’s peculiar, seemingly chaotically looped style of painting, as it turned out, is nothing more than a distribution of brightness corresponding mathematical description turbulent flow.
The foundations of the modern theory of turbulence were laid by the great mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov in the 1940s of the 20th century. However, there is still no exact description of it. Now the situation may change.
According to the researchers, many of Vincent van Gogh's paintings (such as Starry Night, painted in 1889) contain characteristic "statistical fingerprints" of turbulence. As scientists note, “turbulent” works were created by the artist in those moments when his psyche was unstable. At this time, the painter experienced hallucinations and was tormented by depression. The visions that haunted Van Gogh resulted in uneven, as if nervously twisted spirals on his canvases. He more than once admitted to friends that after making another sketch, he calmed down for a while, as if he had completed some important mission.
“Apparently, Van Gogh had a unique ability to see and capture turbulence, and this happened to him precisely during periods of mental disorder,” says Professor Kozlov. - At the same time, the artist has paintings where “traces of turbulence” are invisible. Among them is the famous “Self-Portrait with a Pipe and a Bandaged Ear” (1888). Van Gogh, having injured himself, was under the influence of sedatives, in particular bromine, and, in his own words, was in a state of “complete rest.”
“Van Gogh’s gift is unique,” ​​says our interlocutor. - Researchers have digitized his works and calculated them mathematically. Apparently, he is the only artist who knew how to paint turbulence. Paintings by other painters, even similar in painting style, do not contain a correspondence to Kolmogorov’s theory. For this reason, it is Van Gogh’s work that can become a turning point for modern science. With its help, scientists are going to develop a theory of turbulence and finally explain this phenomenon. Solving it will help, for example, solve this problem in aviation: after all, today the cause of many air disasters is turbulence.
Who knows, maybe Van Gogh’s “mission”, “destination”, which he told his friends about, was also the salvation of distant descendants? In this case, are doctors always right when they provide their patients with “complete rest”?