Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Starry Night (1889)

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy writers Lydia Bugg (1900HOTDOG, the ‘Trailer Park Boys’ comic anthology) and Dan Hopper (Ranker, The New Yorker) for a look at why the painting "The Starry Night" is secretly incredibly fascinating.  Direct link to see the painting: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79802 Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode

The Starry Night, known for being a painting, famous for being swirly. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why The Starry Night is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by Lydia Bug and by Dan Hopper, two wonderful returning guests. Lydia was most recently on the show about chocolate. She's also a fantastic comedy writer. You can read her columns every week on 1-900-HOTDOG, which is a fantastic comedy website. I write for them, you know, once a

month or so. Lydia's there every week doing amazing stuff. Dan Hopper, also one of my favorite guests. He was most recently on an episode about zippers, and he is an old friend, going back to our days at collegehumor.com. He's a managing editor at Ranker. He's also written everywhere from the New Yorker to the Washington Post. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Acknowledge Dan recorded this on the traditional land of the Lenape people. Acknowledge Lydia recorded this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and

Sa'atza Yaha peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and today's episode is about The Starry Night, which is a painting made in 1889 by the artist Vincent van Gogh. And I think it's mostly self-explanatory. This is one of the very few paintings that is in many people's heads already. I'll also have a direct link for you to see it. One pronunciation note, there's a very interesting situation with the name of this artist, because the name of that artist is pronounced many ways by many people. Even though it's one Dutch name with an actual pronunciation,

based on many resources that I looked at and in particular listened to, I think the actual Dutch pronunciation is along the lines of Vincent van Gogh. And you don't say the G on the front. Gogh is the tricky last word there. However, for ease of podcasting, we're going to say it a whole lot of ways as we naturally say it across this episode. The most common pronunciation you run into in the United States is Vincent van Gogh. Also, I'm going to link an article from CNN because they covered a year 2020 exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. And that exhibition encouraged people to use the common U.S. pronunciation of Van Gogh, even though it is the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

There's also other languages and countries where it gets said other ways. Apparently Van Gogh with a pretty pronounced G is very common in the UK. There is one specific Dutch way to pronounce it. It's along the lines of Vincent van Gogh. And then also you will not hear us do that very often. So now you know. Only other setup to say is that this is the fourth episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating about a painting. There are previous episodes about American Gothic by Grant Wood, about The Scream by Edvard Munch, and about the Dogs Playing Poker series by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge. There's been a lot of fine art excitement in the patron polls in particular ever since I started doing that kind of topic. And shout out to patron Caroline Gaston in particular for really rooting for this topic specifically, the starry night. So I'm glad this episode happened. And here we go.

Please sit back or sit at an easel in a mental institution. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating lydia bug and dan hopper i'll be back after we wrap up talk to you then lydia dan it's so good to have you back on as always and i always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. Either of you can start, but how do you feel about the painting, The Starry Night? I really like it. It used to be my background on my credit card.

Oh. Yeah, I don't know why. Wait, background of a, like it was printed on it. Yeah. And when I handed it to people, they were always like, whoa, like it was super special. It was just one of the options the credit card company offered. And I was like, sure, that looks good. And people are always really impressed by it, which was fun.

That's awesome. Yeah. And I recently went to the Van Gogh live exhibit, too, which was very cool. Oh, is that where they project stuff on the walls? I've seen ads for it. Yeah. It's like it's like called immersive i think van gogh but it's just a big surround wall of like a movie of van gogh's pictures all kind of like swirling

together in a really trippy way it's fun but spoiler for how i feel about it as a basic painting it's a really cool painting so i'm glad you're getting so much of it in your life that's great alex is like it's below average uh pedestrian it's just like ripping on it uh i had a actually kind of similar experience i had went to a formal middle school and had to wear ties every day and i had a starry night tie and people loved it and they'd always be like oh starry night van gogh like everyone wants to like let you know that they recognize the painting they'd always like be out of their go out of their way to point that out um that was cool uh i tried to find it i guess i got rid of it in one of my moves because i feel like it'd be kind of mortifying to wear that to like a job interview now or something but uh don't still have it oh um but yeah love the painting uh seen it at the moma

still have it oh um but yeah love the painting uh seen it at the moma been to the van gogh museum in amsterdam i'm just trying to one-up you lydia oh wow you're doing a good job yeah did like a touristy thing i assume everyone every american used to go there and smoke pot and then go to the museum and be like whoa it's so trippy and i think that's what you're supposed to do um but really i was just like afraid everyone was looking at me and knowing that I had just smoked pot. And so I was like pretending to read the plaques for like a minute and a half and stuff like that. It was kind of a nerve-wracking experience.

But it was nice. What if I was like, yeah, I went and saw the painting. There was one terrified guy. Wonder who he was. I'll never know. Anyway. It's like everyone there is clearly doing the same thing. But meanwhile, in my head, I'm like, I'm like, they all know I'm high. And my friends are like, that's like the basic paranoia of I never smoked pot in college,

really. So I'm like still a beginner when I do it. And I'm like doing all the cliche thing. I'm like, I know this sounds cliche, but I really think people are looking at us. And we're like, that is the thing thing that's the you're doing the thing but so that was my that was my whole experience it was like just look at the plaque and they'll they'll they would never think a high person would read the plaque and i'm like just can't decipher any of the words there i'm just like oh man am i have i looked at this long enough? I think I have.

I like that I have a whole other recent self-consciousness around this painting, which is that we moved to New York about a year ago. And then when we went to the Museum of Modern Art, I didn't know this painting was there. And clearly everyone else was aware. And it was like a highlight of their trip. But we like accidentally saw it on the floor it's on. And then I felt foolish. I was like, oh, I don't know enough about art, I guess. Everybody knows it's here.

I didn't know it was there. Yeah, it's in New York, even though he's a Dutch artist and everything. Yeah. Okay. I knew they had Avan. I saw Avan go when I was in New York, but it was like a decade ago. And it was Cypresses. They didn't have Starry Night at the time.

Everyone, there was like a special security guard for Cypresses and like a crowd of people around it. And I can't imagine. That would make sense. Like, yeah, it's gotta be way worse than Starry Night. Because my other big self-consciousness around this painting is that, and I'll have just a direct link for people if they'd like to look at it directly. Like in this painting, there's a big like black spire looking thing that's most of the left side of the painting. And for a long time, I thought that was a church steeple. It turns out those are supposed to be cypress trees. And so now I know like I was

just like, Oh, that pointy thing in Europe, probably a church, even though there's a church in the town below. I like imagining like there's eight armed guards like marching back and forth directly in front of the painting at all times at the moma just doing the like wizard of oz chant or something yeah they're in the way can i see it please just like keep marching in front of it and then they bayonet you you get two seconds and then they poke you with the bayonet you have to keep moving that's what it felt like but yeah like i in the run-up to this i was suddenly like wait i don't totally know the composition of this painting it's trees not a

church i was wrong about it at the museum i might be wrong about his last name had a lot of trepidation about this i know a lot now but boy oh boy uh a lot to learn yeah that was like one of three things i knew about the painting and was wrong i just assumed that was like a church steeple on the left yeah you know the the rumor about what the the thing is right like i don't know if we're gonna cover that later but there's like a popular rumor that the cypress tree is a woman's hair that like van gogh van gogh when he was in a mental hospital saw a woman throw herself out of her window and like flew down in front of him. And that's her hair like flying up as she's falling out of the window. Wow.

Wow. I have not read that theory being a thing, but I think it leads us into a bunch of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it's just a weird Internet rumor. But if you look at it, it does kind of like you can see where it could be that. But also it's a cypress tree is that like the van gogh version of phil collins writing in the air tonight about after seeing someone drowning and yes like calling the person out at the concert which is also not true but awesome yeah let's make this spookier even though it's already kind of spooky it is very spooky i think that that leads us into this next segment here, because on every episode, our first

fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called What the World Needs Now is Stats, Sweet Stats. That's the only thing that there's just too small of a number of. Gorgeous. Thank you. That name was submitted by Linus Wesley and in some ways Austin Powers. But we have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a massillion-wacking best possible.

Submit to SifPod on Twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com. And yeah, this topic, there's going to be a lot of mental illness stuff because that's the artist we're talking about, Vincent van Gogh or Van Ha, however it's pronounced. The first number is a little over 13 months. A little over 13 months, that's the amount of time between Vincent painting this painting and Vincent dying. He had a brief career. He had a brief life. And he painted this in June 1889 at a mental institution. He checked out of that institution the next year and two months later dies of a gunshot, probably self-inflicted.

Probably. I've never heard that it was in contention before. I thought we knew. That's kind of creepy. Mystery. Yeah, he was staying somewhere. He went out for the day, and then he came back with a bullet in himself, and they asked him what was going on, and he was like, I'm just not feeling well, and then passed away that night.

I feel like our roles as guests on the podcast is always like you say some statistics or whatever, and we're like, we riff on on them but then sometimes it's like so dark it's just like he painted his life's work while in a mental institution and then took his own life and died very poor and never enjoyed the success i'm just like all right riff time lol what a fail. But yeah, I feel like some people, like part of the enthusiasm around him is this like brief candle of a guy. He only fully got into making art full time at age 28 after trying jobs as an art dealer and then a teacher and then a church pastor was a goal, but started painting full-time at age 28, and then by age 37 had died. So being an artist was a small part of his life, and most of his

art came from the end of it. That sounds like one of those, like, trying to be motivational, but demotivational internet things, where it's like, don't give up. Van Gogh didn't start painting until he was 28. And I'm like, well, I'm way older than that already. So I'm going to give up. I'm not going to start a new thing now. Yeah. And he did not have a pleasant time of it. Yeah. Oh, yeah, that too.

Yeah. If your goal is to be like Van Gogh, oof. Yeah. I made this meme about not giving up. Now to take a giant sip of coffee and read about every other aspect of Van Gogh's life. Yeah. Now that I've widely shared this meme and tied my identity to, oh, my God. And the next number here is sort of in keeping with that.

It is 142 paintings in 12 months. 142 paintings in 12 months. That's about one painting per two days. That's how much Vincent van Gogh painted while in one stay at a mental institution. Like Lydia said, he was in an asylum when he painted this painting. That is true, regardless of the rest of the theory. And he self-admitted to it. This was about six months after the incident where he mutilated his own ear and cut most of it off. But he checked himself into an institution. The name of it is Saint-Paul-de-Mazol,

which was a former monastery in the south of France in a town called Saint-Rémy. And he was not very well in the institution, but according to some of his biographers, it was almost like an art prison. Like there was not a lot to do besides paints. And so when he was well, he painted and made a lot of stuff. Wow. So that's all I need to do if I want to be really creative is just lock myself in an art prison and then I can write a full book. I feel like anyone could be that productive if they didn't have the internet though. Right? Yeah. I would just be like on Twitter and stuff and just be like scrolling time i'm like

oh i gotta do my oh i gotta do my painting i'm sorry i'm sorry it's just all right i'm gonna take a shower i'm gonna think about the painting in the shower i'm gonna come out of the shower and i'm gonna nail it that's what i'm gonna do yeah the idea of his pitch process is really really baffling like he's like okay I want it to look like a creepy town with like some orbs, lots of orbs, trying stuff out, throwing stuff at the wall. Big tree. I think big tree. I don't know how you do that for paint. I can't draw or paint at all. I have no talent. So I don't know how you conceptualize a painting at all. I can't even imagine it. I don't think I've had 114 ideas in my life total oh 142 sorry 142 oh my god i undershot

it even yeah and that includes everything that includes like you know what to make for dinner like i'm counting all ideas total i don't know in my lifetime maybe it's like 200 or something like that so yeah so he he really that's very impressive to me to like just and obviously wasn't working off any kind of visuals or anything right he was just kind of he was in a literal room almost and was creating these landscapes kind of just so yes and no it because it turns out he he did have a window so he could look through the window but also initially on coming to the asylum he was not allowed out of the grounds, but the grounds had a lot of gardens. And really the main treatment they recommended to patients was take a walk in the garden, which is fine.

But, you know, and then later on, they did allow him to take walks in the nearby countryside if he was supervised by a warden. take walks in the nearby countryside if he was supervised by a warden so like really really art prison but it started to verge on toward minimum security i guess i would call it like they would let him walk around with a guy following him and he did lots of sketches and notes as he did that what was the institution's relationship to the paintings does he like walk out of the of the building with all of the paintings and you know retains the rights and everything like was there ever any time where they were like hey like you know we are privy to some of this or i you know i don't know maybe that's cynical or like like no they never took any walks out with okay yeah well he wasn't famous for so long after he died

i feel like they probably were like yeah you could have all your paintings like like somebody and they're making little finger paintings or something and they're like no you don't have to leave these behind vince you can take those take this out of here he got room okay that doesn't even look like a city what is this it's creepy it's both it's both haunting and beautiful i don't like it get it out of here that's my south of france accent yeah because two other things about this place one is that it was very expensive apparently vincent and his brother teo looked looked into some publicly run asylums and

then ended up spending a lot on this one instead. So if nothing else, they were paying them. I guess they felt compensated enough. And then the other thing about it is it was a time when very few places or people had an understanding of mental illness or illness in general, but especially this place, they didn't really offer mental health care. They just had people observed, they restricted their diet, and that was it. Also, the majority of the patients there were female, but that's because they mistakenly believed that mental illness was a primarily female phenomenon in France at this time, in the 1880s. And then the lead doctor was an ophthalmologist. He was an eye

doctor. He was not a psychologist or anything else. So this was just an old monastery that was a prison for people who were not feeling well mentally. That was it. Like mental health. Oh, God. I was just gonna say, when you said their cure for schizophrenia was to go for a walk in the garden, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be great. Yeah. Mental health care in the 1880s is like 20 doctors in coats observe you, and then they're like, hmm, you would make a good public fool.

Like, that's like, I think you can hack it as a fool. It's like, should we make we help him get better at all? I don't know. He'll walk. Seems like a lot of ghosts in his head. Let's drill a hole in it. It's some of the exact kind of guys who are American baseball scouts, but they're from the circus.

They're looking for talent. That was the group. ball scouts but they're from the circus they're like looking for talent you know like that was the group yeah it was like both not great and in some ways helpful because we don't know exactly what van gogh's condition was like it might have been epilepsy it might have been bipolar disorder with manic episodes but whatever it was he also really throughout adulthood worsened it with a lot of alcohol not eating well also insomnia and overwork and so those things he were he was doing the asylum did restrict and so in that way it was beneficial but they also did not like cure anything or resolve anything and he ultimately died shortly after

so was the role of the building just kind of like, we will try to moderate your, you know, impulses and stuff, not necessarily like we will study your condition and try to improve it? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like at dinner, he was allowed a little bit of wine. They also only let him have a little bit of meat because they believe that meat is a stimulant, which is also not true. It's just a lot of like either wrong ideas or unhelpful ideas. But the basic conditions of just being forced to sit in a room a lot of the time helped him paint in that way. So there you go. It was like self-care. He was doing a year of self-care. Yeah.

Just really working on him and painting and walking in the garden. Sounds nice. Yeah. For what it was, you know? Yeah. Other than the prison part. Other than the prison part. I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you're neurodivergent, it's okay to paint 142 paintings in a year.

Just like one of those viral Instagram posts. Yeah, the internet has so much mental health detritus like that, doesn't it? Just people being like, oh, are you feeling bad? I decided I know how it works. And it's just somebody with an Instagram account. Like, I don't know. You don't know. It's always like something very general and arbitrary, too.

It's like, if you have OCD, it's okay to not go up the steps or something. It has like 9 million shares. You're like, what is? All right. I wasn't arguing with that. I've never even heard this. Like what? Yeah. And Van Gogh's particular illness, I feel like he would be like, it's okay to paint 142 paintings. And then you'd look at the paintings and you'd be like, ooh, I don't know if that's helping you, man. I don't, that's pretty freaky, man. That's pretty freaky.

Wow, this is kind of amazing. So next, next number here is nine, because nine is the number of paintings, including the Starry Night that Vincent mailed to his brother Tao in September 1889. So he paints it in June and then mails it to his brother a few months later. And among other things, his brother said he should stop doing imaginative painting because it's bad reasoning was that it would stress vincent out too much and he should just paint like cypress trees or iris flowers or like stuff he was looking at so his brother kind of said that he was like take it easy man like just just look at a flower paint the flower cool it and those were what was like popular at the time too those really realistic paintings so i'm sure he was maybe like, you know, maybe you could paint something that makes some money someday, buddy. Like, just just paint a real flower for once. God.

Yeah. Yeah, we have a bunch of letters between Vincent and Tao. And apparently Tao said that a couple of the daytime landscape paintings were impressive to him, but the whole rest of the set, including Starry Night, quote, the rest tell me nothing because they lack individual intention and feeling in the lines, end quote. And then Teo just sat on Starry Night and it was not exhibited in Vincent's life. it's pretty brutal feedback for your mentally ill brother paint it right like yes even if it were not one of the most famous paintings of all time it would be pretty weird to be like i see nothing in this do just knock it off you know it's like yeah i

made eight paintings and gave them to you it's pretty good therapy for me she's like no it's not it's just paint something easy this again with the with the orbs with the cypress trees okay yeah he's just over it immediately let me let me guess there's orbs oh surprise all right okay you can see that coming brother i've painted you seven more phenomenal, like haunting landscapes. She's like, tell him I'm not here. I don't want to deal with this right now. So tired of my, my struggling brother painting incredible paintings for me. This is horrible. He shows it to other people.

Like, can you believe this? They're like crying. We're like, Oh my God, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. He shows it to other people like, can you believe this? They're like crying. Like, oh, my God, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. He's like, what? This is garbage. Surely it's my friends who are wrong. It's like exactly Principal Skip in that meme. So I assume he like threw them all in a river and then they floated downstream and ended up at like an art gallery or something like phenomenal i don't i don't know what what's the journey to to fame here

let's get into the big takeaways because that does that good one one number leading into them is seven euros the amount of money seven euros that is the ticket price to visit this asylum in san rami in france and their website lists the price also says you can see van gogh's room you that is the ticket price to visit this asylum in Saint-Rémy in France. And their website lists the price, also says you can see Van Gogh's room, you can see his window, which leads us into... I thought you meant like at the time, like they were just letting people in to look at the people in the asylum. Oh, man.

I was like... Sorry. That's awful. You got to cash in before they get called up to the circus. Yeah, you gotta make some scratch. But no, they do tours of this place now, and partly because it's also a historic site. But that all leads us into takeaway number one. The Starry Night is a fictional mashup of a real place.

Because Van Gogh, he sat at a real window in real life when he painted this, but basically every element is something he pulled from somewhere else or redid. You can visit where he painted it, and it's not what he painted, if that makes sense. Can you do a walking tour of the different elements of the thing? if that makes sense. Can you do like a walking tour of the different elements of the thing or like what? It's just like different stuff he saw over the course of his stay there or life or? Yeah, he did a lot of walks in the region and then did sketches and notes and then went back to his like art prison cell and assembled a painting. And the key sources here, there's a book called Van Gogh, The Life that is by art biographers Stephen Nye Fay and Gregory White Smith.

And another book all about this painting by Richard Thompson, professor of fine art at the University of Edinburgh. But you can go to this asylum. There's a little plaque by the window. You can see his view that he looked at when he painted it. But I'll have a picture linked of what the view is because it's not the painting. It's like a little bit of a wheat field. There's a couple trees in the distance. And also this window had a bunch of iron bars on it. Again, this is like mental prison. And so Van Gogh painted this at a window with a bunch of iron bars. He is fully just reinventing what he's looking at. I thought you were going to say

there's like a KFC in place of the cypress tree now or something like horrible it's like just imagine it without that you're like it's kind of close yeah i am i'm kind of surprised there's not stuff either like they've preserved the history but it's not uh painted i guess yeah starry night flats luxury suites it's just like apartment that has like the exposed duct like ceilings like it looks like every apartment in the world a couple of vape shops right there in the view minor league baseball team they have a van gogh mascot uh you know, it's really... It's a big ear. It's something. Foam ears. But yeah, and so he is in our prison and then really exaggerates what he's looking at.

Apparently the clearest sign is that cypress tree in the foreground. It's like this big, swirly, swoopy set of black lines. But I'll have a picture linked of real cypress trees in Provence in the south of France, because they grow very compact, very tight, very straight up. And so if this painting was a depiction of real life, it would basically be during a hurricane. It would take massive wind to get these trees moving the way they are, where they do kind of look like hair or something else that would make more sense. That's very cool. I'm just looking at the painting right now. Great painting. That's my contribution. Yeah, same. I like it too.

I think it's partly great because he just made up everything. The town he painted is based on this town of San Remy, but in real life that was a large town of 6,000 people, and in the painting he reduced it to a few buildings. He also painted this whole painting during the day. So whole thing was made in daytime, just like remembering night. And apparently one reason you can tell is when you look at the painting, there's like a lighter white band of sky. It's running just above the hills in the painting horizontally. And that's based on what morning mist looks like. So that doesn't make sense at night. It doesn't add up. And it's because he

painted this during the day based on like memories and sketches. I mean, it makes sense that his view from from art prison would not be that picturesque. Like that's a really quaint view of a little town. I feel like they're not giving the art prison people that gorgeous little view. Right, it'd be fantastic real estate. Yeah, sure. Did anyone, after he became famous, try to, like, mimic this and be like,

oh, man, I want to go to the asylum for a year and crank out some paintings? Or, you know, did that become, like, a a thing or, you know, I don't know. I don't know of any stories like that. It definitely remained an institution. And I think Van Gogh just not being famous until later in life, that probably kind of put a damper on people borrowing that trick. Yeah. Cause it seemed like the asylum would suddenly cash in on that.

It should be like, hey, stay here for a year for, you know, 6,000 euro or whatever. Eat really bland food and paint. That'll be great for you. We'll barely feed you, and you'll become a famous artist too. Terrible grift. All these college graduates doing it there's definitely someone in la running that retreat right now where they just feed you crackers and force you to make

art it's actually healthier than normal eating and sleeping you're like no it's not there's not every every like phenomenon it's like actually the stuff you do normally is bad it's like it's fine it's fine no it's fine yeah like they did accidentally put him on a more regular schedule in a way that helped him i think paint more because like when he was just out on his own he would not sleep paint all night if he felt like it and then kind of crash. But there was a lights out time where the staff made everybody stop doing stuff. But then it also leads to him just kind of making up the entire night sky. Like the painting has a crescent moon, and then people have bothered to do computer modeling of what the skies were in 1889 when he painted, and the moon was almost full. All the star positions are pretty made up. Apparently the most realistic night sky element in the painting is Venus.

If people look at the painting, there's like a whitish star that's just to the right of the Cypresses, and that's because Venus was very bright in the sky and looks like that. But also he probably partly painted Venus because he painted in the day, and Venus was visible in the daytime sky a lot of the time. 1800s Neil deGrasse Tyson tweet about it. Actually, you're like, yeah, I, oh, that's not, Starry Night's not realistic, the weird, haunting, swirling image. Right. Yeah, because also he, as far as artistic school, Van Gogh is considered a post-impressionist painter, which means doing some impressionist things where you're depicting real life, but also going out of your way to be more lively, more colorful, make choices. sky should be like this and i think the town should be this and so uh i find it amazing that

there is a tourist destination where you can go see where he painted it and you don't see the starry night scene at all it's just a totally different field in france yeah because it feels like he's just tweaking life a little bit but really he was tweaking life a lot he had a lot of notes yeah, and apparently really widely influenced by just art to make all these decisions. He wrote to his sister that he was thinking a lot about the poems of Walt Whitman when he painted this. And he said that Whitman sees under the great starlit vault of heaven a something which, after all, one can only call God and eternity in its place above the world. He was like, I'm going to be a poet of the sky. There's also a rumor that he might've been thinking of the artist Hokusai,

who made a print called the great wave off Kanagawa, which people have probably seen. Like it's a painting where a big wave is going from left to right. And there's a little Mount Fuji below it. Van Gogh was a big fan of Japanese art and prints and might have seen it, might have influenced the composition of this. It's all made up, but from a real place.

I always love to hear notes from back then that people wrote each other because now nobody's saying stuff about art. Nobody's quoting Walt Whitman in their text to each other. It's like, what up? All we do now is just... Nobody sounds like that anymore. Every letter from that time, no matter what they're saying, just describing the modernities of their day,

is the most beautiful thing you've ever read. Right? Just be like, hey, Van Gogh, you start this show yet? He's like, no. I'm like, yeah, me neither. Do you watch The Bear? He's like, no. i'm like yeah me neither do you watch the bear he's like no like okay cool it's my text conversation with van gogh oh is that on hulu i'm in the asylum the asylum doesn't have hulu oh that's right yeah sorry cool

cool cool all right cool wow tough asylum tough yeah you see your previous text to him was from like three months ago and it was him explaining that he's in the asylum and you're like oh i forgot i forgot he explained this to me already he's made it clear all right off of that we're going to a short break, followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

Maximumfund.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with

Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Next big takeaway here. This also involves the mind quite a bit. Takeaway number two. The brush strokes of the starry night are measurably engineered to make you feel like the painting is moving.

And this comes from that element where a lot of people, you know, either with a fun drug or not, they look at the painting and they say, oh, wow, it looks like it's moving. It turns out that people have looked into the cognitive psychology of this and also used physics to detect a really powerful ability of this painting to make you feel like the sky is moving. It's painted in an amazing way to do that. It's crazy how much we've thought about this painting and the hundreds of years since it was painted, I'm assuming. A hundred? How long ago was it? I don't even know. Yeah, 1889, so 133 years.

Okay. And I just, I feel like he painted so much at the time he probably i want to try he didn't take very long to paint it right he probably painted it in a couple days and we've thought about it for thousands and millions of hours and been like oh we've brought engineers to look at the brush strokes van gogh finished this and was like great next bring me some sunflowers his brother's like i guess i could set drinks on it or something i don't know paint's really thick so that it could be a little table put in the bathroom downstairs i don't know yeah hey theo van gogh weird hat oh that's my brother's painting i don't know i was trying to think of something weird hat i i i do feel that way though with a

lot a lot of art too you know like a lot of bands i loves their first album they just like recorded something in like three hours when they were 22 and it's like i know every word of the album you know and it's like they never thought making that that they were like this is going to be a classic in the genre that thousands of people will know forever it's like it's it's interesting to have that kind of like to apply that self-consciousness to a thing that wasn't self-conscious to begin with. Yeah. Especially because he, like he was doing this between episodes of extreme mental illness and just like,

he was just making it to some extent, just making stuff. And from June 16th to 18th of 1889, in those couple of days, he made a painting that we're going to make this whole podcast about. That's all. That's all it was. They just kept going.

And he just accidentally painted it so that it's engineered in a way to look like it's moving and stuff he just was like whoops ah i like it yeah and like and in ways that people have very precisely measured uh if if nothing else i'm very excited to link the museum of modern art because they have an upload of their latest digitization of the painting because they have it so they can just measure it all they want and in 2020 they finished a new digitization where they cataloged each like little bit of paint on it to a precision of three microns which is less than half the width of a human blood cell. So they have it down to smaller than blood cells. It's a 3D rendering made of over 329 million points of data. This is one of the most massively analyzed things on Earth, just ever.

You can't steal an atom of that painting. They know it's there. Stealing an atom at a time, trying to it out like shawshank with the dirt like if you get too close and you have vapors of starry night on you you cannot leave the museum with that because they'll know right that's just such a wild disparity though like we were saying between how much it ended up being analyzed and what it was like at the time where it's like yes in teo's closet don't the brush strokes make it look like it's moving and they're just like

shut up and eat your anti-masturbation cereal or whatever it's like a little electric shock your crotch if you don't go to bed or whatever the medicine was. Like, they were not even trying that hard. It was just an eye doctor and a staff. Like, I don't know. Walk in the garden. I'm not going to put the electricity rig together, man. I'm busy.

Like, that's a lot of labor. Forget it. They explain this, like, long, detailed, like, litany of, like, 25 specific mental illnesses he has and the doctor's like uh might be his eyes i don't know do you need glasses oh he's got one ear we can't put normal glasses on him oh well all right i give up that's all i had do you want to hold this in front of your face all of the time? No? Okay. Well, he's incurable. The idea that circus is the end is really funny.

For some reason, they all went to the circus. Or you could be a front lawn a front lawn like gnome for like a rich victorian person they're like i have people in my estate it's like mystical like that was like a trend i think it's like like human chess and stuff too like just look at these props i love it this one won't stop painting things, though. It's super annoying. I've got like 142 of this guy's paintings laying around. If you stop painting, I'm paying you to just be in my garden to show off my Victorian richness. Just like amble around.

All right. I found that ugly painting. It looks like it's moving. I hate it that's not even what the moon looked like at that time of year you idiot cypress bushes don't move that much yeah right yeah and like the the movement in this painting that so there's like a cognitive psychology set of theories and explanation for it. But it's basically that there's two things going on at once. There's the colors of the painting. And then there is the luminance. And I had not heard of luminance, but it's a characteristic of like intensity of light, like how intense the light is coming from these brushstrokes to your eyes. intense the light is coming from these brush strokes to your eyes. And according to a TED video about this, they say that the combination of that means your brain is responding two ways

at once when you look at the painting. There's a part of the visual cortex that sees light contrast and motion, but not color. So when it sees paint that has the same luminance, it tries to blend that together. But then another part of your brain called the primate subdivision is seeing the different colors and not blending them. And so your brain is blending and not blending the colors at the same time, or sorry, it's blending and not blending the paint at the same time. And so because the colors and the luminance are blending and not blending, it just ends up feeling like motion. and the luminance are blending and not blending,

it just ends up feeling like motion. Cool. So my brain's trying to hunt the painting or something. It's like, it's moving. Trying to calculate how to hunt it or whatever is going on in the brain. Yeah, I know I just said a lot of cognitive psychology stuff, but yeah, that's the super basic version. I understood every part of it, so that's fine.

I just like the idea that Van Gogh, who's not doing great at this time, kind of breaks our brains so that we can see what he sees. It's like, oh, yeah, this is messed up. I get it. And that's kind of a theory about it. Yeah. That like in particular later in his career and life when he was especially having more of a breakdown and more of a problem than he was before, he was like seeing the world a little bit differently. And so then he painted that and then that's why it is so distinctive. Yeah. But which is kind of terrifying, but also it leads to this art and they, they they've really gone out of their way to try to measure this stuff because it was partly sparked by in 2004, jumping to NASA. Wow, NASA's involved.

The team running the Hubble Space Telescope, they took pictures of a dust and gas formation around a star. And part of the team said, that reminds me of the Starry Night by Vincent Vengo. around a star. And part of the team said, that reminds me of The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh. And from there, they proceeded to bother to do some math where they compared the brush strokes of Van Gogh's painting to the physical movement of dust and gas in space. This is based on a physics concept called fluid turbulence. And according to their work, they say that Van Gogh's later paintings from his peak periods of mental illness have brush strokes that closely match the like fluid turbulence of real dust and gas in space and that his earlier paintings don't have that so much and like other seemingly similar artists

like the scream by edvard munk it also doesn't have that like either because of his brain chemistry or changes to how he worked he started really capturing something that's wild yeah yeah like there's like actual equations based around pretty tricky physics stuff that they bothered to apply to this and they think that by accident or on purpose he really nailed the process of making paint on a canvas look like it's moving. He accidentally painted space. Like... In the 1800s. Whoops! Painted space. And that's so crazy.

That's like crazy weird genius stuff. And during the day. It's a lot more impressive than taking a liberty with the phase of the moon. Yeah. With other critics. Whoever that was yeah it's like hey i figured out physics a hundred years in advance and they're like crescent moon you loser try again vinny you painted the beauty of space on accident? Okay, sure, but that town is really small.

I feel like from your perspective, the town wouldn't be that small. I believe the haberdashery was on the left. Throw this in the trash. And this is where the asylum eye doctor really steps in. Like, I've got it from here i think i know how to fix that he's nearsighted done fixed it yeah uh you'll see the painting move when i throw it into trash eye doctor it's very mad at see the sad thing about that is so many people like hear that statistic and they think i'm van

gogh in my time and they're right it's always the people that are writing like you know a reskin of harry potter or something they're like no one understands me and my harry potter where it's necromancers instead of wizards but someday after i'm gone yeah van gogh's own brother told him he's therefore if people tell me my stuff it is van gogh it is equal to me it's like that's not how the equation goes at all what what was the hit popular art at the time that he was not living up to or whatever like what what would have impressed the people who saw this at the time because i you know i think of like oh 1880 van gogh but it's like that wasn't what was yeah the thing at the time so like what you know what was he painting against

like in the popular landscape like that's a great question it's oddly a lot of people similar to him and especially right after his lifetime, people in a movement called Fauvism will be heavily influenced by him and then make him more famous retroactively. But it was a lot of impressionists and including people he was friends with. Like the night he cut off his own ear, the first thing that happened that night was he took a razor and attacked paul gauguin who is now a very very famous artist paul gauguin but gauguin was like stop attacking me with the razor and then van gogh went home and cut his ear off and then brought it to a lady

so he was like right in the thick of popular art but not popular it is it is crazy how much that resembles like the ecosystem of like any scenes like you know i just keep thinking of music scenes where it's like you know this band kind of started it but wasn't popular but then now people discovered them after they died but the people they influenced got very famous like a couple years later. You know, it's just interesting how that mechanism, like, repeats itself over and over again, even in way different mediums. Yeah. And also, there's another surprising element here, because this leads right into the last main takeaway for the main show. Takeaway number three. The main reason we've heard of the Starry Night is Vincent Van Gogh's sister-in-law.

It turns out after his death and then his brother's death right after, his brother's wife, whose name was Joanna Bonger, did a lot of work kind of throughout the rest of her life to make Vincent Van Gogh famous and also make the huge amount of art she inherited valuable. So not while he was alive, she was like, you know, don't no need to encourage him. But now that I have all these paintings, you know, he was pretty good when you think about it. If you turn sideways and kind of squint, I kind of like this starry night. I kind of like this starry night.

Yeah. I was going to say, some of these stars are out of position, but it's starting to grow on me a little bit. I'd pay a few million dollars for this if I were, you know, someone. Right. I read in this letter while he was in asylum that said, do better, but, you know, now. Really inspiring yeah yeah it's uh because van gogh like a lot of the legend around him is that he was totally unknown in life and it turns out toward the end of his life he was a little bit in the scene and starting to get noticed two months before he died he had

10 paintings shown in a major exhibition and then one of them sold for a sum of 400 francs which was apparently big money at the time but it's called the red vineyard near arles and it's uh i'll have a picture linked it's apparently the only painting we know he sold during life there might have been one or two more um and he was also exhibited alongside artists like Henri Toulouse-Lautrec friends with Paul Gauguin like he it's hard to say but he might have been on the verge of getting more notice in the scene but then he died possibly killing himself yeah that's so sad he was just starting to get famous and then he was like you know what not feeling it yeah like that's wild yeah just the the mental illness and everything else and and then also his brother was just sitting outside

of his painting such as the starry night his brother was like this is not great i'll just hang on to it um but then from there there's this progression where uh before he passes away vincent is constantly writing to te, very close relationship to him. And then in early 1889, Vincent freaks out because Theo is in love and is going to marry this girl, Joanna Bonger, who is a pianist and English teacher in Amsterdam, very educated, very well traveled. And Theo's in love with her, and then Vincent tries to blow it up because Vincent is concerned Teo won't pay attention to him now.

Like, he's like... My best friend's wedding! Oh. Basically. So Vincent is Julia Roberts. That's awesome. That's really good. Yeah. Movie does not end quite the same way, thankfully.

Test audiences were not a big fan of the original ending. Yeah, that would definitely ruin the rom-com vibes. We set up that she had the mental illness for the year. I still don't think this ending is going to really work. Don't get me wrong. When Julia Roberts attacks Paul Gauguin with a razor, a lot of action, a lot of action, a lot of tension. Pretty dope.

That's some family drama. Yeah, he ultimately, Vincent, does not get invited to their wedding because in his letters to Tao, he told him to, and this is translated, but he told him to, quote, just screw the girl instead of marrying her. function of social position and then vincent vincent's like last emergency move was that he threatened to join the french foreign legion which is a military unit for non-french people to go off to distant places and risk their lives and he was like if you don't pay enough attention to me i'm going to join the french foreign legion and teo said that's manipulative and a threat and i'm marrying this girl i love no wow toxic brother yeah he was like mentally ill and hurting and maybe a bad guy and so he did all this stuff and then his brother married this lady anyway and then who helped him become famous yeah yeah and then and then vincent

is basically the luckiest brother-in-law ever. He tried to blow up the marriage, and then she made him famous for all of time. So it's pretty cool for him. His brother's like, I really think you'd like this girl. She's very good at making artists extremely famous and wealthy. He's like, no! I hate her! You shouldn't marry her! She's like, your paintings are amazing.

I could definitely get this in a museum. I don't want to hear it. I'm going to Siam. He's looking on from the afterlife like, man, I called that one wrong. Oh, dang. Freezing cold takes. Whoops. She's the one person who likes his work and he hates her.

Coming up. I love the brush strokes make it look like it's moving. No, it doesn't. It's stopped. I can't even look at this anymore now that I know you like it. The phase of the mood isn't even right. It sucks. Yeah, she seems like a really amazing lady, because then the progression here is Vincent dies in July of 1890.

Earlier that year, Tao and Joanna had had a baby, a son. And then six months after Vincent dies, Teo dies of a disease. And so Joanna is a widow with a one-year-old son and also has like a stack of paintings by pretty unknown artist Vincent van Gogh, like taking up space in her home. And people advised her to like sell them for pennies or just throw them away. people advised her to like sell them for pennies or just throw them away. And instead what she does is keep them, sell her and Tao's home, flip that capital into buying a boarding house. She makes a living running a boarding house and working as a translator.

And then also just does a massive amount of networking across the entire art scene and like painstakingly butters up the right people, donates key works to the right exhibitions, then raises the value of other ones that way. Like just spends decades making it Vincent van Gogh into a famous artist. And then also benefits from the Fauvist movement of the early 1900s being influenced by him, partly by her doing that work. And that's how he became famous is his sister-in-law.

Wow. Who he hated. The one person he dislikes is the one that gets to make all the money off of his work. That too. Oh no! Yeah, because the other labor she does is she takes all of Vincent and Teo's letters to each other, because she inherited all of it progressively through them both dying. And she takes that, translates all of it from French to English,

compiles it, gets it published in a lot of volumes, and then helps build this dramatic story of the tormented, brilliant artist. Because with him, it's not just the art. It's this narrative of this brief flame-out candle. And so also we know the terrible stuff he said because she published the letters. But she really, really put in the work as a newly widowed person. And it's just amazing. I'm just picturing her going, oh, let's see what Vincent thought of me.

Oh. That's not what I was hoping for. So, good news. I finished translating that letter. I don't know if you're going to like it very much. Want me to give you the long and the short of it? French Foreign Legion. Yeah. of it uh french foreign legion yeah it is interesting though again though i feel like

every story like this not to keep you know comparing it to general like stories about artists or scenes or historical creativity it's just like you know whenever you talk about like selling out or like the media trying to create a frenzy or like, you know, there's always this like idea that like good stuff will just purely organ there has to be this like branding sales component and like a luck component and timing. And like, it's like, you know, it's not just, he didn't just die. It's interesting hearing this. It's like, it's not just he died and everyone was so in awe of his paintings. They finally discovered he was great. And then the value soared.

It's like a very deliberate effort and like lots of labor and pr like it which is almost always the case and like i feel like people often talk about that like it's like a thing that diminishes true creativity or like you know it's like the antithesis of like art in it but it's like it has to be present in some form for anything to succeed absolutely yeah and i think yeah and i in researching this i think i got less excited about the guy but i still really like the work like i used to have a print of a different painting by him called the drinkers that my brother got me like a starry night i still really like looking at but like i'm also not a long-time art critic or scholar

or something like i wouldn't know about this guy without his sister-in-law's effort to do those things and make those moves yeah yeah of course none of us would i wouldn't i didn't know anything that we talked about here except for just the painting yeah and that he got off his ear that's the first thing you learn when you're like five years old. Which he also would probably not have been a big fan of. He's like, oh, all they know is the ear thing. The one time I cut off my ear. I painted Starry Night. All anyone wants to talk about is the ear.

No one in here has done something they regret how many people here have considered attacking gogan with a razor be honest everyone like it's like begrudgingly puts their hands up he's like yeah okay all right a group group dm afterwards everyone's like couldn't say this in the moment, but thank God. Huge a-hole. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Lydia Bug and Dan Hopper for gazing at this canvas with me, because boy are there a lot of details to notice, down to the micron. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com,rons get a bonus show every week where we explore one

obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is a pair of related stories. It's how the Starry Night ended up in New York City and how the Starry Night's rough draft ended up in Soviet Russia. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of almost 10 dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring The Starry Night with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, The Starry Night is a fictional mashup of a real place. Takeaway number two, the brush strokes of the starry night are measurably engineered in a cognitive psychology way and a physics way to make you feel like the painting is moving.

And takeaway number three, the main reason we've heard of the starry night is vincent van gogh's sister-in-law those are the takeaways also please follow my guests they're great lydia bug is a weekly columnist for 1 900 hot dog she is one of the core people who makes that comedy site go and does awesome comedy writing there. It's just great. She's also on their podcast, The Dog Zone 9000, and I'm linking that and so much more comedy writing from Lydia. Dan Hopper, also a wonderful comedy writer. You can find him every day at Ranker.com, where he's a managing editor. And you can find more of his comedy writing in The New Yorker. He has written a very funny piece for The Washington Post. He's

awesome on Twitter, at Dan Hopp with two Ps. Lydia, awesome there as well, at You Know Lydia. These are both just wonderful comedy minds, and I'm very grateful they were here to make this show happen. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. I dug into a couple books about Van Gogh to prepare this. One of them is the book Van Gogh the Life that is by art biographers Stephen Nye Faye and Gregory White Smith. Also dipped into a book called The Starry Night. It's just about the painting and is written by Richard Thompson,

who's a professor of fine art at the University of Edinburgh. And then of all my digital resources, I think the most amazing was the stuff from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In particular, I want to recommend seeing their digitization with 329 million points of data of this painting that you can pull up on your computer. I don't know how powerfully you can pull it up on your computer, but it's there. You can get a great look at it without leaving your place. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this

episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating.

So how about that? Talk to you then. you