Van Gogh's Greatest ‘Ugliest’ Painting

 by Hamish Critchley

'The Night Cafe' (1888) 

“The painting is one of the ugliest I've done”, wrote Van Gogh in his September 8th, 1888 letter to his brother, Theo, in reference to his new painting, ‘le café de nuit’, or ‘Night Cafe’ (Arles, 1888).

It is not hard to see why he says this. It is an especially jarring image that installs a feeling of isolation, great unease, and anxiety in the viewer. 

What fascinates me about this work is how it juxtaposes all other Van Gogh paintings that come to mind when his name is mentioned. I think one fitting example is ‘Cafe Terrace at Night’ (Arles, 1888) which appears to be the very antithesis of ‘Night Cafe’. The cobalt sky complements the orange-yellow gas light that falls out of the terrace and spills along the cobbled stone path that brings our eyes down the street and back up into the sky, where the artificial beauty of the cafe and the nights stars harmoniously join: drawing a sense of peace and serenity that is altogether pleasant. Van Gogh's ‘Night Cafe’ achieves the opposite effect; in the aforementioned letter he wrote, “I tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes”. This very concept juxtaposes ‘Cafe Terrace at Night’, which provides a picture-perfect image of the beauty of French nightlife in Arles. The difference between the two is night and day. The dream of outside and the nightmare of inside.

Cafe Terrace at Night (1888)

“I’ve tried to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green”  “Everywhere it's a battle and an antithesis of the most different greens and reds”. Van Gogh was an avid student of colour, specifically Charles Blanc's ‘The Grammar of Painting and Engraving’, exploring colour theory, which states that ‘when complementary colours are juxtaposed they reinforce each other. This is what ‘battle’ he writes of: red and green are complementary colours and exert a force on each other, like the blue and orange of ‘Cafe Terrace at Night’, which have a pleasing and peaceful effect. Contrastingly there is something punishing about red and green. Van Gogh noted this after painting ‘The Portrait of a Zouave Soldier’ a few months prior, “It’s a coarse combination of disparate tones that isn’t easy to handle”. He took this experience and applied it to ‘Night Cafe’, where the blood crimson of the wall completely overpowers and clashes with the green of the ceiling to create tension and unease. Furthermore, both colours are jammed into the upper third of the canvas heightening this sense of tension. Van Gogh also felt that colours took on an intriguing quality at night, especially by gaslight “It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly coloured than the day”. This is clear as the rest of the space is dominated by a sulfur yellow provided by the gas which infects everything from the green of the pool table to the flowers and white of the owner's suit, points that our eyes should be able to rest on; however, the sulfur tint refuses this. The sense of unwelcome that the colours create, reject the viewer making us feel intrusive and unwanted, adding to this painting's infectious isolation and sense of seclusion.

The composition and inhabitants of the ‘Night Cafe’, create a sense of chaos and unease. The owner stares at the viewer with expectancy and hostility as if we have just entered his cavern of bedlam and we are the next of his many customers. He is the first thing our eyes fall on due to the white of his attire, which immediately sets a tone of unease and fear of what to encounter throughout the rest of the painting. The vacant tables are littered with unwashed glasses and are accompanied by chairs pulled out at strange angles, creating a sense of chaos and furthering the sense of anxiety. The other tables are littered with patrons hunched over tables and we are refused their faces, forwarding the sense of unwelcome. The lack of the patron's shadows makes the centre pool table’s appear oppressive and demands our attention. The cue atop it, with the pool balls at the bottom, create a phallic image, which brings Van Gogh's ideology of ‘ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes’ into effect, also possibly hinting at his homosexual desires. Along with the floorboards and lines of perspective, the direction of the cue rushes our eyes out of the bar into a backroom that offers no escape from the gaslights sulfur. The clock above the door reminds us of the late hour and provides an answer to our uneasiness but provides no cure to it. Furthermore, the lines of perspective are impressively warped and meet no common point of horizon, which creates the sense that you are being yanked into the painting, furthering the sense that you are interrupting and the barman reminds us once more: we may stay as long as we join this painting in its unease and chaos.

It is common knowledge that Van Gogh was not a stranger to the feeling of loneliness that this painting creates. Two months after this painting, his friend, and possibly lover, Paul Gauguin would visit him and relieve him of his anxieties, for a short while. However, Van Gogh feared Gauguin would leave him due to their tumultuous relationship and this fear of abandonment, and of the return to the isolation of ‘Night Cafe’, would cultivate into a crisis where, a few days before new years, he would sever his left ear. Perhaps this is why he paints himself into this painting as the patrons, all of which share his recognizable bright orange hair: some even share his straw hat. He feels as if he belongs to this cafe of madness and anxiety. The bar owner stares at him, expectantly, having waited a short while for him to return. Back to his bar. Back for a drink.

Sources 

https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/12507

http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let676/letter.html