We did not use the steps – we took the elevator option to the summit.We strapped the 2 year old on to her daddy’s back for the duration of the trip.In May, the Metropolitan Museum in New York stages the first exhibition devoted to Van Gogh’s fascination with the “flamelike evergreens”, reuniting The Starry Night and Wheat Field with Cypresses, among international loans.AD | I have been or could be if you click on a link in this postĬompensated via a cash payment, gift or something else of value for writingīut in the end, when you’re in Paris, you have to go up the Eiffel Tower right?! So, we had 3 main strategies for making this work – Something similar happens in Wheatfield with Cypresses, where Van Gogh left a gap between a big and small cypress, and both seem to lean into each other like the tower’s legs.” Its base is bulked up with a smaller tree, which makes its shape more pyramidal and closer to that of the tower. “The cypress tree was the first part to be painted. Hall writes: “Van Gogh’s Starry Night is nature’s and history’s response to Eiffel’s bombastic shuddering metal monster that sought to surpass the Egyptians … The obeliscal cypress dominates Saint-Rémy and its church spire in much the same way that the 300-metre Eiffel Tower dominates Paris. Newspapers and journals, including Le Monde Illustré, which Van Gogh read in Saint-Rémy, carried “wonderstruck” illustrated reports of the opening. In 1887, a Paris newspaper published a letter signed by leading artists and writers condemning it as a “dizzily ridiculous tower”, and by the time Van Gogh left Paris in February 1888 its construction had risen above the skyline, reaching its first platform.Īn 1888 official guide proclaimed that whereas the pyramids were built by slaves for tyrants, this monument was “a manifestation of pure science, august art and liberty of labour”. He observes that in 1886, when Van Gogh had just arrived in Paris, a competition to build the monument was launched and won by Gustave Eiffel’s open-lattice wrought-iron feat of engineering, and that its planning and preparation were constantly in the news. His research will appear in the April issue of the scholarly Burlington Magazine. Hall, whose previous books include The Artist’s Studio: A Cultural History, is a research professor at Southampton University. Van Gogh idealised ancient Egypt, and he thought the cypress tree was as beautiful and well-proportioned as an obelisk.” Hall said: “The tower was bombastically marketed as a symbol of French technological prowess, and even more impressive than the pyramids. It’s beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk.” In June 1889, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “The cypresses still preoccupy me, I’d like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers because it astonishes me that no one has yet done them as I see them. Starry Night is a rural and cosmic counterpart to the light show that marked the opening of the exhibition.” Hall said: “For Van Gogh, the cypress tree is a natural alternative to the Eiffel Tower, the centrepiece of the exhibition. He argues that the artist began this series in June 1889, shortly after the Paris monument was unveiled as the star attraction of the International Exposition, whose opening was accompanied by a spectacular late-night show of pyrotechnics, electric light and explosions that he says are repeated in the “pyrotechnical music of the stars, sky and clouds” of Van Gogh’s painting.
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