• Skip to content

Art of Seeing

In Studio with Masters

  • About
  • Sonnets in colour
  • Sign up

Deep and utterly shallow green: mysteries of color composition

November 4, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

This is how Rilke describes van Gogh’s “The Night Cafe” (“Letters on Cézanne”, October 17, 1907):

… artificial wakefulness in wine red, lamp yellow, deep and utterly shallow green, with three mirrors, each of which contains a different emptiness

Vincent van Gogh. The Night Cafe. 1888.

Deep and utterly shallow green — sounds like a paradox, an oxymoron even. And it captures perfectly and precisely this remarkable color composition, striking in its impossible simplicity.

This color composition is built out of three hues (green, yellow, red) and three values (dark, light, in-between).

Its red exists in mid-value version only; it is one flat, unmodulated color area, very uncharacteristic for mature van Gogh.

There are two yellows, light and mid-value (where it turns into ochre).

And only green spans the whole range between light and darkness (where it dissolves into black). Deep and utterly shallow, green is everywhere, like van Gogh’s despair. By being everywhere, it negates blue, takes its place where the eye would expect it. As though there is no blue in this world: no sky, no heaven, no spirit.


The pilot run of the program based on Rilke’s “Letters on Cézanne” starts this Sunday (November 5, 2017). The sign-up form will be closed on Saturday, so basically, this is the last chance to join the pilot.

Filed Under: Art and life, Bookshelf, In Museum Tagged With: Rainer Maria Rilke, Vincent Van Gogh

Receive new essays by e-mail

Other recent essays

On Claude Monet’s Studio Boat and Futility of Goals

February 13, 2018 By Elena Maslova-Levin

You’ve got to have goals, they say. Smart, well-defined goals. “If you don’t know where you are going, how will you know that you HAVE ARRIVED?” The morning of my eighth birthday was warm and sunny, unusual for mid-April in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad). The first warm day after a long, cold winter. I went […]

On the strength of a single contradiction… (Van Gogh’s “Pietà after Delacroix”)

October 8, 2017 By Elena Maslova-Levin

This essay’s title, “on the strength of a single contradiction” comes from one of Rilke’s “Letters on Cézanne” (from October 21, 1907). He writes: … There’s something else I wanted to say about Cézanne: that no one before him ever demonstrated so clearly the extent to which painting is something that takes place among the […]

The artist is present (Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin on man’s glassy essence)

September 29, 2017 By Elena Maslova-Levin

But man, proud man, Dress’d in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assured —
 His glassy essence… William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure What is often called “realistic paintings” are paintings that do not challenge the conventional sense of vision. There is nothing strange or unexpected: things are depicted exactly like we […]

Related essays

  • The artist is present (Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin on man’s glassy essence)
  • Neither flesh nor fleshless (Pierre-Auguste Renoir at the still point of the turning world)
  • Pavel Filonov on “headless” state of consciousness

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Deep and utterly shallow green says:
    December 4, 2017 at 6:04 am

    […] don’t want to influence your perception here, but if you are interested in my take on it, you can read it here (preferably after you’ve spent some time with the painting on your […]

Copyright © 2023 · Atmosphere Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

  • About
  • Contact