How a failure became a touchstone

The afterlife of The Starry Night is almost entirely a 20th-century story, and it begins with a death and a widow. Van Gogh died in July 1890; his brother Theo, who had supported him and held his work, died only six months later, in January 1891. The estate (hundreds of unsold canvases, this one among them) passed to Theo’s widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, usually called Jo. She invented Van Gogh’s reputation: she spent her life placing, lending, and promoting the work until the world caught up.

The Starry Night itself then took the long way to the wall it hangs on now. It passed through a chain of European hands: sold to the poet Julien Leclercq in 1900, to the painter Schuffenecker in 1901, bought back by Jo in 1905, then on to a Rotterdam gallery and a Rotterdam collector for three decades, then to the dealer Paul Rosenberg in 1938, who fled France for the United States as the war closed in.

In 1941 it reached the Museum of Modern Artin New York, acquired “through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, by exchange,” which means MoMA did not pay cash for it but traded other works, funded by a bequest, to get it. And there, in the institution built to canonize modern art, the picture its own maker had called a failure became, in MoMA’s own words, a touchstone of modern art and one of the most recognizable paintings in the Western canon.

That is the whole arc, worth stating flat: a daytime studio study, worked up by a sick man in an asylum from a dawn he had watched through a barred window, half-disowned by its maker as reaching for stars too big, unsold in his lifetime, then carried by a widow’s devotion through forty years of European collections to a New York museum, where the century that came after Van Gogh made it immortal. The fame is real. He never saw any of it.