New Haven Independent

The ticket is to view Vincent Van Gogh’s masterpiece, The Starry Night: Visions of Saint-Remy (June 1889, oil on canvas). Yale University Art Gallery has the June 1889 oil on canvas painting on ldisplay until Sept. 7. It’s on loan from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.

You don’t normally need a ticket to view exhibits at Yale’s gallery. This painting is so popular — an icon of Impressionism not just for art enthusiasts, but for pop culture consumers, too — that the gallery needed to ask people to make reservations. It’s still free to view the painting. But you need to register for a slot; 15 people get to go up to see it every 15 minutes. (Register here.)

When you enter the alcove where Van Gogh’s swirling explosion of nighttime sky hangs, you end up encountering not one, but two originals. The other is a calmer daytime portrait he painted of cypresses. He painted both in the last year of his life, during confinement at an asylum in southern France.

There’s a reason the curator, Jennifer Gross, paired the paintings. She wants to change the way we view Starry Night, and the way we view Van Gogh.

Popular view: Those wild swirls of gobs of bright paint are the intense splashes of a madman, whose genius lay in mental illness.

Gross’s view: The painting represent a mature artist in full command of his work, summoning a lifetime of honed technique to capture the universal emotional depth that accompanies the dark. It’s not about insanity.

The daylight view of Cypresses, for instance, contains the same swirling, but not the same wild feeling. That’s because the day doesn’t feel wild as the night.

Around the corner from the two paintings is another late Van Gogh work, The Night Cafe, which summons a third, subtler, indoor vibe.

Before you visit this exhibit, or even if you don’t, come along for an informed look at the paintings with Gross (whose official title is “Seymour H. Knox, Jr., curator of modern and contemporary art”). On a visit to the paintings Monday she explained what she was up to in putting them together, and how she views the master’s work. She also debunked some myths. Listen in on the visit by clicking on the play arrow. And see if your view of Van Gogh is changed.

For songwriter Don McLean’s take on the painting, the artist, and popular definitions of art and madness, click on this play arrow.