Van Gogh's 'The Night Café' as a Deliberately Ugly Masterpiece

In September 1888, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo that his painting 'The Night Café' (1888) was 'one of the ugliest I have ever made.' The work depicts the interior of the Café de l'Alcazar in Arles, where the artist often dined and spent evenings. As explained by Evan Puschak in a video, this ugliness was deliberately sought: van Gogh used the emotional power of color, especially the complementary red and green, to create a distressing, hallucinatory image, describing the bar as a place of suffering and discomfort. He wrote: 'I have tried to paint the terrible human passions with red and green. It is everywhere a struggle and an antithesis of the most diverse greens and reds, in the characters of little thugs who sleep, in the empty, sad room. In my painting I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, commit crimes.'