The Night Cafe

The interior of an all-night cafe blazes with clashing red walls and a sour green ceiling, a glaring billiard table at the center, a few lost souls slumped at the margins beneath haloed lamps. Van Gogh wrote that he tried to show the cafe as a place where one could ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime, using jarring color to express terrible human passions. Now at Yale, the Night Cafe is a masterpiece of color as emotion - garish, oppressive, and unforgettable, despair and dissipation made visible in hue alone.