“The Starry Night”

Every year, people come from all over the world to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It’s home to some of the world’s most famous works, like Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” and Marcel DuChamp’s bicycle wheel sculpture. But you’ll probably find the biggest crowds gathered around an oil painting on the 5th floor. It was created in the South of France in the summer of 1889.

LOWRY: So “Starry Night” is a unicorn. It’s an extraordinary painting by an extraordinary artist that kind of escapes the force field of any normal description.

That’s Glenn Lowry. Vincent van Gogh’s painting “The Starry Night” is in his care.

LOWRY: I’m the Director of the Museum of Modern Art.

You can probably conjure an image of “The Starry Night” in your mind — maybe you’ve seen it on a t-shirt, poster, or umbrella. Or maybe you’ve stood in front of it at the Museum of Modern Art, better known as MoMA.

LOWRY: It depicts a starry night with a glowing yellowish gold moon off in the upper right, swirling blue-white clouds in the background, a tall twisting cypress tree in the lower left foreground, and a village in the distance. 

Van Gogh painted the landscape when he was hospitalized in an asylum in France. If you know one thing about Van Gogh, it’s probably that he struggled with his mental health — he cut off part of his left ear the year before he made this painting, and he killed himself the year after.

LOWRY: There’s something about the turbulence of the way the paint is applied in concentric circles and swooping lines. There’s something about the way that cypress tree vibrates, or the warm glow of the moon. It is an image you can’t stop thinking about. 

Van Gogh died penniless. Today, his paintings sell at auction for an average price of $25 million dollars — and, in one instance, more than $100 million dollars. But one work that has never come up at auction is “The Starry Night.”

LOWRY: There is no equivalent. There are other van Goghs that have sold, but they’re not the van Gogh that has brought millions of people a year to the Museum of Modern Art. 

So what is “The Starry Night” worth? How do you put a price on something that’s literally invaluable — a unique object that will never be sold?

LOWRY: There’s just no way to figure that out, in my opinion. 

Well, we’re still going to try. For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is The Economics of Everyday Things. I’m Zachary Crockett. Today: “The Starry Night.”

*      *      *

Vincent van Gogh only worked as an artist for about a decade, from 1880 to 1890. During that time, he created nearly 900 paintings and over 1,100 works on paper. But he didn’t sell many of them.

LOWRY: Van Gogh had a troubled life. He’s a kind of classic tragic story. He had no success in the commercial market and was little known in the critical world. His success came after his death.

Van Gogh committed suicide in 1890 at the age of 37, leaving a large portion of his paintings and drawings to his brother, Theo. When Theo died six months later of syphilis, his widow inherited van Gogh’s life work.

LOWRY: His brother’s wife, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, really dedicated herself to supporting his legacy, to ensuring that he wouldn’t be forgotten. She went about selling his work, because she understood that for him to be in the world, to be appreciated, it wasn’t only that museums had to show his work. It’s that people had to own it, and by owning it, it dispersed it into a world that would take care of it. 

In 1900, as a part of that effort, she sold the painting that would become known as “The Starry Night.”

LOWRY: She sells it to a collector in Paris, Julien Leclercq. Leclercq sells it at some point to another Parisian collector before 1905 named Claude-Émile Schuffenecker. 

By this time, Van Gogh’s work had attracted some attention from critics and the public. Many considered his later paintings to be the product of a mad man. And the emotional turmoil of “The Starry Night” made people particularly uneasy. One critic even claimed the painting’s stars looked like fried dough balls. But the notoriety only increased demand for the painting.

LOWRY: Schuffenecker ultimately sells it back to Jo. It’s sold again around late 1906 to Georgette van Stolk. She keeps it for quite a long time, probably until 1938, just on the advent of the Second World War, when she sells it through the Oldenzeel Gallery to Paul Rosenberg, a very well known dealer in Paris. 

It isn’t known how much Rosenberg paid for “The Starry Night.” But by that point, van Gogh’s mystique had made his work more commercially desirable. Across the world, in New York City, curators at the newly-formed Museum of Modern Art decided that they wanted to get their hands on a van Gogh for their public collection. When they learned that Rosenberg might be willing to part ways with “The Starry Night,” they jumped at the opportunity.

And they had the leverage to do so, thanks to a woman named Lillie P. Bliss.

LOWRY: So Lillie Bliss is like the fairy godmother to this story. She was an early pioneer of collecting modern art. When she dies, Lillie does something extraordinary. She leaves her collection to the Museum of Modern Art, over 100 works of art. She says in her bequest that the museum may sell or exchange any work of art in her collection in order to buy more important works of art. The museum has the opportunity to buy “The Starry Night,” but not the capital to do it. And it realizes that it can do an exchange with the dealer for three works of art from the Bliss collection.

CROCKETT: And what were the three paintings that were exchanged for “The Starry Night?” 

LOWRY: So we were able to exchange Cézanne’s “Portrait of Victor Chocquet,” along with his “Still Life, Bottle of Liquor,” and a Toulouse-Lautrec portrait of May Belfort. We exchanged three works of art that allowed us to acquire this single, iconic painting. 

“The Starry Night” has been at MoMa ever since. And today, it’s one of the museum’s biggest attractions.

LOWRY: We get about three million visitors a year, and I’m going to guess that pretty much the vast majority of them will have seen the painting. So over any 10-year cycle, roughly 30 million people will have seen it on-site. 

CROCKETT: This is maybe not the best comparison, but we did an episode on roller coasters a while back and, you know, a theme park might spend $20 million building a new roller coaster, but you charge a ticket to get in the door, so it’s hard to measure the return-on-investment from a roller coaster. In a similar sense, could you attribute a certain portion of visitor traffic to a single painting or is that too hard to parse out? 

LOWRY: It’s a really good question, and I’ve never thought about it that way. You could probably attribute a certain amount of traffic to a handful of paintings in the collection. Because I wouldn’t put “Starry Night” alone in that. There’s the “Demoiselles d’Avignon.” There’s Matisse’s Dance. There’s Jackson Pollock’s “One: Number 31.” The question is, Is that the only reason they come? And there I’m not so sure. But there’s no doubt in my mind that a significant percentage of our visitors are attracted to the Museum of Modern Art because they know that they will see “Starry Night” here. 

The painting’s fame makes it a valuable asset. But, just how valuable are we talking?

LOWRY: If you tried to value it today, there’s no way you could put a number on it that would make any sense. 

Okay, well, just to entertain the question, one approach would be to look at the value of the paintings it was traded for 84 years ago. Today, those three paintings live in museum collections in Ohio and Japan.

There’s no public sales record for them, but the average sale price for a Cézanne painting is $13 million dollars, while the average Toulouse-Lautrec goes for $1 million. So maybe “The Starry Night” is worth two Cézannes and a Toulouse-Lautrec, which would put it at $27 million? It’s not quite that simple.

LOWRY: If in 1941, those paintings equaled in value “Starry Night,” today, in the aggregate, they would equal a small fraction of the value of “Starry Night.” “Starry Night” has emerged as this iconic painting that sits almost outside the norm of van Gogh’s work, whereas the “Portrait of Choquet” and the still life by Cézanne are beautiful paintings, but by no means the defining works of Cézanne.

CROCKETT: In retrospect, this was a good trade for the museum. 

LOWRY: I would say this was a brilliant trade. 

So maybe it would be more accurate to compare “The Starry Night” to a painting of similar renown. In an insurance estimate in 1962, the Louvre Museum in Paris valued the Mona Lisa at $100 million — which would be a little more than a billion dollars today. Are there any similar clues in MoMA’s insurance policy?

LOWRY: What we have is a blanket insurance policy that covers our entire collection. Because one, it would be prohibitively expensive to try and insure every single painting. And two, we move paintings around a lot so their risk factor changes whether they’re on view or not on view, whether they are in storage, whether they’re in transit, whether they are at another museum. Insurance is as much an art as science because it’s really about calculating risk. What is the risk that a work of art might be damaged? The actuaries who work on this develop very complicated and elaborate models to try and, if you wish, price it. 

While it may be hard to put an exact valuation on a painting like “The Starry Night,” it’s safe to say that it’s well over $100 million dollars. And housing something of that value is incredibly resource-intensive.

LOWRY: The restorers are working on a priceless work of art touching it and daubing it and cleaning it and I am thinking, “Oh my god. One slip and there goes the masterwork.”

That’s coming up.

*      *      *

Glenn Lowry says that The Museum of Modern Art doesn’t primarily think of its collection in economic terms.

LOWRY: Value for us is primarily historical value. Is this a work of art that is important in the story of an artist’s career? Is it important in the story of modern art? Does it have value to living artists? 

Even so, caring for a painting like “The Starry Night” comes with very real costs — starting with security.

LOWRY: That gallery in which it sits has a higher than normal level of security officers making sure that the work is safe and secure, and that people aren’t overcrowding it, so that the largest number of people possible can have a chance to see it. 

In recent years, protestors have thrown paint or food on works of art to demand action on climate change. Three of van Gogh’s paintings at museums in Europe have been targets.

LOWRY: Those attacks by climate activists primarily, have made us increase our security. And that increased and enhanced security begins before you even walk in the door. It puts all of us on pins and needles, and also creates levels of protection that further remove the immediacy of the object. We have to ensure that either an inadvertent accident or a willful act will not damage this work of art. 

The first-line of defense for “The Starry Night” is its frame.

LOWRY: The frame is really a box with multiple layers in it in order to protect the painting against vibration; so that humidity doesn’t build up between the painting and the glass; it seals so that no dirt and dust could get inside the box. It is secured by a complex set of devices so you couldn’t just pick it up off the wall. The frame has been carefully designed so it emulates what we believe van Gogh might have wanted as a frame around the painting. And there’s a master craftsman in our museum, on staff, who makes these frames. 

Art consultant Gavi Wolf, who runs the firm Indiewalls, estimates that a frame like the one used for “The Starry Night,” could cost between $5,000 and $8,000. And Glenn Lowry says that the museum’s protective measures go beyond the frame.

LOWRY: So when you enter our galleries, it’s not unlike an operating theater in a hospital. The climate is controlled to an incredible degree. We try and maintain temperature around 72, 73 degrees, and we try to maintain relative humidity between 45 and 55 percent. And there is a vast machinery that is working 24/7 to ensure that the climate remains stable and inside those tolerances. So when it becomes suddenly warm outside, or when the temperature plummets, or when the humidity rises because of a giant rainstorm, the systems in the museum automatically engage to balance out those changes in air so that the temperature and the humidity remain stable. And we have these incredibly complicated filtration systems that take out the most microscopic particles of dust and dirt from the air, so that when you’re in the museum you’re breathing really clean air at a very stable condition. 

All of this has protected “The Starry Night” from decay, but it still gets assessed regularly by the museum’s conservationists.

LOWRY: Van Gogh was actually a very talented craftsman. He understood the chemistry of paint. His paintings, by and large, have held up extremely well. But that said, we are constantly inspecting the painting on the wall, in the galleries. Occasionally it is removed from the wall, goes up to our conservation lab where we do microscopic examinations of it to make sure that we don’t see any kind of deterioration. The painting has been extensively documented with high-resolution images that allow you to see microscopic daubs of paint or even little tiny cracks in the paint — cracks that are the normal condition of aging. 

MoMA gets a lot of requests to loan out “The Starry Night” to exhibitions around the world. They usually say “no,” because of the risk that the painting could get damaged in transit. When Lowry approved a rare loan to the Metropolitan Museum a few years ago, even the 3-mile journey uptown was a huge ordeal.

LOWRY: I mean, it’s a military exercise. Security specialists planning every single moment of the transition. From the moment the picture came off the wall, to how it was packed into a secure crate, how that crate was transferred into a secure vehicle, what the route of that vehicle was, where and how it was received at the Met, how it got on the wall at the Met — all of that was planned to literally the second.

CROCKETT: Alright, so you don’t throw it in the back of a Volvo.

LOWRY: I’m pretty certain that even the President of the United States doesn’t travel with a level of security that we had when we moved this.

If you’re not in New York, you won’t get to see “The Starry Night” in person. But reproductions of it are readily available. You can download a photo of the painting and make it your desktop background, or buy a print to hang on your wall, or even build a version out of Lego. For the most part, MoMA doesn’t make any money from these reproductions.

LOWRY: We own the painting. We do not own the copyright. The copyright was originally owned by the family. But now, because the painting is as old as it is, it’s in the public domain, which means that if you wanted to, I don’t know, make a soccer ball with “Starry Night” on it, it could be done. So LEGO, for instance, could have done it, I suppose, entirely on their own. But they chose to come and work with the museum, because they knew that we have the high-resolution images. 

CROCKETT: So, just to make sure I have this right: MoMA has a copyright on a photograph of the painting that can be licensed out? 

LOWRY: If you want a high-res image, that has to be licensed from the Museum of Modern Art. So we can control what we produce and what we license, but we can’t control you taking a picture of “Starry Night” or ripping a picture of “Starry Night” off the internet and doing something with that. 

Even so, MoMA has undeniably benefited from its decision to acquire “The Starry Night” back in 1941. And the painting has also benefited from the museum.

LOWRY: I think a lot of credit goes, of course, to the decades of work the Museum of Modern Art has done to promote van Gogh as a great artist, to show this painting frequently, to put it in context with other incredibly important works from the late 19th and early 20th century.

But there’s a certain mystique to the painting that can probably never be explained.

LOWRY: Sometimes you can’t actually predict what’s going to be the defining work of an artist’s career. Not all artists are of the same talent, and not all works created by an artist are of the same level. This is one of those paintings that takes something reasonably familiar, a landscape and a starry night, and transforms it into something deeply emotional, powerful, and ultimately universal. Something that all of us can feel in our bones. 

For The Economics of Everyday Things, I’m Zachary Crockett.

*      *      *

This episode was produced by Morgan Levey and Sarah Lilley, and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz-Rabson.

LOWRY: There are people who have come to the museum in order to get married in front of “Starry Night.” We don’t do weddings, by the way.