Sunflowers aside, Vincent van Gogh was captive to the night. The nocturnal sky is full of brightly ringed stars and spirals in "The Starry Night," one of the top draws in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and the impetus for an exhibition focused on the painter's dusk-to-dawn scenes.

"Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night" is compact yet wide-ranging, hitting many of the artist's obsessions, from peasants to gaslights. Among the 23 paintings in the show, about five are perfect, gorgeously idiosyncratic hymns to color and form. There are another handful of head-turners and some typical theme-exhibition filler. The show doesn't always cohere conceptually, but in front of so many great paintings that barely matters.

Night, as much as day, was Van Gogh's workshop. The hard-working, unstable Dutch artist killed himself in 1890 after five years of nearly nonstop painting, reading, writing and carousing. Maybe he just needed more sleep.

For three nights, he sequestered himself inside the grungy all-night Cafe de la Gare in Arles, which Van Gogh described as a place "where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes."

The resulting painting, "The Night Cafe" (1888) is one of the highlights of the past two centuries of art. Here, a billiard table leans in impossible directions, and unsavory characters conspire in corners, huddle against jarring mustard yellow and burnt sienna-colored walls, while the cafe's owner faces out impassively in a white coat.

STARS, GASLIGHT

To Van Gogh, darkness is neither still nor invisible. Figures move across landscapes at dusk; stars glimmer above cities. To paint midnight outdoors, Van Gogh sat near gaslights at the river for "The Starry Night Over the Rhone" (1888). Celestial shimmer is everywhere. It is an ode to joy sung as a lullaby.

Several smaller paintings are also quietly stunning, such as "Sunset at Montmartre" (1887) and a high-contrast version of "The Sower" (1888), in which the huge setting sun hangs like a weight — and a halo — on a field laborer's shoulders.

Van Gogh fancied himself a populist painter for a time, depicting the virtues of earthier types who also labored past dark. "The Potato Eaters" (1885) is his biggest and most famous picture in this vein — he spent months on studies for it. The bulbous noses of the women huddled around a lamp-lit table and the easy sentiment feel ham-handed. Thankfully, he moved on from such sentimental scenes to continue his pursuit of sublime landscapes.

BOOKS AS STILL LIFES

The painter was an avid reader, devouring novels and poems in four languages by Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, Heinrich Heine and Hans Christian Andersen. Selections from his library are on display in a final room. Zola's evening scenes seemed to perfectly describe Van Gogh's nocturnes: Paris, for instance, is a "mass of yellow, striped with huge shadows."

Books themselves were objects worth painting. In "Gauguin's Chair" (1888), two volumes sit by a lit candle on a simple armchair.