Today, major works by the Dutch-born Post-Impressionist artist Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) sell for tens of millions of dollars each. Need we be reminded that a certain portrait recently fetched the exorbitant sum of $82.5 million at auction, the highest price ever paid for a work of art? During his lifetime, however, the now-legendary painter exhibited only a handful of his canvases and managed to sell, at most, one or two.
In this, the centennial year of his death, the once-neglected Van Gogh is being honored throughout his native Holland with a year-long celebration, the centerpiece of which is the most extensive exhibition of his art ever assembled. Comprising nearly four hundred paintings and drawings, this immense retrospective is divided between two museums: the paintings (135 of them) are at the Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh in Amsterdam, and the drawings (248) are at the Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller in Otterlo, a town about two hours east of the capital.
Such a show could not have been mounted outside of the Netherlands; the two host museums have, respectively, the world's largest and second largest holdings of works by Van Gogh and alone account for more than half of the artworks on view. In order to secure loans from private and public collections in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North America, the Dutch government was obliged to insure the exhibition for the unprecedented sum of $3 billion. It seems doubtful that such an undertaking will again be attempted in the near future.
Generally, when an artist attains superstardom serious interest in his work is replaced by hollow idolatry. The challenge for Van Gogh's art in this retrospective was whether or not it could rise above the leveling effect caused by his popularization. In this reviewer's estimation, it has.
Unabashed Comprehensiveness
The curators (Louis van Tilborgh, Johannes van der Wolk, and Ronald Pickvance) maintain that the roster of works represents those Van Gogh, himself, regarded most highly. But the fact is, they have included not only masterpieces but also less important paintings and drawings as well. Rather than detract from our expectations, this unabashed comprehensiveness adds to our sense of Van Gogh's accomplishment by knitting his greatest achievements into the fabric of his tireless struggle to perfect his art. Without such honesty and completeness, the exhibition might have become a parody of itself.
Among the notable inclusions are versions of The Potato Eaters, Still-life with Sunflowers, The Night Café, The Bridge at Trinquetaille, The Postman Roulin, The Irises, and The Starry Night. I say "versions" because Van Gogh often copied his more important paintings, sometimes more than once. Shown side-by-side are several renditions of The Bedroom, La Berceuse, The Sower, and L'Arlesienne.
The decision to segregate the works on paper from the canvases was no mere curatorial conceit. Owing to their extreme sensitivity to light, the works on paper - most of which combine pen or brush and ink, pencil, charcoal, chalk, or sometimes watercolor - demand a specially designed, gently lit setting apart from the paintings. The result is the Kroller-Muller's drawing exhibition. Like the recent Picasso/Braque show at the Museum of
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