by Vincent van Gogh’s unconventional talent has placed him at the centre of European culture for over a century. His works make headlines whenever they are sold, from the record-breaking moment when his Irises sold for £27 million at Sotheby’s in 1987 to the expected hype in Hong Kong this month, where Christie’s will sell his river landscape Anchor Boats, painted two years earlier, for an estimated $30-50 million – probably a record for works from his later, Parisian period.
The Dutch artist’s dramatic depictions of simple things – plants, trees, furniture and faces – are emblematic of how we value art around the world. So much so that the famous 1888 sunflower painting in London’s National Gallery was targeted last year by climate activists from the Just Stop Oil organisation, who threw the contents of a soup can at it.
The yellow flowers, fortunately protected by glass, continue to bloom regardless and this weekend take their rightful place next to two other Van Goghs: a portrait of a mother figure, La Berceuseand another vase of sunflowers from 1889, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The painter had always intended to show them together, and now, thanks to the National Gallery’s new special exhibition, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, they are reunited for the first time since they were created in the artist’s studio in the south of France. This time, however, as Van Gogh expert Martin Bailey points out, they appear in “elegant frames.”
Related: Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers – a captivating rollercoaster ride from Arles to the stars
“The curators have done a fantastic job in securing all these loans, including great masterpieces such as The bedroom And The Yellow House. They will have to fight for every single one,” says Bailey, who is Art Newspaper.
“Exhibitions often proceed chronologically, following the development of an artist, but here the paintings from Arles and from Van Gogh’s time at the nearby Saint-Rémy asylum are mixed together.
“They want us to focus on the painting and put aside the myths.”
The exhibition celebrates both the 200th anniversary of the National Gallery and the 100th anniversary of the arrival of Van Gogh’s Sunflowersis already being presented to the public with the label “blockbuster”; a must-see attraction that museum directors dream of. However, the term also has some unfortunate connotations, including the stigma of safe commercial thinking.
But guest curator Cornelia Homburg, a renowned Van Gogh specialist, has taken this criticism in stride. She is clear about the purpose of the exhibition, which features 61 spectacular works, including some of the most revered and rarely, if ever, loaned out. “We want to show the artist, not his tortured soul,” she says. “Of course, our interest is heightened by what we learn about his difficult life.”
While Homburg acknowledges that there is some connection between Van Gogh’s suffering and his art, she stresses that they are not the same thing. The main reason for the “blockbuster” she has been working on with Christopher Riopelle since early 2019 is its “solid premise.”
“We needed a point of view that meant something,” she says, “and the time Van Gogh spent in the south of France is the moment of creative maturity when he was really thinking about how he could be a modern artist.”
The exhibition thus questions what we know but not what we love about the painter. It updates the common notion that he was unappreciated in his time and that he sought, almost therapeutically, to express his disturbed psyche on canvas.
Homburg points out that although the artist was poor and mentally ill, he still enjoyed the respect of other artists and had great faith in his future audience. “He thought about his audience and the impact he would have. Everything was considered and planned,” she says.
“He knew he might not be widely understood in his time, but believed he would be in 100 years. He changed what he saw when he painted to make it more expressive, but not to express his own feelings. It was entirely intentional.”
So if we sense trauma and melancholy in his twisted olive grove or swirling skyscape, Homburg argues, it is because Van Gogh wanted us to, not because he felt that way himself.
Bailey agrees: “It’s tempting to attribute meaning to the images, but that’s a mistake. There are some from the asylum where you could say you’re seeing the effect of mental struggle. This exhibition has deliberately avoided those images.”
The title chosen by the gallery, “Poets and Lovers”, refers to the cast of characters and changing settings that Van Gogh creates by playing with paint to transform real faces and landscapes. Visitors first encounter two portraits, one of a dashing lover in uniform and then one of a poet, modeled on the face of a painter friend and decorated with the starry sky that symbolizes dreams for Van Gogh.
In the original painting of the artist’s bedroom in Arles, both portraits hang above his bed. In a second version, on display in London, Van Gogh romantically replaces these works with a painting from 1889. Self-portraitalso in the exhibition, and a painting of a mysterious woman.
Later in the show, visitors meet a lesser-known member of the Van Gogh dramatis personae in the 1888 Portrait of a farmerthat reinvents an old gardener as a rural archetype. The work has never before been loaned by the Norton Simon Collection in Pasadena.
This exhibition leaves the clear impression that Van Gogh was always talking to his audience – and even entertaining them.
