Visiting a familiar museum with familiar collections isn’t often the same thrill as new discoveries or an exhibition with new insights, but it can be just as rewarding in other ways—including a chance to pay more attention to how the museum displays itself.
At the always-popular, always-crowded Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, there’s a big hint to the plan right by the elevator that hits the highlights of its viewpoint; within each of those categories it discusses how its collection, the world’s largest holding of Van Gogh’s work, fits into the story.
Starting on the third floor, with paintings showing some of Van Gogh’s rich use of color in nature, despite his own growing mental problems, the museum shows us mutual influence between van Gogh and painters who were in his circle or who followed him.
Examples, drawn from the Museum’s collection, include works by Kees van Dongen (1911, left, above) and Jan Sluijters (1912, right) who both became familiar with Van Gogh’s work through the first major exhibition of his work in 1905. Maurice de Vlaminck’s 1906 The Seine at Nanterre was painted after seeing Van Gogh’s works at a 1901 showing, after which he wrote “On that day, I loved Van Gogh more than my own father.”
Van Gogh’s career as an artist was short, barely ten years, much of it spent in mental turmoil, seeking a place, a peace with the world, a way of forming ties with others, including his attempts at creating an artist colony. In his letters to his brother Theo, near the end, he called himself “a broken pitcher.” And yet he continued painting until the very end, producing 75 canvases in the last 70 days of his life.
The Museum uses its ‘ReFramers,’ a group of “young adults who broaden the museum’s perspective, ask critical questions and… build bridges to reach a new generation of visitors. One of their projects sums up, in a way, Van Gogh’s career as In Search of an Anchor. That point of view helps understand some of the paintings, such as this version of The Sower. As grim as the image appears, how dark the color, the figure is creating new life. That can be seen again in the hopeful green emerging in a Basket of Crocus Bulbs.
Van Gogh’s move to Paris in 1866, along with Theo, wasn’t just about exposure to new styles. Contact, even friendship, with other artists was high on his priority list, and from the flat they shared, and from which this view was made, he began to meet others including especially Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin.
There was also a lifestyle partly fueled with alcohol, including absinthe. Later, he wrote to Theo that he had let himself be carried away “while my strength was abandoning me.”
The group often painted together, trading paintings with each other, and painted each other. This portrait of Gauguin by Van Gogh is only one of many mutual portraits among the friends. Below it, a Gauguin portrait of Van Gogh painting sunflowers.
Here’s a self-portrait by Gauguin, with an inset portrait of Emile Bernard, and one by Bernard with a sketch of Gauguin.
Despite the friendship, and an attempt to share quarters in the “Yellow House” that Van Gogh rented in Arles, life with the increasingly unstable Van Gogh wasn’t easy, and the Arles co-tenancy ended quickly; “Vincent and I absolutely cannot live side by side without turmoil.” Gauguin wrote and abruptly left; that’s when Van Gogh famously cut his left ear.
Two other Van Gogh views of ‘home,’ the first a view of his childhood home in Nuenen, the Netherlands, painted in 1885, where he was quick to argue with his father and wrote that he didn’t fit in. The second, a farmhouse in Auvers, was painted five years later and a month before his death. The contrast is more than an artistic one.
Leaving the second floor and Van Gogh’s relationships with friends and family, we come to Van Gogh and His Time, again with works of contemporaries as well as by Van Gogh.
Theo van Gogh continued to play important roles in Vincent’s life, including the brothers’ large collection of cheaply-acquired prints, both of works by European artists and the Japanese prints that were becoming increasingly influential.
Van Gogh sent hopeful artist Eugene Boch to Theo as a dealer; Theo traded one of Vincent’s paintings for this one of a mining site, telling Vincent “If you don’t like this canvas he’ll willingly change it for another but it would astonish me if you didn’t like it.” Arnold Koning, whose Head of a Woman is below, lived with Theo for months and left paintings behind.
From early on, Van Gogh described himself as a painter of rural life, and even as a ‘peasant painter.’ In the years at Nuenen, before Paris, he wrote that “I desire nothing other than to live deep in the country and to paint peasant life,” which he described as “so much better in many respects than the civilized world.” He was an admirer of painters such as Millet, whose works he often used as models, and Leon Lhermitte, whose Haymaking is below.
But, at least in the beginning, his paintings show a grim view of that life, especially peasants themselves, who appear in unattractive light and feature in his famous The Potato Eaters as well as in portraits such as this. At one point he planned to paint 50 of these, saying “They remind one of the earth, sometimes seeming to have been modeled out of it.”
The dark view and muddy colors continue in Two Women on the Peat Moor and The Cottage, both painted in Nuenen in the period when he had returned home before leaving for Paris.
The muddy colors, though, don’t keep me from making these boots one of my favorite Van Gogh paintings. Their combination of free strokes with careful draftsmanship is a segue to the Museum’s section highlighting Van Gogh’s work in drafting and sketching.
Aside from his hundreds of paintings, Van Gogh produced over 1100 drawings of various kinds; he focused on drawing as he began to teach himself as an artist and proclaimed that it was “the root of everything” for an artist. He considered drawings not only preparation for painting but as artworks in their own right.
Drawn during his earliest studies, this scene of dancers in Antwerp marks his first use of color: red and blue chalk added to the sketch.
His very French views of Montmartre mills and other scenes were mixed with experiments of other sorts. The popularity of Japanese prints found its way into his style and into this painting of a courtesan, a near copy of a French magazine cover by Keisai Eisen and a Bridge in the Rain modeled on Hiroshige.
Japan, of course was not the only contemporary influence in his last years; in a hark back to his ‘peasant painter’ ambitions he admired Camille Pissarro’s Haymaking at Eragny for its use of color, although not its pointillist technique. Van Gogh’s The White Orchard shows a similar palette.
On the ground floor, the Museum has assembled many of its self-portraits by Van Gogh, and they are many and varied but I’m going to sign off with this one that has a fascinating story behind it. It’s small and very detailed; the Museum speculates that he painted it in competition with increasingly common portrait photos; Van Gogh wrote that “it’s a cause worth fighting for to show people that there’s something else in human beings besides what the photographer is able to get out of them with his machine.”
But here’s the mystery: the brothers bore a striking resemblance to each other—the same facial shape, the same reddish hair. For 125 years, it’s been assumed to be yet another self-portrait, but research published in 2011 made a strong argument that it’s actually a portrait of Theo. The Museum now labels it Self-Portrait or Portrait of Theo van Gogh
For best appearance, some of my photos have been replaced with images from the Rijksmuseum website
