The capital’s National Gallery of Art will host an exhibition of the largest collection of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh ever loaned to the U.S., starting in October.
The 70 paintings in the exhibition, called “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs” and sponsored by Andersen Consulting, are on loan from Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum while it undergoes renovation. After running Oct. 4 to next Jan. 3 at the National Gallery, the show will move to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from Jan. 17 through April 4.
“These are the paintings that Vincent Van Gogh sent to his brother Theo in return for financial and moral support,” said John Leighton, director of the Amsterdam museum. “After Vincent’s untimely suicide, Theo resolved to use this collection to establish his brother’s fame. That cause was taken up soon afterward by Theo’s widow (Jo Van Gogh-Bonger) when Theo himself died and then in turn by their son, Vincent Wilhelm Van Gogh, who founded the museum.
“This is very dedicated stewardship,” he said. “It explains the very personal, intimate character of the collection.”
According to National Gallery curator Philip Conisbee, the works were selected to illustrate Van Gogh’s evolution as an artist in his painfully brief career as a painter (1880-90). The show will include a gloomy 1882 Dutch beach scene from Van Gogh’s beginnings as an artist in Holland following failed careers as an art salesman and church worker.
Among the best known pieces in the exhibition will be 1885’s “The Potato Eaters,” showing a poor Dutch peasant family at table.
He wrote of the work to his brother Theo: “What I’ve tried to do is convey the idea that those people eating those potatoes by lamplight dug up the earth with the very hands they put into their bowls. Thus, it’s about manual labor, and about the fact they’ve earned their food so honestly.”
Also in the exhibition will be the canvas Van Gogh considered his greatest achievement, 1888’s “The Harvest,” a brightly colored pastoral scene in the south of France that manifests his fixation with the cycle of seasons, as well as a number of well-remembered self portraits. The show’s centerpiece work is “Self-Portrait as an Artist” (1888).
“He was a difficult and slightly forbidding kind of character, and people were reluctant to sit for him,” said Conisbee, “which may explain why he did so many self-portraits.”
According to National Gallery Director Earl Powell III, who was director of the Los Angeles museum before assuming the Washington post, the Van Gogh Museum is loaning the pictures only because it will be closed for a year. After renovations are complete, he said, the paintings must be returned. The National Gallery has had a longstanding relationship with the Netherlands and has hosted some 30 exhibitions of Dutch art, he said.
Douglas Druick, the Art Institute of Chicago’s curator of European painting, said, “Any American exhibition of Van Gogh’s work is an important and wonderful event no matter where it’s held.”
Druick reminded Chicago-area residents who are unable to attend either coast’s showing of “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs” that the Art Institute owns five Van Gogh paintings that are on permanent display.
“One of the reasons he is so universally admired and valued is that everyone knows his story,” said Druick, explaining Van Gogh’s surpassingly wide appeal and the extraordinary, many-million-dollar prices his paintings fetch. “His pictures speak to a very broad understanding, and his pictures speak very eloquently.”
Because of the huge crowds expected for the National Gallery show, Powell said he is instituting a reserved pass system for attendance, though admission at the museum will remain free. The gallery drew nearly 600,000 people for its three-month Gauguin exhibition in 1988.
