Van Gogh: radiograph of an innovator

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam celebrates its reopening and its 40th anniversary with a big exhibition that shows their latest discoveries made in Van Gogh’s paintings and works of mythical series as The Sunflower

Vincent Van Gogh is the perfect example of ignored genius that lives and loses hope surrounded by the most miserable poverty; as opposed to Picasso, who, after the first difficult moments, could enjoy his success during his life even though he was as innovator as the Dutch or more. Paradoxically, Van Gogh was condemned by his radical modernity as he got to live in the wrong time. 

Van Gogh was an untiring investigator: he was always looking for new ways of painting. He used to extend thin layers of paint that, afterwards, modelled with a pencil as if it were mud and with the unusual use of diluted oils he got a rare spectrum of colours, whose original shine has been lost because of the varnish applied to his paintings.  

But, this one is not the only characteristic of Van Gogh’s paintings that we have lost sight of. The Van Gogh Museum reopens after 7 months of refurbishments with a great exhibition to celebrate in style the 40th anniversary. In this exhibition, 200 artworks by Van Gogh are shown in the light of the most recent investigations around his working process. 

Among many other things, it has been found that he preferred to paint outdoors and that this is the reason why most of his oil paintings are mixed with sand; that he worked with a set-square to provide with a bigger depth his compositions; that he reused canvases by painting their two sides when he had no money to buy new ones, and that he himself repaired the damages in the canvas of his famous work The Bedroom using newsprint. Additionally, the analysis of his drawing notebook has made easier to elucidate the learning process of the painter.

All these discoveries and materials can be admired in the exhibition “Van Gogh at work” thanks to X-Ray films and microscopes. A big exhibition (it occupies the museum‘s four floors) that transcends what is merely an exhibition to give back the artist his role of father of the modernity in art, with essential practices to understand his drift in the following decades. 

An important event, having into account that apart from gathering together scattered typical series as The Sunflowers or The Bedroom, comparing the version in the Museum in Amsterdam with those that keep respectively the National Gallery in London and the Art institute of Chicago, comes back to Holland the Portrait of Père Tanguy for the first time since 1930 and from the Rodin Museum in Paris. 

All this together with other works by contemporary artists such as Monet, Seurat and Gauguin in a showing that also recreates the working place of Van Gogh or a shop where Van Gogh could have bought perfectly the oils he mixed in his palette – the only one which still preserved is exhibited, property of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris – until obtaining his now revealed impossible colour schemes. 

More info: Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam)

Until January 12th, 2014