“Media reports stating that we re-located Van Gogh’s work via helicopter are false,” Axel Rueger, director of the Van Gogh museum chuckles as he kicks off the press conference that will introduce Hermitage Amsterdam’s newest exhibition “Vincent”. Such media speculation around an exhibition featuring the work of a national artist who is always on show in the city, having his own museum and all, might seem a bit excessive (much like the ear-less artist himself) but it quickly becomes quite clear why: the temporary closure of the Van Gogh museum has forced a re-location of his work giving the show’s curators Leo Jansen and Renske Suijver the freedom and possibility to tell a new story in a different setting with a combination of well-known and more unknown Van Gogh artifacts (75 paintings and several letters, sketches and objects make up the show).
The exhibition tells a balanced story of Van Gogh’s life and work that is split into seven different sections. The story starts in a spacious, high-ceilinged room where Van Gogh’s training, technique and preparation are explored in a section titled “Practice Makes Perfect”. A sculpture of a horse next to a painting of said horse shows Van Gogh’s approach to studying volume. A double sided canvas, both sides exhibited for the first time, show the artist’s lack of wealth during his Paris years as he had to save costs. The section “The Effect of Color” show his obsession with the many gradients of one color like the color yellow in his most famous work Sunflowers (1889), which hangs almost majestically on a yellow back drop at the center of the exhibition’s main room.
It isn’t just the unknown artifacts that shed a new light on a well-known artist but the unusual color scheme of the exhibition. The Van Gogh Museum has a very clean and classic color scheme of ochers, whites and browns but with the move to the Hermitage Leo Jansen and Renske Suijver took the opportunity to experiment. The room “Looking to Japan”, which shows Van Gogh’s copies of Japanese prints, is painted a deep red. “It has brought out tones of red in paintings, which viewers didn’t even realize were there,” Jansen states. The carefully selected rich, dark green wall paint of the final section dedicated to the artist’s broad view of nature bring out the vivaciousness of his insects, wheat fields and overgrown gardens in a way that a simple white wall just couldn’t. “This has been an opportunity for us to try new things and liven things up with the future of the Van Gogh museum in mind”, states Jansen without revealing what could be in store for the future of one of the world’s most visited museums. Yet if “Vincent’s” fresh angle and openness to experimentation are any indicator at all future visitors to the renovated Van Gogh Museum (to be re-opened 1 May 2013) are in for an all new way of showing Van Gogh and until then the Hermitage’s exhibition is an insightful and rich preview.
29 September 2012 – 25 April 2013
Hermitage Amsterdam
www.vangoghmuseum.com