Two exhibitions on Van Gogh open in Amsterdam and Chicago

On May 12th and 14th, 2023, two exhibitions focusing on Vincent van Gogh open at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sources: Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam / Art Institute of Chicago · Image: “Wheatfield under Thunderclouds”, Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Auvers-sur-Oise, July 1890

Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise. His Final Months

From May 12 to September 3, 2023, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam presents “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise. His Final Months,” an exhibition focusing on the final months of Vincent van Gogh’s life in the French town of Auvers-sur-Oise. The exhibition includes more than 50 paintings and 20 drawings and sketches.

According to the Van Gogh Museum, “in the exhibition, we follow Van Gogh from his arrival in Auvers-sur-Oise, where he optimistically and ambitiously set to work, through to his last works. By this time, feelings of failure, loneliness, and melancholy had gained the upper hand, but Van Gogh nevertheless continued to make enormously powerful works. The exhibition also explores Van Gogh’s significance as an artist at the time, and how his reputation grew in the initial years after his death.”

Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape

From May 14 to September 4, 2023, the Art Institute of Chicago presents “Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape”. The Art Institute explains that “between the years 1882 and 1890, Post-Impressionist artists—such as Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard, and Charles Angrand—flocked to villages on the fringes of Paris. There, they experimented with broken brushstrokes and contrasting colors to create an innovative style of painting, one that could have been established only through their collaborative efforts.”

“Unlike the Impressionists who in the 1870s had spent significant time in tourist locations south of the city along the Seine, the Post-Impressionists preferred the northwestern suburbs around Asnières. This region had previously been a popular spot for recreation and relaxation but became increasingly populated with coal and gas facilities in the last decades of the 19th century. Rather than serving as obstacles to their explorations of sunlight, water, and the colors of nature, the visual vocabulary of these industrialized suburbs—the bridges, embankments, factories, parks, and villages—became vehicles for Van Gogh and his colleagues to experiment with color and paint application.”