The Oxford Student - By Eleanor Trend on 22/01/2015
Review: The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.” (Vincent Van Gogh.) You don’t have to be an expert to realise Van Gogh chose flowers and turbulence over comfort. Just standing in front of his masterpiece ‘Sunflowers’ (1888), I was overwhelmed by the beautiful wildness of his vision, the chaos and dynamism which he generated from a still life. But while his paintings are the most eloquent expression of his complex mind, the story of the man behind the canvas is equally gripping, and adds a whole new dimension to his art. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where the vast majority of his works are housed, has recently re-hung its collection to foreground the painter’s biographical narrative: to expose “Vincent Van Gogh the person, who he was, what drove him and what motivated him” (Alex Rüger, Museum Director).
Before the renovation, almost 100 of Van Gogh’s paintings were showcased on the first floor of the four-storey 1970s building, while contemporary artists’ work could be found on the higher floors. Now Van Gogh’s are spread across the four stories, and set in the context of contemporary artists, periods of his life, objects which he owned (like his paint palette and a vase which frequently appears in his paintings), and a collection of his letters.
This shift to a narrative approach really drew attention to two aspects of Van Gogh’s work that I hadn’t previously appreciated. Most striking of the two, was how extremely his style changed in his lifetime. Walking into the first room of the second floor, it quickly became apparent that the painter had not always seen life in bright swirling colours, or preferred nature over figures as artistic subjects. His early artwork could not have been more unexpected. Focusing upon the gnarled hands and faces of hard-working peasants in Nuenen, the Netherlands, a source of fascination for Van Gogh while he was living there, these are dark and gloomy, but strangely absorbing works. In the largest, ‘The Potato Eaters’ (1885), he wanted to expose the novelty, in the modern civilised world, of food being consumed by the same hands that produced it. Painted in “the colour of a good dusty potato, unpeeled of course”, Van Gogh even considered it (we learn in a letter adjacent to the painting, written to his sister Willemina, 2 years later) to be “the best thing I did”, despite negative reactions from his brother and friend.
The other myth that was quickly dispelled as I continued to walk through the gallery was the widespread belief that Van Gogh was a “lone genius,” living in isolation. On the contrary, it appears that he was highly engaged with the current developments in art and sensitive to the work of his contemporaries. He discovered the potential of bright colours and impressionism when he moved to Paris and met the painter Gauguin (1887), an important figure in his life who would go on to paint him painting ‘Sunflowers’. By setting paintings alongside each other, the museum’s new arrangement also exposes the similarity between his experimentations with pointillism (‘Garden with Courting Couples’, for example), and Seurat’s work. But the most striking comparison displayed, was that of “Young Woman at a Table ‘Poudre de riz’” by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1887 and Van Gogh’s “In the Café: Agostina Segatori in Le Tambourin”, created in the same year. The composition is virtually identical, both depicting a woman sat at a table, at the same angle, with arms crossed, and slightly warped eyes.
The viewer’s consideration of Alex Rüger’s re-hang reveals just how much the order and display of art can affect our understanding of the works. In this case, the change has been hugely successful: before the renovation, the exhibition was closer in form to a gallery than a museum, but now, with the arrangement’s illuminating contextual insights, the museum decidedly merits its name."