Vincent van Goghthe artist who has won the coveted post mortem recognition after a tragic existence and this is always a game for the cultural and entertainment industry, from 8 October to 26 March benefits from an exhibition with about forty works in Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome, in Piazza Venezia on the side opposite the Vittoriano. There is not much to discuss about the quality of the pieces, approximately 26 paintings and 13 drawings, watercolors and pastels (if we counted well, or errors excepted): they belong to the splendid Kröller-Müller Museuma Dutch institute at Otterlo in the De Hoge Veluwe National Park which has an amazing collection of the 1900s, including drawings and outdoor sculptures such as a large installation by Dubuffet on which you can walk, and is a guarantee.
The set-up has dim or dark rooms to highlight the colors in a building that is a monument. The exhibition roughly spans a large part of his career and life, since with Vincent art and life fit together to the millimeter. The exhibition features extremely well-known pieces and others less common: the self-portrait of 1887 with the three-quarter face is exhibited alone to accentuate the star-like effect, among other paintings stand out an exciting ravine with waving brushstrokes with two figurines of women in between, the Sower, how the painter has changed shapes but not feelings between the old seated and desperate in the initial phase and the final one a stone’s throw from death.
Helene Kröller-Müller, the collector who reflected in her grief
Vangogh’s selection has a sort of appetizer: the first room gathers a small group of paintings from Cranach to a Picasso from 1901 which, beyond the level, indeed seem necessary above all to arrive at about fifty works on display. On the other hand, the portrait of the woman who began to collect works by her from 1908 is completely consistent, Helene Kröller-Müller, a woman who – as the curators tell visitors at the opening – seeing Van Gogh’s works understood her own inner pain, reflected in it and had them when no one was looking for them on a great soothing. The discovery in 2005 of letters and diaries, recalls a press release, made her “the greatest collector of Van Gogh” and today only the museum named after the painter in Amsterdam has more works than the Dutch artist Kröller-Müller.
Click here for the Kröller-Müller Museum website
Sister-in-law Johanna Bonger, who understood Vincent’s worth
About women. The Roman appointment rightly gives an account of evidence in an explanatory panel: if his brother Theo was always close to him and until the last moment, even when he did not share choices such as the bond, then collapsed, with the former prostitute with his son Sein, her sister-in-law Johanna Bonger fully understood Vincent’s value: it was she who “launched” him and promoted him with intelligence and entrepreneurial spirit in the world of culture. Rather, her regret is that she was able to move after Vincent’s death and her husband Theo’s short distance, when she had an eye on the work left by her brother-in-law.
Click here for the Palazzo Bonaparte website
Click here for Arthemisia’s website on the Van Gogh exhibition
With a dozen rooms distributed over two floors and a few works per room, the exhibition is accompanied by several cards with texts and photos and digital reproductions of his many letters (he wrote a lot): they account for the pictorial phases, hopes and bitterness, of the intertwining of tormented psychology and the indefatigable desire to make art, of the pain of life and the joy of color. A note recalls this, also in the panel, where the artist defines the painter’s work as “dirty”, not in a moral sense but in the sense that the painter gets dirty and dirty. Vincent didn’t bother.
From brown tones to chromatic exuberance
From the exhibition it is understood that from an initial period in the brown tones of a long autumn in the north, Van Gogh will increasingly turn to a luminous chromatic range. He will turn especially after looking at his Impressionist and Post Impressionist colleagues in Paris until the explosion of colors in the south of France, in Arles and its surroundings. The interior of a restaurant with a pointillist painting that shows a clear, momentary approach to a painter like Seurat and to a more analytical look at reality, how can I say? Then Vincent will take the path of colors that sway and make him so much loved.
Vincent van Gogh, The Ravine (Les Peiroulets), Saint – Rémy, December 1889. © Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands
Those colors that stand out even in the days before the end in 1890 in Avers-sur-Oise, at 37, for suicide, although in recent years research and a film have raised some doubts about it. This joy of the brushstrokes together with the drama of an existence undermined by disappointments, fatigue, psychological difficulties is one of the ingredients that we posterity like so much and can delight more than one visitor. On the one hand he is an acclaimed artist and therefore looking at his paintings is reassuring. On the other hand, who knows if so much love is dictated by a feeling similar to that of Helene Kröller-Müller: we are reflected in the tragic nature of her existence and the vitality of her art sounds like a ransom that consoles us, comforts us.
He was aware, he was struggling with spiritual and material dilemmas. Read what Vincent wrote in one of his many letters to Theo, published undated on page 173 of the book edited by Fabrizio D’Amico “Cézanne, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh. Letters from light“Published by Linea d’Ombra libri in 2003:” It is certainly a strange phenomenon that artists, poets, musicians, painters, are all materially miserable – even the lucky ones […]. This renews the eternal question: is life entirely visible to us, or do we know only one hemisphere before death? […]. Is it all here or is there more? In the life of the painter, perhaps death is not the most difficult thing ”.
Will it be worth concluding by asking how much an anthology on the Dutch master adds to the knowledge of art? Let’s face it clearly: the first reason for a monographic on Vincent is to attract so much public, it is commercial success.
Instead, the choice of accompanying visitors with the notes, albeit discreet, of a piano in the rooms, and even more so the room with mirrors and mechanisms and music that recalls a playground as if it immersed us in the colors of the artist, makes us reflect. Is it a show, will you say? Maybe. It is clear the organizers’ effort to make the selection of paintings and drawings a more captivating, not bogus, appointment, and the panels on the letters are pertinent. However, a doubt arises: does not such a choice betray an unconscious, unconscious and widespread distrust in the ability of art itself to enchant for which sound accompaniment is needed, otherwise the gaze and comparison without frills is not enough? Perhaps we believe that the ability to concentrate is increasingly reduced for which a musical background is always needed? For an artist like Vincent, who is so sensitive to the spiritual dimension, even if the silence here is interrupted from time to time by the sirens from outside the building, silence would have liked.
The exhibition is produced by Arthemisia, created with the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, curated by Maria Teresa Benedetti and Francesca Villanti. Catalog Skira publisher.
In Rome all the colors and dramas of Van Gogh: from the self-portrait of 1887 to the ‘Sower’