Exhibition Reviews

A first look at Van Gogh in Ottawa
All of us see the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh almost every day, repeated on prints and postcards, on T-shirts and coffee mugs, and on posters, coasters and probably even on toasters.

Which raises a question for curators: how to make an exhibition of paintings by Van Gogh seem new and fresh, like something we haven’t seen before? They looked at this conundrum closely, and they noticed how Van Gogh himself looked at some things closely, and then they decided the public needed to see this more closely. That’s why next year’s big show at the National Gallery of Canada will be titled Van Gogh: Up Close.

“I’ve been working for many, many years on this artist’s oeuvre,” said Cornelia Homburg, a Van Gogh expert who was at the National Gallery on Monday, “and I noticed something which had not been studied, and that is that Van Gogh made these close-up views of an extraordinary nature.”

The impressionist pioneer, who died in France in 1890, may immediately be thought of as a painter of night skies or open fields or portraits of himself and others, but he also spent a lot of time getting close to botanical subjects in ways that were unprecedented at the time. “We found a very solid body of work that fit into this theme,” Homburg said, “and much more than we expected, actually.”

The exhibition opens May 25 in Ottawa, after a three-month run in Philadelphia, and will be, as the press material put it, the “first major project devoted to the Dutch artist by a Canadian institution for over two decades.” The show will include 45 paintings by Van Gogh and another 50 drawings and etchings by others that profoundly influenced his work.

Key among those supporting works will be Japanese prints that were especially compelling for the oft-troubled artist. Nowhere will that influence be better seen than in the masterpiece Almond Blossoms, from 1890, the year of his death. The painting, coming on loan from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, shows a close-up view of the gnarled branches of an almond tree covered in small white blossoms, all set against a rich blue sky. The white flowers on the blue background immediately evoke a sense of Japanese prints and pottery.

The selection of Van Gogh paintings to be in the exhibition began with one in the National Gallery’s own collection, Iris, from 1889. If you’ve ever seen it on the gallery’s walls, and if you’ve leaned in for a closer look, you probably noticed the distinct brush-stoke that Van Gogh used — which is another focus of the Up Closetheme, Homburg said.

“We think of Van Gogh often as this very compulsive, dramatic, instinctive artist who works non-stop and just produces one work after the other,” she said. “Yes, he worked very fast and yes, he was a very impulsive man in his private life. But as an artist he was the most deliberate painter you can possibly imagine.”

The broad brush strokes and thick dabs of paint may look loose and uncontrolled, but they were anything but, Homburg said, and when Van Gogh painted used these techniques they were largely unheard of.

“He made his brush-stroke part of his vocabulary, so to speak,” she said. “He was one of the first to really think about using the brush in this way.”

Van Gogh's view. Getting up close with the painter's close-ups

Cornelia Homburg was writing a book on Vincent Van Gogh when she noticed an aspect of the artist's work that no other scholar had investigated before.

Whether it be a pair of tree trunks in a grassy bed of white flowers and dandelions that he painted during his stay in an asylum or the blossoming almond branches he created as a gift to his newborn nephew, the impressionist pioneer zoomed in on nature, playing with depth and focus.

"I realized (there were) these amazing close-up views, looking down on the grass or getting a detailed close view and excluding everything else,'" Homburg says. "These works were never done by chance. He made them in order to present us this close view, this immediacy of nature."

While speaking to Anabelle Kienle, assistant curator of European and American art at the National Gallery of Canada, Homburg mentioned that Iris, a still life of the purple flowers that is a part of the gallery's collection, is a perfect example of Van Gogh's innovative use of close-up views.

From this conversation five years ago, Van Gogh: Up Close was born. The first major Canadian exhibition of Van Gogh's work in more than two decades will open at the National Gallery in Ottawa May 25 after a stint at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

"I don't think people think of Van Gogh as a landscape painter. But he was very much a landscape painter," gallery director Marc Mayer says during a Toronto media preview of the exhibit. "I think that will resonate with Canadians. I think they will understand how landscape and paintings of nature can be deeply meaningful."

The exhibition features 45 paintings from private and public collections from around the world, including Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum and Paris's Musee d'Orsay. Homburg and Kienle drew up a list of about 100 works that fit their theme and went about the daunting task of tracking down private collectors and convincing institutions to part with their masterpieces.

Kienle flew to Hawaii two years ago to visit the Honolulu Academy of Arts to negotiate for Wheat Field with Sheaves, an 1888 landscape that gives you the feeling of standing in a golden field.

"You're coming across this very small room with beautiful but small impressionist paintings and your heart is sinking," she says. "It's one of their absolute stars. They were very not wanting to part with it but then they realized it is so important for us."

Homburg and Kienle hope this exhibition will give viewers a new appreciation for Van Gogh's work. The popular image of the Dutch painter was that he was a difficult, impulsive and crazed artist whose work was characterized by feverish, impassioned brush strokes. He worked only for 10 years, dying of a self- inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 37.

"On the one hand, he was very intense," says guest curator Homburg, who began studying Van Gogh in 1986. "But he painted with incredible deliberation. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew which brush stroke to put exactly where to what kind of effect in a picture."

Van Gogh: Up Close will run from May 25 to Sept. 3, 2012 at the National Gallery of Canada.

There's something about Iris. Make that Iris, the indisputable gem among the three Vincent van Gogh paintings owned by the National Gallery of Canada. A crowd-pleaser since its arrival in Ottawa in 1954, it's on tap to be the starting point of Van Gogh: Up Close next spring at the National Gallery – the first major exhibition in Canada of paintings by the tormented Dutch master in more than 25 years.

At least 45 paintings from around the world, including six from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, are to be displayed May 25 through Sept. 3, 2012, it was announced Wednesday in Toronto.

Hopes are high that the show – five years in the making and focused on van Gogh’s nature paintings and still lifes, and in particular, his use of the close-up – will both refresh our perceptions of the beloved post-Impressionist and break new ground in van Gogh scholarship.

More than 120 years after his suicide ended a febrile painting career lasting just 10 years, you’d think there’d be nothing left to sleuth out on van Gogh, perhaps history’s most researched artist.

Not so, according to Cornelia Homburg who, with NGC assistant curator (European art) Anabelle Kienle, is orchestrating the upcoming show in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art (which gets it first, in February).

Indeed, Ottawa’s Iris is one of the works expected to be seen in a new light next year.

“Traditionally it’s been dated to the spring of 1889,” when van Gogh was living at an asylum in Provence, explained Homburg, former assistant curator at the Van Gogh Museum and chief curator at the St. Louis Art Museum. “And it’s always been said that it’s a study for Irises,” a canvas completed by van Gogh in May 1889 and bought in 1990 by L.A.’s Getty Museum for more than $50-million (U.S.).

“But it doesn’t look like a study at all,” she asserted. “The Getty irises are much more fully developed, further in their bloom, whereas the irises in Ottawa are very slim, still coming out in bloom. Furthermore, the Ottawa painting is not done on canvas but on cardboard. Van Gogh rarely did that – once in a while in Paris and only when he was really in trouble and didn’t have any canvas left.”

According to Homburg, van Gogh had plenty of canvas when he was doing the Getty Irises – “but the next spring [1890] there’s a moment when he’s desperate for canvas and is writing his brother [Theo, his benefactor and dealer], ‘I really need it blah-blah-blah.’ ”

By joining this Iris with paintings scholars are 100-per-cent sure van Gogh did in 1889 and 1890, the year of his death, Up Close provides an unprecedented opportunity to compare and contrast the artist’s brush strokes and perspectives and thereby clear up parts of his legacy.

“Really, it’s very exciting,” Homburg said.

The National Gallery of Canada's summer exhibition for 2012 will be Van Gogh: Up Close, a personal look at the art and personality of the Dutch master artist May 25 to Sept. 3, 2012, in the Special Exhibitions Galleries.

This will be the show's only Canadian stop. This exhibition will feature about 50 paintings, including works that have rarely been shown publicly, as well as a selection of Japanese prints. Start planning your 2012 summer vacation.

The biggest Van Gogh exhibition to come to this country in more than 20 years will arrive at the National Gallery of Canada in 2012, says a fundraising letter sent to gallery donors.
The show will include dozens of works by the storied master. It will open at the National Gallery in Ottawa next summer, though no specific date has yet been announced. Typically the gallery's big summer shows run from June through October.

"The gallery will host Vincent Van Gogh: Up Close in 2012, the first major project devoted to the Dutch artist by a Canadian institution in two decades," says the fundraising letter, dated Jan. 24 and received by many donors last week.

Beatrix, queen of the Netherlands, will be royal patron for the exhibition, though it is not yet clear if the Dutch queen will visit Ottawa.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is co-organizer of the exhibition with the National Gallery and, according to the museum's website, Van Gogh: Up Close will be seen first in that city between Feb. 1 to May 6, 2012.

"In 1886, while living in Paris, Vincent van Gogh dramatically altered his manner of painting landscapes and still lifes. By experimenting with depth of field and focus and using shifting perspectives, he produced some of the most radical and original works of his career," it says on the Philadelphia museum's website.

"The exhibition explores the reasons and means by which van Gogh ... made these innovative changes to his painting style.

"The first exhibition devoted to this unexplored aspect of the artist's work, Van Gogh: Up Close will present some 45 paintings borrowed from collections around the world."
The show will total 50 to 60 pieces. Which paintings will be in the exhibition remains to be seen, but it's a safe bet that the National Gallery's own Van Gogh masterpiece, the 1889 painting Iris, will play a big role. Iris is a crowd favourite and is possibly the single most valuable piece of art in the gallery's collection. A similar Van Gogh painting of irises from the same year sold in 1987 for more than $50 million U.S., and could sell for more than double that amount today.

Van Gogh had an enormous influence over the art of the 20th century, but barely sold a painting before he died at age 37, impoverished and insane, in 1890.

The exhibition Van Gogh: Up Close at the NGC has been named one of the Top 100 Events in North America by the American Bus Association. Learn More