The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters
Exhibition preview
A LANDMARK exhibition, The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters, will be on display at the Royal Academy of Arts from January 23 to April 18, 2010.
The focus of the exhibition will be the artist’s remarkable correspondence and will include over 35 original letters, rarely exhibited to the public due to their fragility, together with around 65 paintings and 30 drawings that express the principal themes to be found within the correspondence.
Thus this first major Van Gogh exhibition in London for over 40 years will offer a unique opportunity to gain an insight into the complex mind of Vincent van Gogh.
In addition to lending almost all the letters in the exhibition, the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, has made available twelve important paintings. Other major lenders include the Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, together with other museums and private collections worldwide.
Born in Zundert in the southern Netherlands in 1853, Van Gogh was the second of six children of a Protestant pastor. In his early adult life, he worked for a firm of art dealers in The Hague and London, before becoming a missionary worker. His career as an artist began only in 1880, when he was 27. During his ten-year artistic career, which his suicide cut tragically short in 1890, Van Gogh’s output was prodigious: largely self-taught, he produced over 800 paintings and 1,200 drawings.
Van Gogh was a compulsive and eloquent correspondent. The majority of his letters were written to his brother Theo, an art dealer who supported Vincent throughout his difficult artistic career. Vincent also wrote to other family members, including his sister Wilhelmina. Other artists, notably Anton van Rappard, Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, were also, at different phases of Vincent’s life, recipients of his letters.
The originality of his ideas about art, nature and literature, combined with his deep understanding of these subjects, make Van Gogh’s letters much more than a personal expression of feelings: they attain the status of great literature. In reading the letters one encounters not only a sensitive, determined and exceptionally hard-working man, but also someone possessed of a powerful intellect.
By allowing the viewer a rare insight into his artistic process through the intimate medium of his correspondence, the exhibition will challenge the view that Van Gogh was an erratic genius. Together the letters create a ‘self-portrait’, and reveal the ways in which Van Gogh defined himself as an artist and as a human being.
Taking the letters as its starting point, The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters will view the paintings and drawings from the perspective of the correspondence. The letter sketches that Van Gogh frequently used to show a work in progress or a completed work are a fascinating part of the correspondence, and many will be shown alongside the paintings or drawings on which they are based.
Highlights of the exhibition will include Self-portrait as an Artist (1888) and The Yellow House (1888) from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Still-life: Drawing Board with Onions (1889) from the Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo; Vincent’s Chair with His Pipe (1888) from the National Gallery, London; and Entrance to the Public Park in Arles (1888) from the Phillips Collection, Washington DC.
Examining such themes as the role of colour in painting, the cycles of nature, friendship, religion and literature, the exhibition will celebrate the new edition of the artist’s correspondence Vincent Van Gogh – The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition, published by Thames & Hudson in October 2009.
The result of 15 years of scholarship by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker of the Van Gogh Museum, the complete correspondence of Vincent van Gogh is published as a printed edition in three languages and as an integral web-edition, thereby providing the worldwide public with a wealth of new information. The exhibition is based on many insights that the new and extensive research into the letters has produced.
Admission: £12 full price; £10 Registered Disabled and 60+ years; £8 NUS/ISIC cardholders; £4 12-18 years and Income Support; £3 8-11 years; 7 and under free.
Times: Daily from 10am to 6pm (last admission 5.30pm), Fridays until 10pm (last admission 9.30pm).
Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1J 0BD
Tel: 020 7300 8000